Winter is the hunting season in South Africa. During this season, while the rest of us are clinging to the creature comforts of industrial civilization, thousands of hunters, they will have us believe, are eschewing these comforts and braving the bush and the cold to get in touch with their hunter-gathering past and ensuring the survival of wildlife in this country, not the individual lives of animals, for obvious reasons, but the perpetuation of the species. This, at least, is part of their ideology, what I call the "hunting ethic", the "ideal" they want us to believe. They present their ideal as a hard fact, beyond dispute, forgetting that we shape reality through our values.
Those domesticated people amongst us who dare to question this ideal and question the "ethic" of hunting, pointing out that it is, in fact, not an authentic natural experience, but an animal exploitation industry, where "wild animals" are "farmed" on "game farms" for the purposes of killing, and suggesting that it is deeply unethical to kill something for sport or for pleasure, that the conservation is just a mask for a celebration of violence and blood lust, will be met with the predictable and unexamined hunters' arguments. Central to their ideology is that wild animals must pay for their right to exist, that conservation must be, if not profitable for the owners or hunting farms, then at least economically viable. Thus, for them, economy trumps ecology, a view that I will critique in later posts. Those domesticated people amongst us who react in horror to the hunters' killing of animals for meat, but who continue to eat industrially-produced meat themselves, will be called "hypocrites".
I will critique these positions and arguments in later posts, but, for now, would like to suggest that they are not so much arguments but dogmatic assertions meant to limit discussion (to the hunters' terms) and to close further debate. I have heard these arguments repeated so often that I suspect they are matters of faith rather than reason. It is time that the hunters' dominant ideology is challenged.
Those domesticated people amongst us who dare to question this ideal and question the "ethic" of hunting, pointing out that it is, in fact, not an authentic natural experience, but an animal exploitation industry, where "wild animals" are "farmed" on "game farms" for the purposes of killing, and suggesting that it is deeply unethical to kill something for sport or for pleasure, that the conservation is just a mask for a celebration of violence and blood lust, will be met with the predictable and unexamined hunters' arguments. Central to their ideology is that wild animals must pay for their right to exist, that conservation must be, if not profitable for the owners or hunting farms, then at least economically viable. Thus, for them, economy trumps ecology, a view that I will critique in later posts. Those domesticated people amongst us who react in horror to the hunters' killing of animals for meat, but who continue to eat industrially-produced meat themselves, will be called "hypocrites".
I will critique these positions and arguments in later posts, but, for now, would like to suggest that they are not so much arguments but dogmatic assertions meant to limit discussion (to the hunters' terms) and to close further debate. I have heard these arguments repeated so often that I suspect they are matters of faith rather than reason. It is time that the hunters' dominant ideology is challenged.