Thinking about Thinkers Who Think About Hunting

Would you believe that we are already well into the evening of the second day of the New Year and New Year's Day is quickly fading into the dustbin? This is terrible! Time is already flying by way too fast for me so I am demanding that time slow down just a bit and give me the opportunity to sit back and enjoy the passing days.
I think that is what I have always enjoyed about the outdoors, whether hunting or fishing. Time seems to slow just a bit and give me the opportunity to breathe in the world around me. That slow down also allows me to take stock of myself and what I am truly trying to accomplish.
These thoughts have been popping into my head quite a bit over the past couple of weeks and I think they are, in part, inspired by reading the work of Dr. Randall Eaton. It is still too early for me to actually comment on Eaton’s work, other than to say that I am starting to believe he is the most important thinker about hunting who is alive today. Or maybe that is too grand a statement to make. There are other people who come to mind as being great thinkers about hunting, Jim Posweitz, founder of the Orion Institute is heading the list of living thinkers.
A problem with both Eaton and Posweitz is they are headlining a list that is too short for the enormity of the problems being thought about. I’m not referring to the common problem of the antis vs. the rest of the community, or even the problem of slob hunters vs. good hunters, but I am referring to the cases (for example) of wildlife management vs. real nature or the unrelenting march of suburbia colliding with nature. Or, in a very frightening way, the abandonment of nature as part of the education curriculum of young people in metropolitan schools in favor of today’s unrealistic “feel good but not fuzzy—everyone gets a trophy” thinking. These issues are not as far from the core issue of “to hunt or not to hunt” as their proponents would lead society to believe. Hunting is core to the value system of making a choice. In recorded history not all men have been hunters but in every great civilization the choice of whether to hunt or not to hunt has been pivotal to that civilization’s social construction. Consider the Greeks and spend a little time with those thinkers who gave us the foundations of western philosophy. Not all of them were hunters but hunting was part of their world and they recognized its varied social roles. Perhaps the role of hunting is the spiritual connection between the human and nature that Dr. Eaton writes about. Regardless of whether hunting’s core relationship is spiritual, physical, or emotional, or an elixir concocted of all three we need to spend more time thinking about hunting and where our relationship to hunting places us within the context of contemporary civilization and the civilization of 2099. Yes, that is not a typo—I mean 2099! Our forefathers made the mistake of believing that once certain truths about hunting were established, those primarily being centered on notions of sportsmanship, hunter’s ethics, protection of wildlife and setting aside lands for the future, then hunting would take care of itself. Had our forefathers placed hunting alongside their desires to preserve wilderness and wildlife, keeping hunting—as a choice to participate in nature, to the degree of being a hunter, or not to participate, or some level in between—firmly entrenched in our national curriculum hunting might not be facing the crisis it is today. So, no matter how much of a spiritual connection can be built between the hunter and the quarry, regardless of how much time is spent discussing ethics, the simple truth is that hunting is no longer part of the core of our national being. This damage cannot be undone by a single Eaton, Posweitz, or the half-dozen other thinkers that exist among our ranks. We need to cultivate more thinkers; men and women who will provide the community of hunters (and anglers) with better answers to questions about the why of the hunt. But, equally important, these thinkers will provide the foundational thinking that generate more questions about the actions of politicians, bureaucrats, academics and the teachers they influence. Questions are what thinkers generate and ours is a time when we need many more questions because the answers we’re being thrown today are too often like scraps of offal laced with ground glass.
Just a thought or two.

Thinking about hunting ethics

This spring has been a roller coaster ride of weather and nature constantly waving her little finger over the land causing floods with evacuations, roads being washed out, and in general making life difficult in North Dakota. There is light ahead because in some areas the rising waters are beginning to stabilize—sort of—there is still a lot of water in the fields to flow down to the rivers. Shoot, the way it is going it is going to be a few more weeks before I’ll be able to go fishing. Right now however, what I’d like to do is find a field that I could actually reach that is under the flight path of the thousands of geese around here. In time I know the rivers will return to their course, the bogs will shrink to sloughs and the ground will be dry enough to walk on without sinking past your ankles. If I am lucky it’ll all happen while the snow geese are still in the area and I’ll be able to get in some good snow goose hunting. Until then I’ll have to be content to watching the thousand-bird flights that pass over my house several times a day. Maybe tomorrow on my drive to Fargo I’ll be able to get some photos of the geese rafting on the flood waters. It is an amazing sight!

How many of you are familiar with the writings of Jim Posewitz? He hasn’t written any best sellers but he has written two books that I believe are very important to the future of hunting, Beyond Fair Chase and Inherit the Hunt . These are small books and each one can be read in just a couple of hours. What I believe is important about these books is that Posewitz tackles the tricky question of hunting ethics.

The question of hunting ethics is the source of many debates and I often find myself being at the heart of many discussions over hunting ethics. What has caught my eye in Posewitz’s book Beyond Fair Chase is that he has offered a comprehensive ethic for hunters and I’ve been working with it in the last installment of my three-part series for Whitetails Unlimited. Here is what he has posited as a Twenty-first century ethic for hunters:

“A person who knows and respects the animals he hunts, follows the law, and behaves in a way that will satisfy what society expects of him or her as a hunter.”

This is on page 16 of Posewitz’s book and in the next few chapters he takes the short, three-part statement apart and offers his evidence on how and why it works as a hunter’s ethic. What I have found, in my own work, is that Posewitz has written what I believe is a workable ethic. There is a great deal more to the discussion around the question of ethics in the Twenty-first century but the Posewitz Ethic can be applied to nearly every problem—at least that is how I see it.

What do you think? glg