How can hunters love animals?

One of the things I love about hunting is how it's made me think a lot about some fairly deep questions about life, death and nature.

If I'd been raised as a huntress, I think there's much I would take for granted, but converting to the hunting lifestyle at the age of 41 really forced me to confront these issues head-on. I had to, because I was making a conscious decision to kill in a society where anti-hunting sentiments are ubiquitous.

Slowly but surely, the answers have come.
I choose to kill because animals are already being killed for me, and I'd rather take personal responsibility for their deaths than entrust both their lives and deaths to industrial agriculture. Hunting is acceptable because the predator-prey relationship is an essential part of the natural world, a pattern that repeats itself from the smallest creatures to the largest. Hunters enjoy and appreciate nature in ways that hikers can't because hunting makes you a participant, not an observer.

But the answer to one question had eluded me, until recently. Anti-hunters think we hunters are cruel, heartless animal haters, but most hunters I know love and respect animals in a way that borders on worship. How can this be? How can we explain this to the non-hunting public?

A couple weeks ago, I went on a spending spree on Amazon.com, buying half a dozen books about women hunters and hunting in general. One of them was Woman the Hunter by Mary Zeiss Stange. I'm normally too exhausted to do much pleasure reading while school is in session - the incessant stream of grading hurts my brain. But this book I couldn't resist, and I chipped away at it a little bit every night. My reward came on my third night of reading.

Stange wrote something that I already knew, but hadn't connected to modern-day hunting. It came at me in waves.

First, she quoted anthropologist Susan Kent saying that in hunter-gatherer societies, mammals and birds "are classified as intellectual beings. They are placed in the same macro-category as humans, whereas plants and fish are not."

Next, Stange noted that "the human-non-human animal dichotomy so sharp in Western civilizations is not at all as clear or even present in all societies."

And then: "It is only when larger-scale agriculture enters the scene, and with it the differentiation between 'wild' and 'domesticated' animals, that people begin to make meaningfully sharp distinctions between the intellectual capacities of human and non-human animals. ... (I)n societies in which people hunt regularly and also raise domestic animals, only the latter are denied status as intelligent beings. ... It is the farmer, not the hunter, who approaches the world of nature as something over which he must seize control."

Wow. I'd never thought about that before. I knew "primitive" societies viewed animals differently than we do, but I'd viewed it as a sign of their intellectual inferiority, not as a natural and logical state of being. I'd never considered that modern civilization's view of animals as inferiors might have just been a rationalization for their confinement - much as those notions have been used in the past to justify slavery and the subjugation of women.

Suddenly all these feelings I've had on the hunt started making sense. I view my prey as a competitor, my skills versus his or hers. When I went on a dog-training pheasant hunt with my friend Dana recently, I actually talked to the pheasants while they were in their crate before Dana released them, telling them, "Here's your chance to get away, buddy. Good luck." Two of them did.

Sometimes when ducks speed away unscathed by a poorly aimed shot, I salute them (after cursing profusely, of course). When I hit them, I often apologize to their limp bodies.

When I wrote a commentary for The Sacramento Bee last month about why I hunt, it was the subject of discussion in several hunting forums, and one guy said something on the California Predators Club forum that really stuck with me: "I still can't believe I hunt considering I've got to be one of the biggest animal freaks out there."

Now it seems all these thoughts and feelings add up to something really significant: Society as a whole takes a patronizing view of animals; hunters view them on an entirely different plane. Hunting makes you see animals differently, and not in they way PETA and HSUS would like the public to believe.

Hunting fills you with profound respect for animals. It is civilization that has taken this away from us.

© Holly A. Heyser 2008