My Response to My Outdoor Media Question

I’ve had so many great comments on my questions about the responsibility in media I think it is time for me to comment.

I think it is a safe assumption that a significant percentage of the audience for outdoor programming is NOT the hunting intelligentsia, but on the same thought line I believe it is very dangerous to make the assumption that the viewing audience is somehow intellectually challenged or lacks the benefits of higher education. For nearly 40 years I have watched, studied and researched our body of literature, and watched this trend of our better writers (broadcasting included) struggle with the insistence that the majority of hunters, shooters, anglers, et al. lack the formal education, or are somehow hampered with the lack of intellectual capacity to understand complex issues affecting the outdoors, or are incapable of grasping the nuance of fine literature.

When we analyze the writings of many of the anti-hunting authors a recurring theme is that the hunting/fishing/shooting community is populated by men and women generally lacking a high school diploma. These writers encourage their readers to believe that hunters/anglers/shooters lack the ability to exhibit compassion for wildlife and cannot grasp the ethical analysis of hunting/angling and the environment. When these writers attack hunting and hunters, angling and anglers, for proof of their assertions, they frequently reference our own media! They focus on broadcast programming’s excessively poor language, outrageous high-five behavior and fishing shows that depict casual indifference to fish being returned to the water—none of which are factual representations of the outdoor community—but they persist in our media because we allow them to.

I think an excellent exercise is to actually conduct a comparison between the housing/education/income statistics (discounting the present economic distress) and the audience statistics of Sportsman Network. There is a very interesting corollary between the data and it suggests that if we examine the characteristics of home ownership and then plug those characteristics into the characteristics of the Sportsman Network’s audience we’ll arrive at a result that proves that the greater percentage of men and women participating in hunting/fishing/shooting are better educated, and by extension better read, and have a much better grasp of the issues (political and scientific) surrounding the environment than the general population.

My question is why, when we consider all of the available information, do publishers, programmers, producers, media buyers, personalities, and even our industry and media leadership, insist on playing to the lowest perceived audience denominator and not to an actual, common denominator that would put forward a better image of anglers and hunters? Is it money? Is it fear of a vocal minority within the audience? Or, is it insecurity within themselves and their own hierarchy? I believe it is a combination of these factors.

Our industry, most certainly our media, must come to grips with the fact that this is not the middle of the last century when the chasm between the pro and con was so wide the actions of the antis were largely perceived as the mumblings of a disgruntled minority. The Silver Springs monkeys, Peter Singer, Edward Abby, Cleveland Amory and a handful of other activists were instrumental in refocusing national attention on our relationship to animals, and ultimately on hunting. By 1990, and into this decade, as tools of the media began to radically change at an increasingly faster pace, it is interesting to note that the outdoor media’s adoption of these tools has been slower than the anti-movement and at the same time, as a defensive measure akin to circling the wagons, the leadership of the varied arms of the outdoor industry (manufacturing, sales, management and media) with support from many of the individuals within those arms, began to insist on a Golden Age, or perhaps more commonly expressed as “the Good ‘ole Days” of the outdoors as having been the ideal before the interference of environmentalist and animal rights activists, often blurring the line between the actual role of the hunting community in establishing awareness of the need for environmentalism and the emergence of the extremists. If we want a date for this claimed interference perhaps the earliest would be 1949 and the publication of Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac (A Sand County Almanac; with essays on conservation from Round River), but a later date that is often popularly cited as the opening of the environmentalist movement is Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (Silent Spring), published in 1962. But, if we take the long look at our nation’s history of hunting and fishing we are forced to admit that the claimed “Golden Age” never existed except for a short time in post-colonial America. Neither the populations of the species nor the availability to the hunt by the general population existed in a combined condition that provided the conditions asserted in the Golden Age mythology. This is not to say that hunting, and excellent hunting, did not exist because it did, but it was not universally available throughout the population.

Another interesting, and often ignored truth, is in the alleged numbers of species that were exterminated or nearly so, in westward migration. Outside of a few well publicized species (buffalo, pronghorn, passenger pigeon, etc.), if you have read the journals of the Lewis & Clark expedition and not the “cleaned up” versions found in most libraries, the stunning truth is the expedition very nearly starved to death for lack of game! At one point Clark (I believe, perhaps Lewis) shot a doe deer and before he could reach the animal his starving men fell on it, and in their frenzied desperation for food ripped the carcass to pieces and devoured it raw! Yet, as recently as an outdoor writers’ conference in Columbus, Missouri an exhibit of the L&C expedition completely glossed over the expedition’s trials.

Except for a few familiar species most wildlife was scarce. Some anti-hunting literature argues that the colonial and post-colonial writers’ gushing about the presence of wildlife is proof that hunting has destroyed wildlife populations. These writers ignore the fact that these colonial writers were promoting interest in colonizing by poor Europeans, or in the post-colonial period to entice the stalled westward migration to begin moving. Another important argument, and one that is seldom heard, is that the presence of even a small population of game would be beyond the experience of most of the colonists, and in their enthusiasm would exaggerate the amount of game—a condition that still exists among those of us who are outdoor writers! Another rarely citied argument is that as civilization pushed into the wilderness the wildlife pushed deeper into the forest. The most common argument by the anti-hunting community maintains that America’s wildlife was completely plundered by market hunting and prior to that the landscape was teeming with wildlife. This is an assertion that is not unique to North America. Africa, Europe, Asia, they were presented as having vast number of ALL species. It is simply not true. There were vast herds of specific species (American bison, African wildebeest, etc.) and it is true that these herds suffered from the ravages of market hunting, but it was largely a pre-refrigeration phenomenon that corresponded to the transformation of social structure to urban areas to support industrialization. As refrigerated rail cars opened the possibilities of moving domestic meats to distant markets, whether in Africa or North America, the need for market hunting largely collapsed, although vestiges of it remained as species specific, although even this ended, first in North America and later in Africa.

The mythos of the Golden Age or good ‘ole Days is that there was a period in early to mid 20th century America in which game was universally abundant, a hand-shake sealed all bargains, neighbor trusted neighbor, land was generally open to hunting, the public eagerly supported hunting and nearly everyone hunted, and was a gun owner. All of these are false. Today, in fact, we live in a period of the greatest amount of hunting opportunity this nation has enjoyed since the brief post-colonial period. There are trouble spots and most of us know where they are, but if you are at least older than 55, and hunted in the 1950s and sixties, chances are you remember a time when finding a place to hunt was problematic, but today there are PLOTS, CRP and other lands open that were previously closed. The amount of game is staggering. Old timers here tell me that in the alleged “good ole’ days” they never saw a deer, grouse or partridge and now all are abundant. The Golden Age was a state of mind. Between 1835, which is the birth of what is today’s outdoor writing, and July 2, 1961, American outdoor writing reached its zenith and was a major part of the literary canon, but by the end of the Vietnam War that position had collapsed under the weight of changes in the social landscape, and rather than face these changes and deal with them our entire industry circled the wagons, giving the writers of the anti-hunting, anti-gun and animal rights movements the room they needed to assault public opinion.

My point is that every time a writer decides NOT to write a think piece on environmental issues, or puts an outdoor short story in a file drawer believing no outdoor magazine will publish it, or decides to simplify a text because the editors maintain the readers can’t understand it, or they don’t want to read something “that” complex, or a TV personality mixes metaphors, confuses verb tenses, talks like he/she flunked seventh grade English—three times, and does a sophomoric high five dance around a newly killed animal, the future of fishing and hunting are each cast that much further in doubt. There is no substitute for good writing and there is no justification for poor programming. Ironically, when we go back in the history of outdoor literature we discover that only a handful of decades ago excellence was the standard, mediocrity was not abided, and outdoor literature appeared in literature text books.

Interesting, isn’t it?

glg

An Approach To The Hunter Ethic Problem

This is a truly long post. I think it needs to be.

The principle of hunter’s skill, game’s nature is one that I am going to stand firm with because I do believe that this is the grounding ethic of hunting. At any point where the hunter steps outside of the hunter’s expression then the ethic breaks down and it is also true that if the hunter, or someone other than the hunter, removes the quarry from its ability to employ its nature then the ethic breaks down. But with that said I believe we must consider Holly’s question about the planted birds and whether we can apply this ethic to nearly any human action (I’m inferring here) that involves the killing of animals. She rightly points out that at one time humans would drive whole herds of bison over the cliffs. But, Holly, isn’t that subsistence hunting—from which early civilizations distinguished sport hunting? When the need to hunt for food has been replaced by husbandry does Man need to hunt? Both Dr. Eaton and Cork offer the opinion that Man needs to hunt because through hunting man is maintaining the spiritual connection with nature. Let’s say, as the Greeks noted, that hunting provides people with the opportunity to test their personal selves against nature. We might be tempted to argue that the rules of hunting, the notion of sportsmanship, ethical hunting, etc., were put in place only to level the playing field between the hunter and the hunted. However, Dr. Eaton, James Swan and others have all noted that the cave art, which depicts hunters and their quarry, seems to have religious or spiritual meanings. Dr. Eaton takes it a step farther and points to some cave art being trophy art, meaning that successful hunters of these pre-civilization eras were bragging about their hunting success. What does seem to be certain is that much of this early human art does establish a much stronger connection between the hunter and the quarry than previously thought and that in the genetic chain between contemporary humans and those early humans there is a hunting gene. But, where did we get our ethic? Here’s the problem that I see.

Subsistence hunting – whatever it takes to be successful therefore zero ethics.
Animal husbandry replaces subsistence hunting – The dynamics of relationships change from the successful hunter to the successful farmer/herder.
Hunting becomes a sport – The birth of hunter ethics = “hunter skill, animal nature.” Why?

What was it in that transition that made men stop using whatever would work to kill an animal to employing a set of specific skills to kill it and then, in an equal fashion, giving the animal the opportunity to employ their nature to survive? I believe that if Eaton, Swan and others are correct in their assertions then I will maintain the development of hunter ethics occurred “because” of the transition. Men could certainly have continued to kill the animals in the same way that they had been but they did that out of need, yet even in that need early man recognized that a connection existed between the hunter and the hunted. Perhaps they drank at the same water holes and early gatherers noticed that many of the animals ate from the same fruit trees, berries, nuts or even roots. The animals were not completely unlike Man and because Man did possess that added element of creativity (art) they wanted to maintain the connection—even as they hunted the animals—because there was a connection between them that was within nature.

Jump forward a few tens of thousands of years to the transition to herder societies. The connection between the animals and man was not forgotten. The desire to hunt, the drive to provide food hadn’t disappeared, but in order for the success to have that same meaning it had before husbandry evolved there evolved a self imposed set of rules for the hunt. Hunter ethics did not burst fully developed into the civilized world, it came with the creep of time and has evolved as civilization has evolved. That begs the question of application of hunter ethics—can it be applied equally to each hunting circumstance. Native pointed out that in our own country each region has its own specific conditions for the hunt. I will make the argument that it is not the application of circumstance to the ethic but is, in fact, ethic to the circumstance. The basic hunter ethic equation is:
Skill - Nature
I wonder if we could write it as:
Skill U Nature
That is to say that the ethic is the union of the two. This means that it is ethical to hunt from that enclosed and elevated stand when the conditions warrant it. The same can be said of the planted birds. I’ve hunted planted birds that taxed every bit of both the dog’s skill and my own. In fact, I can’t remember any bird hunt that hasn’t been a true test of both dog and hunter—planted or not. But what about the high fence hunt? My answer returns to the ancient ethic and the application of the ethic to the circumstance. I have hunted high fence enclosures and left without the animal I hunted. I’ve also hunted them hard and been successful. About fifteen years ago I hunted fallow deer in upstate New York and it was one of the most rewarding and difficult hunts of my life. I finally got my deer but not until the morning of the last day and not until I’d low crawled through a foot of snow to get close enough for a shot. The enclosed area was slightly more than two thousand acres but as Native pointed out, the deer were wild and had become wild even though fed by humans.

Anonymous made a very interesting point and that was that if the elimination of high fence hunting “means less people can hunt, that’s a population/demand/habitat/management problem. It’s not a hunting problem.”

Humm. I want to disagree but before I do let’s look at two very different scenarios. The first is my hunt for the Fallow deer. The hunt was a high fence hunt that took three full days of intense dawn to dusk hunting. Often times we (the guide and I) would be following a group for the entire day without seeing the deer. Now, here is where ethic is applied to the circumstance. These deer were fed every day from the back of a trailer pulled by a tractor. When the tractor started down a feeding road the deer emerged from the woods to feed. In the application of the ethic to the circumstance the guide and I had agreed that we would not ambush any deer headed for the food nor would we hunt any stretch of road where they were fed. Only after I had killed my deer did the guide inform me that had I suggested hunting the deer on a feeding road the hunt would have ended. On the other hand wild hogs, which raided the deer’s feed, were fair game while raiding the deer food—if you could get close enough for a shot! Ethic applied to circumstance.

The second scenario is in Africa. There is a great deal of debate about the practice of “turning lions out for the hunter.” In these cases ranch owners are raising or capturing lions and when a hunter books a lion hunt they turn the lion out in the fenced area and the hunter goes in after the lion. Some operations turn these lions out in areas covering thousands of acres and weeks or months before the hunter arrives and others have only a few hundred acres and turn out the lion a few days before the hunter arrives. One of the arguments for these operations is that it helps reduce the instances of operators “salting” an area where a hunter has booked a lion hunt. In salting, unscrupulous PHs set out baits to attract the lions and the hunter is “guided” to the salted area where the lion has come to expect a free meal.

Contrast that with my lion hunting experience. I had hunted a particular ranch the year before and was back for another hunt (yes, it is high fence, all 7,000 acres) when I was offered a chance to hunt a lion that crossed onto the ranch, probably from nearby Kruger park. The ranch owner and I began following the spoor with a tracker and for several days we hunted the lion, getting up in the morning and driving around the ranch until we cut fresh spoor then following the spoor on foot. The only condition for shooting the lion was to shoot well because I probably wouldn’t get a second shot—the reason being the shot would be at close range because of the thick thorn bush we were hunting in and the lion would charge before I would get that second shot. Finally the lion left the ranch and life returned to normal. On the same ranch, the year before, a hunter (in our group) and his PH were driving across the ranch when they spotted a young lion stretched out across a pile of dirt. The guide told the hunter to kill the lion but when the hunter declined the guide argued with him and finally convinced his client to shoot the lion, which he did. In both cases the big cats were a threat to the human population on the ranch and painful experience had taught the ranch owner and the PH that if the big cats are allowed to roam free they quickly find the clusters of native rondavels and the livestock kept nearby.

To which case is there an ethic being applied to circumstance? Perhaps the ranch owner and I were trying to apply an ethic to circumstance by hunting on foot and tracking the lion across the ranch. It had all the earmarks of a hell of a hunt because there were times when the cat wasn’t more than a few dozen yards in front of us, but hidden by the thick bush and the cat was aware that we were tracking it, periodically stopping to growl a warning for us to back off. But was there an ethic with the sleeping lion? I’ve never thought so, nor has any hunter to whom I have told the story even though they understood that because of the risks the cat had to be killed. Finally, there is the “turning out” and “salting.” Maybe in turning out, if the lion is given time to establish itself in a large enough enclosure ethic is applied to circumstance providing the lion is free to make its own kills and the enclosure isn’t being salted.

Anynomus feels that if there isn’t enough room to hunt then it is not a hunting problem but a people problem. I still can’t agree although I do understand the statement and its intent. I think we need to look at this from the perspective that if we apply two foundational rules to hunting then we arrive at the principle that hunting can be preserved and made available to both the pay to hunt group on high fence hunts and the public land/open range group. First, there is the ethic, ancient though it is:
Hunting Ethic = Hunter’s Skill U Animal’s Nature.
The second is:
Ethic over Circumstance.
Applied to contemporary hunting we have an ethic and an application. I also remain firm that we need to make every person who hunts understand this one thing, whether hunting high fence or open range, everything ethical about the hunt is nothing more than the tug on the shirt sleeve.
Thoughts?
glg

Hunting's Oldest Problems

I have received some truly great comments and it is obvious you are all thinking about hunting and that’s what we need to do as hunters—think about this sport we love—hunting.

Am I correct in assuming that all of you are arguing that we cannot establish a line in the sand that is the division between the ethical and non-ethical behavior of hunters?

What if I offered the argument that I disagree—that we can, in fact, draw a line in the sand? What if I even went much farther and argued that the line in the sand was drawn very early in human civilization. If we go back into ancient history we will discover that the notion of fair chase, ethical hunting (sportsmanship)both appear early in hunting’s history, very nearly the same time as when subsistence hunting was replaced by animal husbandry. The notion was that since there was no need to kill the animal for food then the animal should be provided with every opportunity to employ its every nature to escape the hunter. Here’s the kicker---AND the hunter should employ his (her) every skill to quickly kill the animal. These teachings, which predate the Greek and Persian thinking on sport hunting, were focused on the hunter’s skill and the animal’s nature being fully employed. As subsequent civilizations developed (and disappeared) these two principles remained ab origine and are the root of outdoor’s hunting philosophy, regardless of the philosopher.

So, my argument is that the hunter must allow the animal the opportunity to employ its nature to escape while also employing his (or her) skill as a hunter to insure as quick and clean a kill as is possible. Does this apply to the subsistence hunter? Interestingly, most peoples who still rely on true subsistence hunting strive for the quick kill (quick can be by slow poison, but the animal never panics) to preserve the quality of the meat and reduce the amount of distance the meat, hide and other parts must be returned to the village or family group. But, in essence, we should probably say no, it does not apply, but in truth the careful subsistence hunter wants the quick kill for other reasons.

That said I’ll maintain that the line in the sand has been drawn and it returns to the hunter. I personally enjoy hunting waterfowl from a permanent blind, whether it is built on stilts over the marshland or is a pit in the ground. I also derive a great deal of satisfaction from setting up a block of decoys on a slough then hiding in the cattails. I can also see deer and other big game hunts in my own future in which I will be hunting from a blind or hide and some of them will be over waterholes. I’ll also hunt from a tree stand when the need arises. But the question is whether I the hunter will employ both sides of the ethical equation—hunter’s skill, game’s nature. Does the use of the blind over a food plot provide for the animal’s nature? I am not so sure it does but that does not mean I cannot be convinced. In the case of the blind on a marshland where the birds return to the same area day after day—the birds are not stupid so if they persist in flying near the blinds where they are shot at something else must be at work. Is it hunter’s skill, the weather, or a combination in which case the skill may be reading the weather’s influence and how to set the block of decoys. Is the hunting of planted birds unethical? Planted birds that are properly raised can humble a confident hunter as quickly as a neophyte. What about driven hunts? It isn’t uncommon for the birds in driven hunts to be pen raised birds and the survivors are called back to the pen at the end of the day. Still, some of my most memorable bird hunts were for planted birds.

These are the questions and the issues that have dogged sport hunting since husbandry made subsistence hunting unnecessary. So, is hunting unnecessary? I maintain that hunting is necessary. But that’s another question.

You see, guys, what I am offering is the question and then reaching behind the question to the next question. The only question for which I maintain there is an answer is the question of hunter ethics and that is because I believe that this question was answered thousands of years ago—hunter’s skill, quarry’s nature. Because this is the foundational premise of hunting then even the high fence hunt, if it answers the second part, and the hunter employs the first part, can be ethical. The hunt for planted pheasants can be ethical provided both sides are employed. I do not believe this is a difficult answer to reach although there are times when the questions which lead to it are complex and demand difficult answers.

Another historical notation, but please don’t ask me to reach for it right now, is in my pile of research papers and that is a translation of some early Persian writings in which “fair chase” when hunting is discussed as being important to the sporting hunt. In that instance fair chase was making reference to not employing so many hunters on the chase of a single animal that the animal could not employ its natural defenses. It was believed that the king could not ascertain which of his young men were not brave hunters when they were not being fair to the chase; thus he could not weigh each young man’s value as a soldier. This is an early reference to the martial side of hunting.

Thus, both fair chase and ethical hunting, which we want to believe are more recent innovations, are actually ancient concepts. Our problem today is figuring out how these principles apply in contemporary hunting and through the application of these principles we can overcome some of the negatives that are dogging us and improve the quality of hunting.

It is to these problems that I am proposing the thinking symposium.

Thoughts? g