Sorry if this has been posted before but I found it an interesting read.
I like the point about anti's suffering from a form of cowardice.
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I like the point about anti's suffering from a form of cowardice.
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ww w.velocitypress.com/killing_as_sport.shtml
"Killing As Sport"
(©1990, 1994, 2002) This article is Chapter 10 in The Air Rifle Hunter's Guide, by Tom Holzel.
The ethics of killing for sport is a subject that makes many hunters feel uncomfortable. Articles that do get into print are often couched in the most diffuse language--killing an animal is referred to as "taking it"--and the tone is often apologetic, all traits of defensiveness and uncertainty. No wonder hunters feel uncomfortable.
There is no need for apology, and we do not need to beat around the bush with elliptical language. Because a good offense is the best defense, and a solid argument can stand up to any attack, hunters need to see spelled out clearly what they know in their hearts, sport hunting is a natural, totally legitimate activity. But it is no wonder that we are all a bit defensive. We are browbeat so unmercifully by spoon-fed journalists, particularly unmarried, city-bred, nonhunting journalists who, when they are not espousing some new theory on permissive child rearing, believe that they are also particularly well qualified to inveigh against the brutality of hunting. These are often the same people whose 250-lbs pet St. Bernard's daily run amok, dragging their owners behind them on a leash screaming:" He won't bite."
Occasionally, while picketing in support of abortion, these people who have never hunted wonder earnestly how any civilized person can even consider the cruel killing of defenseless creatures. But even the most casual survey shows that people who hunt are no more cruel than those who do not. Perhaps they are less so. Living in the real world where they experience death firsthand, they are certainly less subject to bouts of hysterical ignorance. No hunter would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to free a few ice-floe trapped whales when the same amount of money could save thousands of animals suffering less TV-genic fates.
Nor do I believe the question of hunting ethics yields to the moralistic analysis that so often graces the pages of leftwing literary magazines. The question is less about sport than it is about human nature. Like all questions of human nature, they are out of reach of those who have never faced them. This is as true of the ethics of hunting, as it is of one's reaction to discovering AIDS in a friend, or effacing an unwanted pregnancy, or witnessing the practice of neighborhood racism. When ethical questions confront you personally, a lot of fanciful theorizing goes down the drain.
If the answer to hunting ethics can not be found by applying theoretical homilies, how is it to be discovered and expressed? I found it the same way most people discover the various aspects that make up their ethical selves-by trying it. I began hunting late in life. Before going for the first time, I too, felt a tinge of intellectual guilt. Had I stopped there, I too, could have waxed eloquent about the moral struggle, the ethical anguish beating in my breast. But I did go hunting and my guilt turned out to be only squeamishness, a character deficiency of those separated too long from the outdoors, and an affliction not to be confused with hunting ethics.
To be squeamish is to be easily nauseated or sickened. The new mother who cannot bear to cleanse her child's bloody scrape; the father who gags at changing his baby's diaper; the teenager who cannot dispose of a dead bird on the front lawn-all these weaknesses are signs of that form of petty cowardice known as squeamishness.
Is squeamishness a phobia? If so, it is surprising how quickly these illogical fears vanish with a little direct exposure. Clean and bandage a few bloody cuts, change a few dozen diapers, remove a broken bird or two from the lawn. Before you can say "parenthood" you will find yourself jaded and cured. You may enjoy the tasks no more, but at least you can handle them with aplomb.
The same is true of hunting. Shoot a duck and eat it, and you will be quickly cured of your guilt complex. Terminate a woodchuck, if you can, that has been tearing up a farmer's crops, and you will feel proud of a difficult job well done. Where is the guilt you thought you should feel? Theory is a poor guide in the face of firsthand experience.
Yet, if hunting farm pests made me feel good, shooting varmints improperly had the opposite effect. Five close-range (20 yards) body shots with a high-powered 5mm air rifle did not suffice to kill one gray squirrel. After searching for 15 minutes I found this wounded animal lying on its back, mewing in death throes. I gave it a coup-de-grace and vowed never again to shoot squirrels unless I could manage a clear head shot, or an unobstructed shot to the heart. (this problem is greatly alleviated by using the larger calibers and true hollowpoint pellets.)
This experience taught me as much about the effectiveness of my air rifle on squirrels as it did about the effect of hunting on my conscience. But shooting to wound was a hunting tactic I first had to try in order to learn that it was not for me. This, then, is the only way to learn your own ethical hunting limits: not by reading a book, but by trying things out and discovering where you must draw your own line. When you do explore your ethical hunting limits, you will want to order your thoughts. What are the relevant questions the modem hunter must confront in order to arrive at his own ethical stance? And what are the red herrings? Here are some considerations not usually addressed at the literary teas.
Meat-eating animals are either predators or scavengers. This includes humans. That means that hunting other animals comprises a central part of our nature, not some morally reprehensible aberration. This dashes the appealing propaganda of the Animal Rights Fanatics (ARFs) which always seems to suggest that humans are disembodied spiritual beings who are descended, not from the grubby animal kingdom, but from ethereal outer space. That hunting is a human, and therefore a perfectly "natural" activity does gall our ARF friends, who secretly believe they have elevated themselves to the next higher plane of humanity. Just wait-next they will be opening their own churches.
The ethical issues of hunting are practical, not moral. When lawyers and professional debaters raise moral issues, it means they have no legal or common sense legs to stand on. The reason "Morality is the last refuge of a scoundrel" is because it is always injected in order to cloud a question, not to resolve it.
Hunting takes many forms, each different in small degree from the other. Everyone will have to decide where on the slippery slope he feels comfortable, and the point beyond which he does not.
Here are some mileposts.
Everyone (except perhaps the most deranged ARF) would shoot a rabid dog attacking a child. So killing animals is not evil in and of itself. Of course one might still feel sorrow afterward that such a fine animal had become infected and had to be destroyed. But that sentiment is not guilt. It has nothing to do with the act of having to kill an animal in order to save a child. Contrary to the central ARFs belief, the same argument extends to the killing of animals that bear other diseases, from bacteria to yellow fever, from cholera to the plague as carried by mosquitoes, flies, fleas, and rats.
Nearly everyone believes it is perfectly normal and natural for technologically backward peoples (e.g., Eskimos, jungle tribesmen) to hunt for food. The alternative would be for these natives to starve in order that lesser animals might live a bit longer, an argument that makes no sense. Of course our ARF friends would likely contend these natives could once again become farmer/ gathers, taking thereby a million-year evolutionary step backward to join the ape families from which we have all so recently sprung.
Many hunters make the distinction of eating what they kill (and not killing what they don't eat). This is the most center-of-the road position. After all, what difference is there between a hunter who eats what he kills, and the average suburbanite who eats what Mr. Perdue kills? There is no moral difference whatever. This does not prevent some suburbanites from seeming to be able to eat their meat and have it. They object to hunting in one breath and order a butterfly lamb from the butcher in the other. Ah, logic.
Most people also believe that it is acceptable to kill animals which cause significant loss of property, particularly when the loss occurs due to over-breeding because of a reduction of natural enemies. Locust swarms, menacing dogs running wild, huge flocks of pigeons and disgusting detritus, and even deer which over-breed and not only strip off bark and kill but face a lingering death of disease and starvation due to insufficient natural fodder.
Farmers fall into this group. For the benefit of man (including themselves) they increase the fodder animals thrive on which causes an unnatural increase in the population of parasitic varmints. In order to maintain a balance between food for human consumption, and mounting varmint depredation, reducing the number of farm varmints is not an activity that requires moral agonizing. This is one reason I feel little remorse at air rifle hunting crows. I am doing the farmer and his customers a service that he would just have to do himself But this does not get the sport hunter fully off the book.
The sport hunter cannot use quite the same reasoning as the farmer knocking off crop predators.
Killing 62 raccoons in a single night using lights and dogs may be performing an invaluable social service to a farmer, but it is certainly not what most people mean by sport hunting. The hunter's activity differs from those "harvesting" animals for consumption, or as nuisances. That critical difference is one of fair play, or a "sporting chance." This consideration separates the sport hunter from all others. It can be boiled down to the degree of difficulty of the hunt.
Hunting would become quickly boring if it were too easy. "Hunting" pigeons, while perhaps a gratifying way to start when marksmanship is still a major problem, soon palls as skill improves. It is too much like shooting fish in a barrel. But hunting with limitations that result in only a single kill in ten trips out is certainly as sporting a chance as any prey gets from its natural enemies.
So the essence of sport hunting is to pit fairly man's predatory skills against those of his prey. If the prey has excellent daylight eyesight, you combat it with excellent camouflage, not with night-vision goggles. If the four-legged prey survives by an extraordinary sense of smell, you approach it upwind on foot, not by helicopter. In each case you engage the prey on its own turf, using only natural techniques, so as to maintain a level playing field. It is an even contest of 'your predatory skill versus your prey's survival instincts'.
Because game animals are well-equipped and highly practiced in survival, it requires an extraordinary degree of skill for civilized man to hunt them successfully, if he does so on their terms. Hunting by self-imposed limitations that result in a low success rate indicates with precision that the hunting method used is one that the predator is well-equipped to deal with, perhaps because the hunting threat you pose is so close in kind to the natural dangers it faces everyday. You are taking it on its own turf, giving it a sporting chance, and the smart ones still usually get away,
There are two additional considerations for the sporting hunter: the threat of extinction, which is self-defeating, and the infliction of pain. Does hunting a species reduce its overall number? No varmint hunter has to worry about this problem-especially the air rifle hunter! But this consideration does apply to hunting animals on the decline. Most African big game (elephants, rhinos) falls into this category.
For other big game, fortunately, hunting licenses pay for a lot of animal preservation. As long as the numerical balance is maintained between hunting and preservation, any animal that is difficult to kill may be fairly hunted for sport.
The most frequent objection nonhunters without a political agenda have about hunting is that it causes animals unnecessary pain-, that is what they mean about hunting being cruel. One can empathize with their feelings, but they are misplaced. The cruelty to which nonhunters object should be directed at the hunter. Animals die naturally and painfully every day. Mice which are dispatched with a mouse trap suffer far less than those who are caught-and played with-by house cats.
'Natural" deaths, such as by starvation, or being set upon by fellow creatures when any signs of weakness are displayed, or by accidental injury, are seldom pleasant ways for animals to die. Few are as rapid as by pellet, bullet, or arrow.
In comparison to dying a natural death, being killed by a hunter is almost always less painful and quicker, even when death results by loss of blood rather than a direct killing shot. After botching the killing of my gray squirrel, I came to realize, as all sporting hunters must sooner or later, that unless a killing shot can reasonably be made, it should not be taken. Following this simple rule means the animals I kill for sport will always die quicker and with less pain than nearly any "natural" alternative.
Of all these provisos, the "sporting chance" doctrine reigns supreme. Although it might seem an unlikely alliance, true sporting hunters and genuine animal lovers have at least one point on which they can agree fully: the extremists who hunt inhumanely are just as repugnant as those "Friends of Animals" who, under the false flag of "animal rights," will cruelly let deer starve slowly rather than be reduced by hunting to levels that natural fodder can sustain. The former are simply savages with guns; the latter are screwballs without scruples.
If we could unite to protect ourselves from the savages and the screwballs, hunters, animals--and those who love them--will be better served by far.
