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The Sacred Game

Predation: It isn't always pretty, but at least it always works

By David Petersen

Found in: | Hunting |

As another hunting season approaches, the old passions are renewed within me, for and against.

In counterpoint to the embarrassingly obvious moron minority among our ranks, true hunters are thoughtful predators playing a proper and important role in the natural scheme of things. It is, after all, predators, human and otherwise, who sculpted the incredible defensive tactics of prey species. Predator and prey: a quintessentially symbiotic relationship and the engine that powers upward-spiraling intellectual evolution among all creatures great and small - as Darwin was among the first to recognize. And there is no "chance" involved.

Those animals (and plants, for that matter) that are born with or somehow acquire physical features or behavioral traits that provide them with an environmentally adaptive advantage over others of their kind, tend to live longer and breed more often, ultimately passing on their genes more successfully than those individuals who are less well adapted to their niche. In the face of this subtle yet fiercely selective competition, the less fit are gradually weeded out, while those best adapted to their environments prosper and multiply.

Through this epochal winnowing process have evolved the most masterful self-defense organisms in the mammalian world, the deer, or cervid family. To get within eating range of any species of deer, predators must defeat a truly remarkable eye-ear-nose-instinct defense strategy. This is the challenge that excites the serious, no-shortcuts hunter.

Consider vision. Deer see differently than we do. The eyes of all mammalian predators, yours and mine included, are set side-by at the front of the face, a few inches apart, so that each eye views an object from the same distance but a slightly different angle, providing binocular vision, which, in turn, facilitates precise depth perception. Whether you're a cougar about to leap from a ledge onto the back of a passing muley, or an archer aiming a bow instinctively, it's essential to have an accurate sense of the distance to your target. The trade-off is limited peripheral vision among predators, far less important in the wild (where we evolved and are designed to live) than in today's high-speed commuter traffic.

Contrarily, since the major threat to prey species is predators sneaking in from the sides or rear, natural selection has positioned prey eyes on opposite sides of the head, providing extensive peripheral vision. The losses are binocular vision and fine-tuned depth perception. But no great matter. For a deer or wild turkey, visually determining the exact distance to a potential threat isn't nearly so important as knowing if, when, and how that threat moves. And prey eyes are attuned to detect the slightest rapid movement.

Working in conjunction with cervid eyes are big, top-set ears that swivel independently, like scanning radar, to capture sounds in stereo, much as predatory eyes receive images. If something within the deer's extremely wide field of vision moves, the animal, always alert, will spot it. And if the mover makes any slight sound, the deer's ears will provide an instant fix, confirming direction and distance. Between the two, sight and hearing, far more often than not the hopeful hunter goes hungry.

Even so, by far the most remarkable of the deer's defenses is its nose - virtually undefeatable unless the wind is constantly in the predator's favor.

And so far as being subjected to what hunting's critics phrase the "terror" of the hunt - deer evolved as prey, necessarily nervous by nature. What we may interpret as terror is both routine and felicitous to the cervids' generic makeup. Since we've purged most nonhuman large predators from the wild, were deer not hunted by humans, they soon would devolve (and in many places, such as some national parks, already have) to semi-tame yard, garden, farm and roadside pests, having traded away their hard-evolved freedom and dignity for an easy, well-fertilized meal (precisely as most modern humans have done).

Consequently, if hunting were ever banned or unwisely restricted, rather than seeing gains in the overall welfare of wildlife, as biologically uninformed critics imagine, we would see rapid increases in overpopulation and its horrific upshots - increased collisions with automobiles, increased contagious disease, gradual genetic decline, overgrazing of habitat precipitating mass starvation, a loss of respect by humans, and general misery all around. In many parts of America, this is happening even with abundant hunting ... suggesting the need for a little help from brother wolf.

In the end, no matter what one thinks of hunting, to condemn and attack it broadside and indiscriminately is to threaten the lifeblood of natural evolution and the primary tool of modern wildlife management - thereby imperiling wildlife itself.

The essence of wildlife is wildness. And the essence of wildness is predation.

David Petersen is the author of Heartsblood: Hunting, Spirituality, and Wildness in America, and the Colorado chapter chairman of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers (www.backcountryhunters.org).