Coyote crap, a stranger's off-the-cuff comment, and the problem with 'sport' hunting

I had about a dozen errands to run this morning, and one of them was a visit to my pharmacy in Folsom. No more than two steps out of my car, I spotted a dung heap on the pavement.

Dog? Nope. I could see from the fruity contents that it was coyote poop - no surprise, given that my medical center abuts some undeveloped land with plenty of connections to waterways.

No more than two steps after that, I heard a woman farther back in the parking lot exclaim, "That's a coyote!"

Damn, she could tell from there?

No. I looked up and she was pointing. There was a young 'yote trotting down the sidewalk adjacent to the medical center.

"He'd better get out of here before he gets dead," she said, and I agreed as we started walking toward the building's entrance.

"I like coyotes," I told her. "I'm a hunter, but I'm not interested in killing them."

"You're a hunter?" she said, starting to size me up, as I did the same with her. She was, like me, a middle-aged white woman, typical suburbanite.

I nodded.

"For meat or for sport?"

I grinned. Thank you, God. You couldn't have sent this woman to me at a better time.

"For meat," I told her. In the remaining steps of our shared path, we discussed various types of waterfowl's tendencies to mate for life. She really hoped I didn't hunt geese; I admitted that I did. Then we parted company with a couple pleasant have-a-nice-days.

Why was I so happy she said "for meat or for sport?" Because she perfectly illustrated a point I've been making recently over at Tovar Cerulli's Mindful Carnivore, where there's been a spirited discussion about the merits of calling hunting a "sport."

I was going to drop this anecdote in a comment over at Tovar's place, but I realized that while I have made many comments about how much I hate the term "sport hunting" on this blog and on others', I have never written a post devoted to the subject.

This chance meeting with a stranger gave me an excuse to rectify that. Plus, it gave me the chance to start a story with a description of coyote feces, which not only satisfies my need to be unusual, but also provides a point of contemplation for people who like to read deeply into writers' messages.

Time to get to the point: For this woman, there were two types of hunting: You either hunt for meat, or you hunt for sport. The two are mutually exclusive. Based on my extensive monitoring of what non-hunters say about hunting, I believe she represents a LOT of non-hunters.

That, in a nutshell, explains my loathing for the term "sport hunting" as a description for what hunters in America do. Non-hunters - who constitute a vast majority in every state in the U.S. - often hear "sport" and think we're just killing for shits, giggles and heads on our walls. (Some people do, in fact, hunt just for thrills and heads. But I've found them to be an extreme, albeit highly visible, minority.)

Anti-hunters hear "sport" and say, "It's not a sport if the animals don't have guns, too."

I just don't see how clinging stubbornly to this term does us a damn bit of good.

I have heard a lot of defenses of the term "sport hunting." My good friend Phillip has argued - lucidly, as always - that hunting is recreation for most Americans. We don't have to do it. We don't hunt just for meat; we hunt because we enjoy it.

While I prefer to turn that argument around and say, "We don't have to get our meat at grocery stores," I still have to agree that Phillip is essentially correct, and very honest, in his assessment. Hunting is something most of us choose to do in our free time, not something we are compelled to do.

But I still don't like "sport."

I also know that "sport hunting" was used more than a century ago to distinguish between that notion of recreational hunting and "market" or "commercial" hunting, which we don't do anymore because that was wiping out game species. We still see vestiges of these mutually exclusive terms in fishing: it's either commercial fishing or sport fishing.

Even so, I think the fact that "sport" means something entirely different - and entirely negative - to people who aren't part of the hunting community makes it a poor word choice for us.

I'd always read and heard that sport hunting v. market hunting was the origin of the term, but over on Tovar's blog, Jim Tantillo informed me that there was a deeper history of the term, tying it to concepts of fair chase. Here's an excerpt:

The ancient Greeks hunted for recreation and had a concept of “sport” that went along with it. Sport is where the rules of “fair” chase come from. Greek hunters were critical of later Roman hunters who hunted in so-called “Oriental fashion,” i.e., from elevated platforms, simply waiting to sluice animals as they were driven past the platform. This offended the Greek sensibilities of what was fair/unfair.

Fast forward to the middle ages, and you see fair chase developed in mature form and associated with honor and chivalric behavior generally. Again, hunting as a highly ritualized activity with arbitrary rules designed to restrict the hunter’s advantage–as opposed to poaching with crossbows, sluicing animals in mud wallows or water, etc.–basically is present in virtually all aspects by the 12th or 13th century.

This did not change my opinion. I don't think that non-hunters hear "sport" and think of noble Greek hunters, as opposed to lazy Roman hunters. And personally, I prefer commonsense rules (e.g., the North American Wildlife Conservation Model - the very basis of modern American hunting laws) over arbitrary ones.

In short: I don't care about the history of the term, recent or ancient. I don't care if it's being misused, or unjustly maligned. The reality is that people who aren't familiar with hunting hear "sport" and think, "Ew, that's disgusting. Why would you kill living beings just for sport?"

Language changes. Words we love take on different meanings over time. That's when we retire them - which is precisely what we should do with the term "sport hunting."

© Holly A. Heyser 2011