Hunting as Conservation

The tree swayed in the dark as I eased myself down onto the rickety hunter’s seat. Sitting on this little grating, swaying 30 feet above the ground, with dry leaves and winter wind swirling around me, I did not feel very secure. I waited for the darkness to turn to dawn. 

My friend looked one way down the clearing, I the other. Trees began to appear like streaks of charcoal against the snow. I pinched my companion’s leg, drawing his attention to a deer that had appeared between the trees. An hour later, I was helping drag the gutted buck on a sled.

Some would celebrate our action as an example of rustic American self-sufficiency. Others would see it as an act of cruelty and a violation of animal rights. Which is correct? 

Pragmatically, men have always valued lower animals as food sources. In modern times, however, sentimentality has replaced this natural consciousness of our place in the food chain. 

Instead of realizing that hunting is husbandry, many activists view hunting as something that encourages cruelty toward animals rather than care for them. We might expect them to invoke (as they always try to do) scientific evidence. But science does not show hunting restrictions in a beneficial light.

Over the past twenty years, activists in the U.K. have promoted and succeeded in enacting anti-hunting laws with the special goal of severely limiting the traditional horseback foxhunt with hounds. But far from promoting the welfare of the quarry animals (as everyone assumed the laws were designed to do), the quarry species have suffered from not being hunted. Charlie Pye-Smith and Jim Barrington have delved into this problem in a recently published book titled Rural Wrongs.

Hares benefit greatly from being chased: since they are much faster than the dogs, only the weakest are ever caught, resulting in a healthier overall population through a thinning of sick animals. The chase improves leporid immune systems, with presumably similar health benefits as those that accrue to humans from jogging—including improved appetite, cardiovascular strength, and better toxin elimination through increased blood flow. Deer benefit from the hunt in similar ways. And the iconic English foxhunt is a spectacular instance of how the machine paradigm will never replace the effectiveness of human-animal cooperation.

Pye-Smith and Barrington describe an example of a farmer whose lambs were being eaten by a fox. Since foxes had not stopped being pests when the anti-hound laws were introduced (why can’t their society for the prevention of cruelty to humans get with the program?), British farmers started having more recourse to professional marksmen. In this instance, a sharpshooter dispatched 18 foxes on the property. The lambs continued to disappear. As a last resort, hounds were called in, and (as was usual for the traditional hunt) they tracked the scent of the fox from the pen where the lambs were taken to the fox’s den. They found one mangy vixen and her littler. Eighteen healthy and untroublesome foxes met their demise—all because hounds were not allowed to do what they do best.

As Pye-Smith and Barrington show, campaigners against hunting didn’t have evidence to back their claims. Similar “lapses” continue among politicians and influencers alike—one thinks immediately of the refusal to dialogue with unbiased scientific studies in the realm of trans surgery or abortifacients.

In a countryside which no longer has apex predators, man—along with his “domesticated wolf,” the dog—is now the keystone of a new ecological equilibrium. Certainly, men can overhunt, and species have gone extinct through reckless hunting. But if overstepping one’s place in the ecosystem can have disastrous consequences, so can refusing to take one’s place in it. In a countryside which no longer has apex predators, man—along with his “domesticated wolf,” the dog—is now the keystone of a new ecological equilibrium.Tweet This

When we hunt, we have a reason besides “it’s virtuous for preserving the environment”: we want to preserve a source of sport and sustenance. While aesthetics may convince a virtuous few not to litter or pollute, recognizing a more practical and profitable relationship between ourselves and animals might be a more effective motivation to ensure their habitats. 

Sebastian Morello has discussed all this at greater length. He follows in the footsteps of Roger Scruton, who once provocatively asked if whale and elephant populations would be in better condition if we farmed them for oil and ivory. But hunting is not just an ecological trick: the context of cultural tradition communicates much about our relation to the earth. 

For us Americans, hunting is also a cultural statement and heritage: it may not be the ritualistic and highly liveried pageant of the English foxhunt, but the shotgun, truck, flannel, and labrador of many American sportsmen also tells a tale.

It is a story of independence and resistance to overcentralized government, a story of conquering the wilds of a new world. It is an example of a uniquely American subsidiarity. With arms, skills, and resources at their own disposal, the American farmer, rancher, or hunter mirrors the landed gentry of the Old World: a local force able to both support and, when necessary, resist centralized government. 

Even when hunting on public land, the hunter uniquely exercises his citizenship by transforming his country’s natural resources from potential common goods into actual common goods: food for themselves and their families. 

Hunting encourages and forms a crucial part of a way of life that is inimical to the overreaching, socialist, digital dictatorships most modern governments seem to be becoming. Rather than eating slabs of meat neatly wrapped in plastic and sourced from a thousand miles away, hunting distributes local resources locally rather than shipping growth-hormone-enhanced cows from one side of the country to the other.

Hunting gives us a solid (if humbler) reason to foster flourishing populations of prey species themselves. It allows us to recognize our place as apex predators and to find wonder in the natural order even as we step into the role of rational predator. And finally, it not only symbolizes but actually effects a wholesome separation from the “nanny state”: subsidiary engagement with the natural world in the here and now results in food for the here and now. 

Summer has melted much of the alpine snow of my Rocky Mountain home state; fall is upon us. Before the winter settles in, I’ll see pickup trucks with dead deer or elk in the back driving down Main Street. Hunter orange will be seen here and there as men stock up at the local gun shop. The time has come to conserve by hunting.