Darkness and Light

Indeed, the sense we get from today's blitz of high-tech hunting advertising, magazine articles and Tee-Vee sludge is that the animals we pursue are soulless cardboard targets that deserve no moral consideration or quarter whatsoever, like flash-bang villains in a video war game. And the bigger their antlers, horns, heads, the grander the killer's self-image.

My own hunting philosophy - which some call elitist, as if I should give a damn what they think? - is borne out of immutable science-based fact: Across millions of years of co-evolutionary, co-dependent give and take between predator and prey, a sacred bond was forged. Thus evolved humanity's first and longest-lasting "religion": the animal-centered spirituality of hunter-gatherer people everywhere. Just as our primal ancestors, for millions of years, hunted, killed and fed upon wild animals, wild animals likewise hunted, killed and fed upon them, on us. In no pure, pre-agricultural foraging society were animals viewed as property or inferior beings worthy of neither moral concern nor humane treatment. To the contrary, the primal hunter's worldview was and is one of "dispersed spirituality." wherein every animate-seeming thing - plant, animal, fire, water, weather - is viewed as embodying a share of the great spirit of all life and therefore imbued with dignity and not merely worthy of human respect, but demanding it. Viewed from a slightly different angle, because pre-agricultural humans based their lives and shaped their cultures around hunting and killing animals they did nothing to breed, nourish or otherwise "husband," their prey were valued not as mere commodities, not as ego-trophies, but as sacred gifts from the gods who demand gratitude and respect in exchange for giving their lives to support our own. (For an insightful introductory examination of this ancient and honorable hunter's worldview, and a darn good read to boot, check out Richard Nelson's masterful classic, The Island Within.)

And so it was essentially forever; that is, for all but the most recent few geological moments of life on earth.

Then, just a few thousand years ago, with the advent of sedentary agriculture, land ownership and domestication of wild animals, did those timeless, spiritually satisfying ways of interacting respectfully with nonhuman life begin breaking down. Creatures that had always been considered co-equals - "members of other tribes" (Paul Shepard) - were reduced by captivity and domestication (which, as viewed from the wild state, equals dumbing-down) to mere objects, commodities, of no spiritual value whatsoever, thus granted no moral rank.

Expanding on the animistic grounding of our forebears, my own long-pondered philosophy concerning the hunter's proper relationship to the hunted is rooted in phenomenology - direct observation of real life and real death; of palpable things and events and forces, rather than mystical wishful thinking no matter how culturally sanctified.

Consequently, I see no way, and no need, for hunters to get our hackles up and defensively attempt to deny our critics' claims that animals are capable of suffering emotional as well as physical pain at the hands of humans, including hunters. Quite clearly, they can and they do. But rather than giving in to an ill-informed knee-jerk decision to abandon mankind's functionally evolved predatory relationship to wild animals as now having become "cruel and obsolete," as hunting's more extreme critics suggest we should, I believe our moral imperative as thoughtful human hunters is to look back, and back, and back to our very beginnings for our grounding, emulating our ancestors in viewing and treating our prey with the highest respect and dignity, never taking their lives for trivial reasons, never boasting of our "triumphs" in an egoistic manner, and refusing to put up with any such bullshit from our hunting companions, the hunting media, or the increasingly stupid and self-serving hunting industry.

 In the end, people are humans and elk are deer, and never the twain shall meet on intellectually common ground. Yet our inarguable intellectual superiority doesn't give us moral license to declare unbridled technological war on wildlife in the name of ego or profit, or to objectify our prey as non-feeling non-beings, or to willfully or carelessly cause suffering among that glorious "plurality of other mortals with whom we are inextricably connected" (Melville) . . . connected, that is, body and soul, like Siamese twins, on this wild, strange trip that brings us out of mysterious darkness, into the sunlight briefly, and back into the great unknown.

 

David Petersen recently released a revised 3rd edition of his now-classic Ghost Grizzlies: Does the Great Bear Still Haunt Colorado? For details, visit davidpetersenbooks.com.