Tell me Tantillo, are you one of those people who pokes caged animals with
sticks?
Anyway, a couple of interesting points herein.
1. From the article:
"Relating the kill to the aboriginal way of life poses a challenge to
hunting abhorrents (sic), who almost universally embrace native traditions
as touchstones of environmentalism. In Dr. Foote's Edmonton yard-a
typical, predator-free, fenced environment of grass and tall trees
that humans have developed to mimic our safe ancestral
homeland-students were challenged to confront the bloody reality of
their existence."
Bissell replies; Relating modern hunting with aboriginal/subsistence hunting
is also a basic error. Take your typical Northeast bird hunter. Armed with a
$2000 Italian made shotgun with an over-bred, over-trained "Franken" dog,
wearing $1000 worth of clothes specifically designed for the gentleman bird
hunter, out to demonstrate his skills with both dog training and wing
shooting quail. What has this to do with an aboriginal hunter who would have
trapped the birds or jumped them in the dark when they were sleeping? Is the
closeness, or lack thereof, to aboriginal hunting the ethical test? Who said
that aboriginal hunting was ethical anyway? Making an ecological saint of
aboriginals is not only incorrect, it is patronizing, and probably racist.
Sure aboriginals used a lot more of the animal than modern hunters *at
times.* But this was from necessity, not from some mystical knowledge of the
unity of all beings. They also drove buffalo over cliffs, killed hundreds at
a time, and ate only the tongues.
Hunting needs to stand or fall on its own merits, not on the similarity to
aboriginal life-styles.
2. Again from the article;
"To most people geographically or generationally isolated from eating
wild-killed meat, these activities seem barbaric, heartless and
uncivilized. When uncivilized becomes a pejorative, it speaks volumes
about how far cultures have drifted from a natural way of living," he
wrote in a recent essay, The Irreducibility of Hunting."
Bissell here: Natural way of living? As opposed to un-natural life? How does
that work? This sort of Boy Scout Chauvinism gives me the willies. Is
killing a deer and eating it more "natural" than going to the Opera? And,
killing a deer, skinning it, eating it probably is, to some extent,
uncivilized. So what? Didn't this article just laud the aboriginal way of
life? I thought that was the point to this; that hunting was uncivilized and
therefore "natural."
3. Article;
"Animal rights activists, of course, greet this all with scorn. John
Livingstone, a naturalist and author of the Governor General's
Award-winning Rogue Primate, calls hunting "gratuitous, ergo evil."
He once likened it to child molesting."
Bissell: I had to look up "gratuitous." From Webster this is the second
meaning; "without cause or justification; uncalled for." If that is John
Livingstone's definition of "evil," then most of what we do on a daily basis
is evil. I've never heard of "Rogue Primate," but my eyes rolled at the
title. Just another Garden of Eden story. Humans are somehow "wrong" and
basically harmful. As to comparing hunting to child molestation, silly
rhetoric, nothing more.
4. Article:
"Besides, he says, wild meat simply tastes better. . . ."
Bissell: Right, that's what we always tell people. But I guarantee that if
you compare an old male sage grouse with a chicken from the store, you'll
see that is mostly nonsense. I enjoy some wild meat, but things like moose,
sage grouse, mountain sheep, and a lot of others to not, to my palate, taste
as good as beef, chicken, or lamb.
So, Tantillo, is this good enough for you? I think I'll retire for a while.
Steven
Quietly they moved down the calm and scared
river that had come down to earth so that its
waters might flow over the ashes of those long
dead, and that would continue to flow long
after the human race had, through hatred
and knowledge, burned itself out.
Vikram Seth
A Suitable Boy
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