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The Wild Ember Within The Wild Ember Within A Study of the Hunting Ethos in Norway and the U.S.A. Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Philosophy in Culture, Environment and Sustainability Submitted by Kristian Svendsen Bjørkdahl October, 2005 Centre for Development and the Environment University of Oslo Blindern, Norway Contents 1 Introducing Hunting………………………………………… 1 The Charge against Hunting……………………………………………………… 3 The Hunter’s Response…………………………………………………………… 10 2 Creatures…………………………………………………….. 13 The Problem of Pluralism………………………………………………………… 14 The Importance of Being Practical……………………………………………….. 19 Ceci n’est pas un animal vs. The Moral Status of Animals………………………. 24 The Hunter’s Animal……………………………………………………………... 36 The Hunting Game……………………………………………………………….. 41 Is There a Case for the Fair Chase?..……………………………………………... 48 3 Origins………………………………………………………. 51 The Hunting Hypothesis and the Killer Ape……………………………………... 51 A Fresh Look at Our Predatory Past……………………………………………… 54 10,000 Year Long Fall……………………………………………………………. 55 The Fall as Conceived by Those Who Are Not Professional Human Ecologists… 62 The Wild Ember Within………………………………………………………….. 63 The Predatory Instinct……………………………………………………………. 67 The Return of the Killer Ape……………………………………………………... 71 To Argue with Instinct……………………………………………………………. 74 4 Webs…………………………………………………………87 Preserving Nature, or, Making Sure There Are Enough Animals to Hunt………. 89 The Hunter’s Enemy……………………………………………………………… 92 iii The Merciful Predator and the Art of Growing Animals…………………. 96 The Holist Sportsman …………………………………………………….. 99 Man and Nature……………………………………………………………108 5 Conclusion……………………………………………..119 References……………………………………………..122 iv Acknowledgements (and Apologies) I dedicate this thesis, and all the hours spent writing it, to Kine and Filip. At the same time, I would like to acknowledge the following individuals and institutions for their invaluable help and support: Andrew Brennan, Karen V. Lykke Syse, Nina Witoszek, Liv Emma Thorsen, Josh Watson and Randi Noreng, Beth and John Watson, James Tantillo, David Kaldewey, Brad Svee, David Dolliver, Joe Schroeder, Greg Field, Sally Clark, Steve Jasmer, Todd Shipp, staff and fellow students at SUM, Svendsen family, Fredriksen family, Cascade Mountain Men, Tubafor Mill. My acknowledgments go also to Patrick Geddes-stiftelsen, whose grant alleviated my work with this thesis. As far as apologies go, I need to express them to all my informants for not managing to fit their responses into this thesis. I deeply regret this, but I hope it is some consolation that I greatly appreciated meeting with you, and that the thesis has benefited much from those meetings. Finally, I apologize to all female readers for the designation of humankind as “man” throughout this thesis, which is a choice solely made for practical reasons; I can only hope that you will find it justified given the context. v Abstract The thesis starts from the supposition that hunting has become a morally contested practice in the Western world. It identifies a challenge to the moral legitimacy of hunting in the perspectives of animal rights theorists, and takes the hunter’s response to this challenge as its subject. The thesis oscillates between cultural analysis and moral philosophy in an investigation of the arguments given by Norwegian and American hunters in justification of their sport. A pluralist-pragmatic framework for studying ethical issues is presented, and its application to animal studies suggested. From this framework, a minimal animal ethic is sketched which elaborates on two common sense beliefs about the moral status of animals. This position is then brought to bear on three central groups of arguments commonly given by hunters to justify the hunt; firstly, the hunt as a game played by the hunter and his quarry, justified by the game’s character of being fair chase; secondly, the hunt as an expression of the human hunting instinct and as re-enactment of human origins; lastly, the hunt as a means of management of nature or as the nexus of an ecologically integrated lifestyle. Hunters’ arguments are reviewed and related to relevant ethical principles. vi 1 Introducing Hunting (…) this is no laughing matter but rather, however strangely, a deep and permanent yearning in the human condition. – José Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on Hunting Is it a contradiction in terms to speak of a hunting ethos? Taking recent efforts in animal ethics as our guide, it would apparently seem so. For instance, ecofeminist Marti Kheel contends that “the textual discourse on hunting ethics has functioned both to camouflage and to legitimate violence and biocide” and she rejects the notion that hunting “may provide a sound conceptual ‘resource’ for an environmental ethic, or any ethic at all” (1995: 87). But hunting, we are told, is a complex experience. When hunters go afield, they seek not only the kill, but a whole myriad of impressions that come together in a greater whole. As the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset has argued, “one does not hunt in order to kill, on the contrary, one kills in order to have hunted” (1995: 105). From the outset, we must acknowledge that hunting is a very composite activity; history and evolution, myth and ritual, laws and regulations, meat, camaraderie, fascination with weaponry, interaction with game and environment, and many other components, are all part of the hunting complex. Such complexity makes it quite impossible to deal with hunting in a way that satisfies everyone’s image of what hunting is. Luckily, the object of this study is neither the whole called “hunting”, nor any one of its parts; it is the values that permeate all of them. Values, however, do not exist in a social and cultural vacuum, and in this thesis I will be intent not to leave that aspect out of the equation. Today, by far the most interesting context for the values that attach to hunting is the ongoing debate and conflict over our use of animals, what sociologist Adrian Franklin calls “the increasingly contentious and conflictual nature of human-animal relations (…) in the twentieth century” (1999: 2). Most notably, the values of hunters are posed in opposition to a considerable 1 group of hunting skeptics and antis, who are most likely to consider hunting a “heinous crime”, as one hunter puts it (McIntyre 1988: 2). Although other practices, like medical and cosmetic experiments, industrial meat production, and breeding for fur, have instigated the most agitated opposition, hunting has also been designated a legitimate target for those concerned with the wellbeing, and even the rights, of animals. Of this, hunters are becoming increasingly aware. Norwegian hunter Ole Kirkemo admits: “Hunting is not something that solely concerns hunters. In the future, the framework for hunting will increasingly be defined by the attitudes of society at large” (2004: 170). American hunter Chas S. Clifton elaborates: “When we look at hunting’s place in the modern world, we see that for a large number of people – whether they hunt or not – the old “domination” rationale is no longer adequate to guide our relations with wild animals” (1996: 148). Hunters apparently realize that traditional attitudes to animals have been challenged, and they feel compelled to justify their sport anew in the face of opposition and criticism.1 It is against this background of hunting as a morally controversial social practice that I want to investigate how American and Norwegian hunters argue in defense of their sport, why they phrase their arguments like they do, and lastly, how plausible these arguments are. The thesis will concentrate on the hunting ethos of those two countries as it has been propounded in books, articles, and other written material since around 1970, which was when the modern hunting opposition gained real momentum. These countries have been chosen primarily for practical reasons, but also because their hunting ethos comes across as slightly different from that expressed by hunters in the rest of the Western 1 In a study of American attitudes to hunting, 15% of the respondents disapprove of “traditional native hunting”, 62% disapprove of the hunting of mammals for “recreation and sport”, and 59% disapprove of the hunting of waterfowl for “recreation and sport”. Further, 14% disapprove of “hunting for meat”, while 34% disapprove of “hunting for recreation and meat”. Finally, 80% disapprove of “hunting for a trophy” (Kellert 1979: 106). In a study of Norwegian attitudes to hunting, 14% of the respondents are either “negative” or “very negative” to hunting, while 54% are either “positive” or “very positive” (Stokke 2004: 47). Significantly, this leaves a rather large group (29%) who respond that they are “neither positive nor negative” to hunting (Stokke 2004: 47). In Norway, though, the population is split in two about the hunting of large predators like wolf, bear, and lynx (Stokke 2004: 63). Another survey of Norwegian attitudes to hunting concludes with a somewhat clearer opposition to hunting; here, 32% respond that they are generally negative to hunting, while 65% are generally positive (survey by TNS Gallup, in Stokke 2004: 24). These surveys are not in any way unequivocal, but they show that there is a substantial opposition against hunting in both countries, though the majority of Norwegians are still positive to hunting. Further, the surveys demonstrate that the hunter’s motives are important in people’s assessment of hunting. Lastly, we should note
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