Hunting for a reason
Maybe its just me but isn’t conservation about preserving life?
The following is excerpted from an article in my local paper entitled:
Female hunters shouldn’t settle for hand-me-downs:
Kelly Semple, 42, has been awarded an Order of the Bighorn by the Alberta government. The awards recognize outstanding contributions to fish and wildlife conservation.
She has spent more than 20 years as an advocate for conservation, hunter education and the wise stewardship of Alberta’s natural resources.
Semple’s role in a youth mentor program run by the Hunting for Tomorrow Foundation taught her that women can be easily turned off the activity if they start out improperly equipped.
Often, when women start off in traditionally male activities they don’t show up at the sporting goods store and ask to be fitted with good equipment, Semple said.
Instead, they’ll use hand-me downs from a male influence in their life. So, often the equipment doesn’t fit right or is oversized and “too much bow or too much rifle.”
Now it’s one of the things Semple insists on with the female youth she mentors.
“If you don’t have equipment that fits, you it really takes away from the overall experience and it can turn a lot of people off very, very quickly.”
Another challenge she encounters more each year is the plethora of video games and entertainment tools that desensitize people to the reality of life and death.
“A lot of the video games that the kids play are really quite graphic. The unfortunate part of that is it creates a layer between understanding the life and death cycle and understanding that when you kill something you, and it, are forever changed. It’s not as easy as just flicking a switch and picking up the game again.”
So this award winner for conservation is concerned that potential hunters will be turned off by the experience and may not want to kill more animals. Or that somehow it is a pure experience because it teaches you that death is final.
Kind of go by the philosophy that if I want to show my appreciation of life and death, the most meaningful way is to not kill because I have a pretty good idea that killing leads to death. (And by the way, on the government’s Sustainable Resources website the award is described as being given to champions of fish and wildlife -kind of makes you hope that these people never become your champions).
Somehow ties in with a recent wolf kill being proposed here because elk are threatened (in other words, there are not enough for hunters to meaningfully understand life and death).
How about culling the hunter population instead (and no, I don’t mean killing them, just stopping them). Meanwhile on another coast they are having a big deer hunt because there are too many. Too many for whom? Nature tends to work these things out eventually without bullets or red vests.
humans are well armed arrogant SOBs, I think Dr. Crichton illustrates quite well- we suck at wildlife management, and shooting them, well…Cheney comes to mind “duck!”
“They eliminated the wolf and cougar and were well on their way to getting rid of the coyote. Then a national scandal broke out; studies showed that it wasn’t predators that were killing the other animals. It was overgrazing from too many elk. The management policy of killing predators had only made things worse.
Meanwhile the environment continued to change. Aspen trees, once plentiful in the park, where virtually destroyed by the enormous herds of hungry elk.
With the aspen gone, the beaver had no trees to make dams, so they disappeared. Beaver were essential to the water management of the park; without dams, the meadows dried hard in summer, and still more animals vanished. Situation worsened. It became increasingly inconvenient that all the predators had been killed off by 1930. So in the 1960s, there was a sigh of relief when new sightings by rangers suggested that wolves were returning.” source: http://www.michaelcrichton.net/speech-complexity.html
Comment by ginzu98 — March 12, 2008 @ 1:44 am
Your comments are understandable, especially seeing as you have obviously never hunted. I am not a hunter now, but it is true, something about the experience changes you uniquely for the better. You develop an appreciation for your prey, and in turn that relationship between all animals that is impossible to articulate.
To truly appreciate the life-death cycle Ms Semple describes, it must be experienced first hand. There is something so terrifyingly surreal about hunting an animal you intend to eat. After you have harvested the animal your mentality and opinion are changed forever. Most claim to understand this cycle and I could see why they would, it seem obvious. To me however this akin to an 18 year old boy believing he know how to drive a car perfectly before he even gets behind the wheel. He might know how it works, but driving is certainly different to his expectations.
You are right in saying nature tends to sort these things out, it does. The problem is it may sort them out in a way that is inconsistent with how we desire. As arrogant as that sounds, letting nature sort itself out would likely lead to the extinction of thousands of different species we love and take for granted. In some cases, the survival of a species can depend entirely on the economic interest hunters have in them. Many of the African game animals spring to mind.
Comment by Seb — March 12, 2008 @ 2:21 am
You are right Seb, I haven’t hunted and though this comes off as anti-hunting it is more a post against humans using hunting in this manner. I can’t be too upset about hunting as long as my meat consumption continues, as long as my dinner choices lead to many many more deaths (and in many cases inhumane conditions for the creatures that will be killed to adorn my plate) than even avid hunting ever would. Still don’t like hunting but my moral outrage doesn’t really hold up in light of my other behaviors.
And I do agree that there are cases in where hunting can be part of keeping a species alive. Sometimes the only way you can “protect” a species, is by controlled hunting (partly to undermine poaching and partly because these things take money, and hunting brings in money). And of course hunters have a vested interest in keeping a species viable or else the hunt will cease.
I will never however buy the argument about the only way to understand nature is to kill it. As true as it might be, that that is a kind of special knowledge, it can never outweigh the loss of a wild animal’s life. There’s enough out there for them to worry about. Other creatures, disease, natural disasters -why add big brains plus high powered rifles into the mix. (Don’t have any problem with people hunting with what they were born with; or how about giving the prey vehicles or armor or some sort of fair compensation).
I’ve heard of the knowing death up close argument used by serial killers and there too it makes some sense but I don’t think that means we want to encourage those sorts of voyages of self discovery.
Comment by aos — March 12, 2008 @ 9:40 am
I have hunted. I found it boring. That and I don’t really like the idea of killing things, unless it’s on paper. I do like shooting, because it is about self-control and concentration. My interest in hunting was an extension of that. The idea of harvesting (hunter-speak, in reality: killing) a deer and dragging through the frozen landscape when I could have easily purchased meat at the supermarket seems like a lot of work, and a little barbaric
Culls, etc. wouldn’t be necessary if our ancestors hadn’t messed up the environment, no? Kill all the wolves, too many deer.
Comment by Stevo — March 15, 2008 @ 12:55 pm