Hunting: What's Got Everyone So Worked Up?

If you want a hot argument, tell hunting stories in front of an anti-hunter.  You can probably elicit cursing with no work at all, and with a little effort, shoe-throwing isn’t impossible.  Few topics elicit unreasoned vitriol so reliably.  Unsupported generalizations are common:

• “The hunting community is mainly composed of grown men (and some women) with nothing more intelligent to do than kill little birds and animals because it provides fun and excitement for people who need to feel potent.”  (source)
  
• “Collectively, hunters resemble an army of under-trained, unsupervised amateur killers roaming around destroying 200 million animals a year, making it unsafe for hikers, campers and wildlife . . .  A hunter's lack of feelings - empathy and compassion - for animals and lack of respect for nature go hand in hand.”  (source)
  
• “killing for fun teaches callousness, disrespect for life and the notion that might makes right”  (source)
  
• “hunters are PATHETIC morons who have to kill things to feel like a man because they can\'t satisfy their wives”  (source)
  

That some people who oppose hunting express themselves in vehement and unreasonable ways is not surprising – irrational argument is common on all sides of nearly all hot-button issues in the United States today.  But what does surprise me is the extent to which anti-hunting fervor exceeds anti-meat-eating fervor.  As I mentioned in a post the other day, it’s hard to distinguish, from a moral perspective, shooting a deer that will be cut up and eaten from slaughtering a cow that will be cut up and eaten.  It is true that with hunting, there is a greater chance that the execution of the animal will be imprecise and the animal will suffer before it dies.  But hunting has the compensatory virtue of allowing the animal to live a natural, free-ranging life before it is killed – most commercial beef-producing operations, in contrast, confine the animals to be slaughtered in conditions that must be far less pleasant than the shaded woods or open prairie in which game animals live.  To me, these factors tip the moral balance in favor of hunting over commercial meat production, but reasonable opinions may differ.  Let us merely say for present purposes that, from a moral perspective, hunting and commercial meat production are in rough equipoise.  If you consider commercial meat production morally acceptable, you should hold the same view of hunting.

A Confined Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) in the San Joaquin Valley.  This is actually a dairy farm, but beef cattle are kept under similar conditions.

That’s what I would think – but it ain’t so.  Polls show that about 22% of the US population would support a ban on all hunting (source), but only about 2.8% of the population follows a vegetarian or vegan diet (source).  That means that almost 20% of Americans – one in five – eat meat, but oppose hunting.

Why?

I think it’s about the public’s views of hunters, not hunting.  Re-read the bulleted quotations above.  Many people stereotype hunters as unappreciative morons who kill animals to feel powerful.  To be fair, I should note that most of the above quotations come from individuals who posted their opinions on the web; only the third quotation comes from a well-known organization (The Humane Society of the United States).  Most anti-hunting organizations, like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), refrain from overt stereotyping even if the information they disseminate appears misleading or inaccurate.  But I suspect the hunter-as-buffoon stenotype drives the passion of many individual activists. 

And that, I think, is the real danger of canned hunts.  When someone pays hundreds of dollars to shoot an animal that is confined in a small space, the act of killing the animal may be no worse that what occurs in a beef slaughterhouse, but it’s hard to argue that the shooter is motivated by an appreciation for nature or respect for the ancient workings of the food chain.  To the American public, the motive matters.  Stereotyping buyers of canned hunts is easy and effective, and asking the public to distinguish canned hunts from legitimate hunts is probably asking too much – like it or not, all hunters will be painted with the same brush.  For that reason, if for no other, hunters like me should oppose canned hunting.