Cancel Culture Comes For Hunting
by Ron Spomer
Ugly trophy pictures. Literal bleeding hearts upsetting figurative bleeding hearts. Social media posts celebrating dead giraffes and lions.
It’s a mess, make no mistake. Lions, giraffes, bears, coyotes, woodchucks… The ongoing social media uproar incited by hunter-posted images of dead game animals never ends. Well, it might end with the censorship and banning of such images, possibly the cancellation of any hunter clueless or foolish enough to post an image of little Susie with her first deer or big Uncle Jake with his 100th. Hey, if they can cancel Dr. Seuss…
Is a family not allowed to show their happiness at accomplishing their goal, of getting their winter venison?
A rational anti-hunter recently posted a reasonable explanation of her dislike of giraffe heart hero shots and dead lion celebration images. They are ugly to her. They speak of heartless people celebrating death while hiding behind their contributions to conservation.
To her credit, this writer did recognize and appreciate all the good that modern sport hunting and the North American Model of Conservation management programs have done and continue to do for wildlife and wild places. But she warned us latter day hunter-gatherers that our posting of celebratory images hurts our cause. Gruesome (to some) images drive people to hate hunters and hunting.
They undoubtedly do.
Hunters, in response, say they’ve had enough. Enough of limiting our freedom of expression, our right to hunt legally and ethically and share our joy and successes. Just as our forefathers had done as far back as the painting of the cave walls at Lascaux. Enough of trying to make us feel inferior, evil, heartless or whatever it is you assume we might be. To heck with your bleeding heart virtue signaling. This is life. Mind your own business. Everything dies. Get over it.
Inuit hunters posing with a seal they shot in the early 20th century.
Except they won’t get over it. No, they’ll push and drive and cry and legislate until they shut down hunters and hunting. That’s the frightening part. Without heartless hunters pouring their hearts and dollars into wildlife management programs, all wild plants and animals will lose. We see this in nation after nation that has outlawed regulated sport hunting. With no sport hunters to stand guard, poachers move in. Goats, cattle, and wood cutters strip the land. Wildlife is devalued, shot for meat, poisoned as vermin, and soon wiped out. (And sport hunting is not a frivolous “sport.” It’s identified as “sport hunting” to differentiate it from market hunting and poaching and because, like all organized sports, it has boundaries and rules, all designed to protect and sustain the hunted as well as the hunters.)
There are good reasons bison and elk and pronghorns and whitetails and turkeys and black bears and cougars and wolves have bounced back from the ragged edge of extinction to become common to abundant to nearly pest status (seen any Canada geese lately?) It’s because sport hunters made it happen. Sport hunters rallied against market hunting. Sport hunters initiated closed seasons, bag limits, licenses and tags. Sport hunters pushed for excise taxes on their guns and ammunition. Sport hunters demanded and paid for game wardens, disease research, habitat restoration, transplants and re-introductions.
While non-hunters and anti-hunters enjoyed their tea and dreamed of bluebirds dancing with foxes, hunters were slinging mud, digging dirt, planting trees. Hunters were rebuilding wetlands, buying grasslands, capturing and releasing sheep and elk and grouse and ferrets. Sport hunters were hiring biologists and game wardens and lobbying Congress and raising hundreds of millions more dollars annually to protect, restore and replenish the wilds.
During decades of annual elk hunting, these regal deer continued increasing in numbers and range, testament to the success of sustainable hunter-funded management programs.
I’m sorry if that doesn’t tug at your heartstrings and bring a tear to your eye, but the millions of animals produced and saved by hunters’ conservation efforts far, far outstrip the number eaten by them. The number of lions saved from poachers’ snares and poisons by the professional hunters who are patrolling the gritty backlands of Africa far, far outstrip the handful of senescent old males shot by sport hunters each year. Call it blood money, but blood money — paid generously by legal hunters — funds the habitat and protection. “Trophy hunters’” dollars ensure not only a sustainable population of lions, but vultures and sable and duikers and kudu and dik dik and elephant and lilac breasted rollers. Hunters want and need wild lands and wild habitats and are willing to pay for them. Drive those hunters out and farmers, cattlemen, lumbermen, and poachers move in. Within a few years the wild is gone. The wildlife is gone.
But anti-hunters back in the city are happy. Ignorant, but happy.
The simple reality is that Nature is right. She/he/it/God established a biotic community on this planet that has for millions of years been swimming in blood and gore and fecundity. Every living thing stays that way by feeding on death. To Nature death is indivisible from life, one and the same. The carnivores — from wolves and lions to minks and falcons to robins and humans — are as natural and necessary as any herbivores. A gentle, brown-eyed doe is no more beautiful and innocent than any cold-eyed rattlesnake. A diving, ripping, biting eagle is no more noble and majestic than a tip-toeing San bushman with a bow and arrow. A leaping, chasing, snapping pack of wild dogs that eats a zebra alive is no more kind and righteous than a cigar smoking, gold chain-wearing, high-powered-rifle-toting multi-millionaire blasting 45-caliber holes through a moose.
The photo of a wolf eating a deer (out of season, no limit) is acceptable to most anti-hunters because “they don’t know any better and are just doing as Nature intended.” Humans, of course, know better than Nature and must live apart from it. Or something like that. Or maybe wolves get a pass because they didn’t take the picture so there’s no ego involved.
It makes no more sense to despise the human hunter than the canine hunter. Or the feline hunter. Or falcon hunter. Except…
Humans know. We know we have the power to wipe out virtually any species. We understand the ramifications of our actions. So we modify and temper them. Of all Nature’s carnivores, we alone limit our killing for the benefit of our prey. The golden eagle we image to magnificent and noble would kill and eat the last endangered black-footed ferret on Earth and neither know nor care a whit. In some California mountain ranges cougars have been documented killing every last bighorn sheep. They have yet to offer restitution. Cougars have not proposed closing their sheep season. They have not captured and reintroduced brood stock into the depleted ranges. Neither has any wolf been known to forego killing nursing female caribou or snapping up their newborn calves. No wolf pack has agreed to postpone killing moose until they’ve matured, reproduced, and grown antlers spanning a minimum of 50 inches. No crows or magpies ever observe a closed season on duck eggs.
Despite all the anti-hunter complaints about selfish, greedy, cruel, murderous human hunters, we two-legged hunters remain the only animal that has ever exhibited compassion, restraint, kindness, sharing, and altruism.
Alas, none of that is depicted in a picture of a beaming hunter behind a dead ram. No anti-hunter and darn few non-hunters see justifiable pride in the accomplishment. None see happiness in the hunter-gatherer having procured a winter’s supply of free-range, all-organic, cruelty free meat. (No confinement, no inoculations, no castration, branding, ear tagging, forced weaning, shipping, slaughterhouse.) They can’t imagine the hunter might be honoring his quarry by displaying its magnificence, its pelt, body, antlers, or horns that might otherwise go unseen and unacknowledged. Ashes to ashes.
Are these Inuit hunters allowed to feel satisfaction or a certain degree of accomplishment in helping their guest find and shoot this muskox, a native animal that provides them fur, leather, and meat for the long winter? Or should they be forced to eat cattle shipped from Texas to the north shore of Canada?
But this disgusting trophy fetish, this lust for antlers? Surely that is wrong! Isn’t the piggish hunter merely chest beating for having vanquished the mighty jabberwocky? Perhaps. But so what? The animal is still dead, still meat, still appreciated, eaten and celebrated. So what if the antlers or horns are hung in a place of honor and admired? They were admired and appreciated by the animal itself. Bucks and bulls parade and display these secondary sexual characteristics to show off, to intimidate rivals, to impress females. Cows and does notice, respect, and admire big antlers and horns to the point that they’ll reject a male of lesser stature to mate with the one sporting the largest horns. Seems rather silly of us to trivialize or denigrate what the animals themselves admire and value.
Ah, but all of this requires thought, analysis, honesty, and tolerance, none of which are currently in vogue. No, ours is a culture of condemnation and virtue signaling. Those who can’t stay atop the moral high horse can at least jump on the band wagon it’s pulling and contribute to the cacophony.
What might seem gruesome to western sensibilities too long removed from reality looks like soup stock bones to these happy children living closer to the land. Eland and oryx legs. Nothing goes to waste in Africa.
The solution to social media posting of hunter success, then, is a poor one at best. Stop. Sure it’s unfair. While gardeners can grin behind a basket of giant carrots, marathoners dangle their gold medals, 4-H kids display their blue ribbon cattle, hunters must hide their accomplishments. To be sure we are free to display dead animal photos, but each one potentially drives another nail into the coffin. A few more Cecil lion incidents, a couple more dead giraffes, and hunting images could be banned from social media. Worse, hunters and hunting could be banned, period. Outlawed. Voted out of existence. Like mountain lion hunting in California, grizzly hunting in British Columbia… And then not only would millions of hunters suffer, but wildlife and wild places would be left undefended, unwatched, unappreciated, vulnerable. And soon gone.
San bushman have been hunting southern Africa for at least 30,000 years. Should they be permitted to memorialize some of their kills via photographs instead of just the rock art they’ve traditionally displayed?
Does this mean one can never post a “trophy” photo? No. I think tastefully posed scenes of hunters with prey can be shared. The trick is capturing the episode with honor and respect. De-emphasize the ego. Focus on the animal and habitat. Add comments about the joy of being an active participant in Nature’s cycle of life, of gathering all-organic, free-range food. Mention connections with tradition, family and friends, responsibility for procuring your own food. Forego the collections of corpses lined up on tailgates or piled on garage floors. We don’t hunt for the thrill of stalking through our garages or driving the roads. Let’s show ourselves, family, friends and game in the settings that draws us to hunt, the beautiful, stimulating, restorative wilds we need, celebrate, fund, restore, and defend.
Hunting photos like this help tell the story, but they leave questions like “Did you get one? How big was it?” The story of the hunt is as old as humankind with the same ancient goal — success.
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