I didn’t want to hijack this thread here about a replacement hobby for fishing, but this got me thinking about how fishing is a stereotypical male hobby and one that’s socially acceptable to pretty much everyone who’s not a rabid greenie.
Hunting, on the other hand, is a totally different kettle of fish. Sure, there are parts of the US (and other countries) where hunting is a perfecetly socially acceptable hobby/pursuit/sport, but I think it’s a safe bed to say as a general rule, particularly among people living in urban areas, hunting wild animals is not seen as a socially acceptable hobby/pursuit/sport.
I understand (but do not agree with) the objections to hunting, but what I don’t get is why the idea of catching and killing fish for recreation is fine but shooting wild four-legged animals for recreation is less fine. At the end of the day, a living creature is not alive because someone killed it for sport (and possibly food, depending on the animal).
So, why do you think people are generally OK with fishing but not hunting?
Tuna is generally OK, but it must be “dolphin safe”. If people hunted snakes, it probably wouldn’t be so big a deal, either. Crocs are somewhere in-between, I guess.
I would think the visual aspect of the two would have an impact. With fishing your hooking a fish in the mouth then pulling it out of the water and into a container. When you hunt with a rifle the act of shooting the animal and seeing it go down probably evokes a visceral reaction from many people.
Both of these. Fish don’t provoke the same level of empathy by appearance as mammals, and almost certainly don’t suffer as much as mammals (especially large, big brained mammals), if at all.
It’s like lobsters. Sure, some people are offended at the idea of boiling lobsters alive; but imagine how much larger the reaction would be if you dropped a live deer into a big vat of boiling water.
Plus, there’s the fact that hunting land animals usually involves techniques that would also be effective against humans: A person can be killed by a gunshot, but is not likely to be killed by being dragged by a hook into an unbreathable medium. And even when it’s not used against humans, gunfire produces a loud, abrupt noise, which is one of the very few things which we instinctively fear.
The disgust evaporates quickly once you dip the deer meet in drawn butter.
The more an animal is like us, the more people are going to object to killing it. Which explains why chimpanzee meat is getting increasingly harder find in American grocery stores.
There certainly is the ‘cuteness’ factor. I’d also hazard that many urban areas have waterways where one can fish, if one likes. Harder to find places to hunt, so urbanites aren’t socialized into the hunting culture.
I’d say that depends rather strongly on where you live. I spent six years in Michigan as a graduate student (till last August) and hunting is an extremely popular sport and hobby. (Among white people, at least: I think for some cultural reasons it’s less popular among African-Americans). Including Democrats as well as Republicans, and including a lot of folks I know from the greater Detroit area (which is unquestionably a major urban metropolitan area).
Hunting is certainly less popular in some parts of the country, like perhaps Manhattan or Cambridge, Massachusetts. For reasons that strike me as utterly irrational sentimentalism. But I don’t think it’s anywhere near
socially unacceptable’ in the country as a whole.
The reason hunting is relatively unpopular in Europe probably has a lot to do with the fact that until the 19th century or so, it was largely a preserve of the wealthy.
The objections to hunting are almost entirely illogical so I don’t really think there is any good explanation for the objection to hunting in some quarters. About the only sound argument against hunting are along safety concerns for non-hunters who want to be able to safely use the public forests where some hunting occurs and genuine concerns in cases where wildlife authorities have allowed overhunting to unsustainable levels.
The former I think is fairly handled in most places in that during the hunting season Sundays are non-hunting days, so non-hunters can go into the public forests with no fear of running into hunters. The penalties for violating that are pretty serious. And since the period of major hunting is just a few weeks, the entire rest of the year bird watchers and hikers get all 7 days of the week.
The latter I think is less of a concern these days, as most popular game animals are nigh-overpopulated at this point and hunting popularity (as measured by hunting licenses issued) has steadily declined removing the risk of over hunting to a degree. I think the reason for less young hunters is overwhelmingly one of hunting not being fun compared to video games and various other forms of entertainment.
It takes awhile to get into hunting in my experience, and in the early days it’s just trudging through the woods in winter for hours and hours without ever doing anything and sometimes sitting silently on a rock for 3-4 hours hoping a deer comes by. It’s hard to put that up against an Xbox or Playstation experience which gives almost instant gratification. I doubt I would be into hunting today if video games had been around when I was a child.
[QUOTE=Hector St_Clare]
I’m sure that fawn would rather die a (relatively) quick death by gunshot, than a slow death by starvation.
[/QUOTE]
Possibly. But nobody’s there to watch them starve whereas people who shoot fawn take pictures, so there you go.
And from an ethics p.o.v. the hunter doesn’t get to assert that his killing an animal is a good thing. If the animal would really rather die it can always just die without the help of a shotgun, be it by tanking a predator without fighting back or flinging itself off a cliff.
That might be the case in England, but here in France the stereotypical hunter used as the poster-boy for anti-hunting movements is a drunk hick.
Maybe in the parts of the country where most of the people in this country live. Your anecdote about Michigan just reinforces the OP. Accurate or not, Michigan is bumblefuck flyover territory to a good chunk of the country, marginally populated areas like Detroit notwithstanding. When less than 10% of the population hunted last year, many of us don’t even know anyone who “got” a deer last season. IIRC Michigan only lags behind Pennsylvania wrt number of deer licenses issued. And those PA folks are in the Pennsyltucky* portion of the state, not Philly.
A lot of people in this country don’t like firearms, so that’s a strike against hunters.
*Perhaps there is a general derision toward more rural pursuits. That’s where ignorant people live and do ignorant things? Dunno.
Personally I’m all for it, especially for animals where we’ve fucked up their normal predation.
There also a perceived active element to hunting vs. fishing.
Fishing is a few guys in a boat casting lines and waiting for a fish to bite.
Hunting is walking through the woods, finding a deer/turkey and shooting it.
Neither popular picture is completely accurate (hunting blinds is passive vs. mimicking insect flight being active) of course, but that’s not the question here.
Animals don’t exist in ethics, they are irrelevant to ethical decision making.
Well not many people who live in cities hunt, with it being extremely illegal, dangerous, and bad pickings to boot…unless you’re into hunting pigeons, the occasional urban raccoon, or cats/dogs. But it’s definitely true that for most of continental and British history hunting was not permitted of the peasantry as all game animals were the property of the various monarchs, even in lands not directly controlled by them. Nobles as part of their land grants received hunting rights, but commoners other than those who worked as professional huntmasters would not have been legally hunting until modern times.
This is the real answer, I think, and should not be a mere “plus”. The other answers that people are giving are mostly obfuscation. Hunting involves weapons, mostly guns, that kill people as well as animals, and, in America, support for hunting has become an important part (one of the few that actually makes any coherent sense, in fact) of the litany of justifications given for keeping gun control very lax, and allowing widespread, largely uncontrolled gun ownership. People in favor of stricter gun control, because of the large numbers of humans that guns kill, are likely to be skeptical of hunting because of its association with opposition to gun control.
I don’t even understand that first sentence. I’m not being facetious – I just don’t understand what it’s asking. But I will say one thing: there is a vast, vast difference between killing any animal out of necessity – because you need to eat, or because the animal is already suffering – and killing an animal for “sport”, which is just a way of saying that killing sentient beings and watching them die is “fun”. I would personally consider the latter to be not a “sport” but a pathology, possibly verging on – and correlated with – psychopathology. And to be clear, I’m not referring here to hunters whose goal is to bring fresh game home for food – I personally dislike this practice and wouldn’t do it myself, but that’s all. I’m referring to your specific comment about “killing for sport and possibly food”. Take away the last phrase, or use it just as an excuse, and you’re describing at least a potential pathology, and a culture that still has some evolving to do.
This. It’s a big part of the perspective.
Maybe that was meant to be facetious, but “cuteness” in large measure reflects our ability to anthropomorphize and we tend to do that with creatures that are sufficiently advanced that we can see in them aspects of ourselves, so it’s really quite valid.
And while I’m certainly not going to go around claiming that fishing is cruel, or that I don’t eat fish, but our human greed is having many deleterious effects. Many species are being fished to the verge of extinction, and the Chinese practice of capturing shark, hacking off their fins for shark fin soup, and then tossing them back into the ocean alive is cruelty by any measure.
I suppose my bottom-line answer to that last quoted question is this… bear with me for a moment (and no pun intended). I have caught fish, as I imagine most of us have. Few would argue that this is any big deal. But on one occasion when we were canoeing and camping in a national wilderness park, it had been a bad season for berries and brown bears were foraging far and wide for food, and a mother bear and two cubs invaded our campsite several times. They left us alone and we left them alone, and it was fun to watch them forage for food and even take down the stuff we had strung up on a line – as per SOP – between two trees. Park rangers eventually showed up because terrified campers had complained – quite appropriately, since bears and people really don’t mix well in close proximity.
The plan was to tranquilize the mother bear, then capture the cubs, and transport the whole family far up north into unpopulated wilderness. The plan kind of changed when the mother bear, surprised at these humans advancing toward her and her cubs, reared up on her haunches and roared at us. One of the rangers, perhaps losing his nerve, forgot about the tranquilizer idea and shot her.
It’s a memory that will stay with me forever – the sight of that magnificent free creature collapsing, and most of all, the stench of death. I suppose, just like in wartime, we can get insensitised to it, but when we do, it seems to me that we lose part of what makes us human and civilized. It seems to me that when this becomes everyday life, we lose part of our souls. When it happens a lot in wartime, it’s called PTSD.
P.S.- the bear cubs were captured – into little cloth sacks – and duly transported up north. The park rangers returned later to tell us that the cubs were well old enough to take care of themselves, and that when the sacks were opened, the little cubs disappeared into the woods so fast that they were gone in seconds.
That’s the most nonsensical post I’ve ever read. If killing animals isn’t part of what makes us human then I’m not sure what is. We wouldn’t be here without hunting.
