On Hunting - something to think about

Some may wonder why we hunt; here is a short muse as adapted from a book that rang true to me. If we better understand ourselves & those few who oppose us, we can better deal with the issues that arise in the future. I believe that we as Australian hunters are on the edge of a new age of hunting prosperity, we have left the dark valley of oppression & are breaking out into the sun light at the top of the ridge, we are seeing the bright sunlit valley below. It looks great.

With recent anti-hunting media in Sydney and anti-hunting hysteria being whipped up by extreme green groups amongst their constituents in NSW, maybe it is time to reflect and better understand hunting and how many modern attitudes have been formed in Australia. The following is adapted from a section in James A Swan’s book “The Sacred Art of Hunting”.

Hunters an endangered species?

Throughout more than 99 percent of human history, hunting has been an unchallenged taproot of life, as well as a cornerstone of culture. In recent times, “conservation/recreational” hunting has become more the norm. Every modern hunter who sets foot in the Australian bush today to pursue deer or other game has a thousand ancestors looking over his or her shoulder who have felt the deep sentiments stir when looking down the sights of a gun or bow at a majestic deer.

However, a most important difference is that the modern Australian hunter faces determined social opposition – something that the average Aussie hunter finds hard to comprehend.

There is no evidence of any significant anti-hunting sentiment until the middle of the 20th century – even among cultures with large numbers of vegetarians. Today - not just in Australia -but all around the world, modern hunters are subject to considerable scrutiny, criticism and even attack – socially, politically, and legally.

The tide of anti-hunting sentiment in Australia has closed hunting seasons for certain species and regions, increased restrictions on methods of hunting, reduced places where we can hunt, organised harassment of legitimate hunters in the duck swamps of Victoria and contributed to extreme green politics throughout Australia. Remarkably all of this has taken place even though there are no valid ecological arguments against legal hunting guided by modern wildlife sciences.

There appears to be several reasons for the cultural shift in attitudes towards hunting:

1. Less than 3.5% of the Australian public hunts. Hunting by nature is a quiet pursuit, imbued with mystery, which takes place away from the public view. The percentage of the public that hunts has grown smaller, and many people have lost first-hand familiarity with hunters. Consequently, hunting for many non-hunters is foreign and fraught with suspicion.
   
   
2. The majority of the population of Australia is now crowded into urban areas where increasingly few people have any first-hand experience with nature, let alone with getting their hands dirty or bloody harvesting food to eat. Coupled with rising crime rates and biased media reporting that often paint hunting and firearms in a consistently negative image, this shift in population has made the hunter a convenient scapegoat for the projection of emotions of today’s social problems, which have little to do with hunting.
   
   
3. Because of the focus on sensationalism, hunters suffer from the negative image created by the popular media, regardless of the improved safety of modern hunting – which is now much safer than many popular and accepted outdoor pursuits like skiing, mountain bike riding, and horse riding – and the increased sophistication of hunters, thanks to increased hunter education in NSW and Australia. It is a sad fact that illegal hunting and firearms accidents get far more attention in the general press than the considerable amount of good conservation work supported by hunters.
   
   
4. People have traditionally learnt to hunt from family members. Today with the breakdown of the nuclear family - up to 40% of all children will grow up in a single parent family during their childhood, resulting in fewer role models and teachers to pass along the hunting heritage, especially so in more urban populations.
   
   
5. Founded by Aldo Leopold, the science of wildlife management has made many advances since its birth some 70 years ago. There is no biological reason to oppose hunting in Australia guided by modern wildlife sciences. Nonetheless, wildlife management education at many universities in Australia is endangered. Old schools of pragmatic natural resource management are being replaced by protectionist systems with a scientific and technological focus, as if machines, “professionals”  and monitoring were now the most important component of the ecosystems. Very few natural resource courses in Australia Universities address or even acknowledge hunting and fishing as legitimate cultural, conservation and recreational pursuits in Australia – for Aboriginal – let alone non-indigenous Australians. This trend places the future of hunting in jeopardy as an increasingly small number of people who regulate hunting have any first-hand experience pursuing game in the Australian bush, let alone a scientific understanding of what runs a hunter’s mind.
   
   
6. Psychologists have not spent much time studying the motivations for hunting. The activity has been one of those things that people do, and no one has questioned it until very recently. In addition, the experiences if hunting occur far removed from the laboratory in environments that cannot be controlled. And, the experiences are often so profound that it is difficult to find words to describe them. The lack of documentation makes it more difficult to defend hunting against false accusations, even when the accusers admit their charges are unfounded.
   
   
7. To be sure there are some unethical slob hunters and hunting guides, but they are the minority by far. In many areas of NSW it is this tiny minority of illegal hunters that give the vast majority of ethical hunters a bad name. Around the world when we hear of hunting causing extinctions or dramatic reductions in wildlife populations, no one mentions that it illegal hunting and associated criminals that are causing the problems.
   

The modern Australian hunter is often stygmatised, scapegoated, stereotyped and openly vilified by opportunistic politicians, media and extreme green and animal rights groups. These extreme anti-hunting and animal rights groups pursue their dogmas and philosophies despite what science has to say about the safety and sanity of hunting.

It is important to set the record straight with non-hunters. There is no substantial psychological research or writing to conclude that hunting in general is in any way associated animal cruelty or mental disease. What evidence there is supports just the opposite position. Many of the best-respected behavioural scientists of our times including Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and Erich Fromm, have agreed that hunting is a natural healthy part of human nature and there is little or no evidence physiological or behavioural to suggest that predatory aggression has much in common with intra -species aggression. In one of the rare studies (undertaken in the US) between the gun ownership and crime among high school-aged boys who legally owned firearms were found to have lower rates of delinquency and drug abuse than those who owned no firearms.


Safe Hunting,

Robert Borsack (2009)
Adapted from: The Sacred Art of Hunting. Myths Legends and the Modern Ethos.
By James Swan, 1999 Published by Willow Creek Press.