Curated Thoughts on Why We Hunt, Fair Chase, Anti-Hunters and Killing from “A Hunter’s Heart”

By Rob Shaul

This winter I spent hours reading and thinking about why I hunt and trying to answer to the most powerful anti-hunting argument against hunting - “Animals suffer and die for your sport/recreation.”

I believe hunting is threatened activity partly because it’s a primarily rural tradition, and rural America is shrinking. But also because much of the current hunting industry promotion, marketing and media is focused on blood and killing, and anti-hunters are appropriately and smartly using this marketing/media to build political momentum against hunters.

Most of the books, essays, blogs and videos I read or watched were unhelpful. However, one collection of essays, “A Hunter’s Heart - Honest Essays on Blood Sport” collected by David Peterson was helpful and enlightening.

I’m still collecting my own thoughts on how best to answer the most powerful argument against hunting as well as the best way to confront the focus on killing, and lack of focus on Fair Chase, in today’s hunting industry and media.

I do know this. The game we pursue asks something of us. “Don’t cheat to kill me. Don’t waste my life for a photo or my antlers.” When we don’t answer these questions well we know it, and it feels wrong.

Below are the best thoughts/passages on why we hunt, Fair Chase, anti-hunters and killing I gleaned from the essays in “A Hunter’s Heart.” I hope they are as though provoking for you as they were for me.

Printed first is the essay title, followed by the author.

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Essay: Blood Sport - Edward Abby

"And he was a hunter - not a sportsman. He hunted for a purpose: to put meat on the table."

"Gradually, from year to year, my interest in hunting, as a sport, waned away to nothing. I began to realize that what I liked best about hunting was the companionship of a few good old trusted male buddies in the out-of-doors. Anything, any excuse, to get out into the hills, away from the crowds, to live, if only for a few days, beyond the wall. That was the point of hunting." 

"In earnest, there lies the key to ethical issue. Earnestness. Purpose. That sly sophist Ortega Gasset wrote, somewhere, that "one kills in order to have hunted," Not good enough. Thoreau would say, one kills in order to eat. The killing is justified by the need and must be done in a spirit of respect, reverence, gratitude. Otherwise hunting sinks to the level of more fun, "harvesting animals," divertissement, sadism, or sport. Sport!"

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Essay: Moose and Mangamoogna - John G. Mitchell

On antihunters - "They have lived their lives against a background of a constant gunnery - murder, hijacking, assassination, and war. Their most unpopular war is the one in the woods. They do not understand, or do not want to understand, how anyone could possibly derive joy from shooting at animals. They see the hunter as a bumbling sadist, and they speak sardonically of protecting their constitutional right to bear arms, "If you can't play a sport," the old anti-hunting advisory goes, "then shoot one." "

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Essay: Before the Echo - Pete Dunne

"With these tools, binoculars and shotgun, I grew intimate with my woods. I came to know them the way a predator knows its territory, and my confidence grew in measure with my skills. This is what it takes to be an accomplished field birder. This is what it takes to hunt with confidence and clear purpose."

"Think of the natural world as a great play, an incredible drama held on a world stage in which all living things play a part. When I carry binoculars, I stand with the audience, and omniscient observer to all that goes on around me, and I enjoy this very much. But when I carry a gun, I became an actor, become part of the play itself. This I relish, too."

"I have listened to the war of worlds waged between those who defend hunting and those who decry it. Listened to the arguments mouthed by sportsmen - banal truths about "controlling the herd" and "harvesting the surplus" and "maintaining the balance," as if hunting were some sort of civic-minded cleanup. That's not why they hunt. I know that. Maybe they cannot articulate their reasons and so retreat behind the defensive arguments erected by game-management engineers. Their rhetoric bridges no gaps and does no service to the truth." 

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Essay: Is Hunting Ethical? - Ann S. Causey

"With antihunters insisting that hunting is a demonstration of extreme irreverence for nonhuman life, thoughtful hunters must concede, albeit uncomfortably, the apparent contradiction of killing for sport while maintaining a reverence for life." 

"How can anyone both revere life and seek to extinguish it in pursuit of recreation?" 

"Hunters do hunting no favors by hurling taunts and slander at their opponents. The questions raised about hunting deserve a fair hearing on their own merits."  ..... 

"Rather, ethical hunters must undertake the uncomfortable and sometimes painful processes of moral deliberation and personal and collective soul-searching that these questions call for." 

"Those who support hunting usually respond by citing data" .... "While these statements may be perfectly true, they're almost totally irrelevant to the question. Antihunters are not asking whether hunting is an effective management tool, whether it's economically advisable, or whether hunters love and appreciate nature. Rather, they're asking, Is it ethical to kill animals for sport? A any forms of hunting morally right?"

The hunters answer with data ..... But the question is about morality.

"Animal welfare proponents and the general public are primarily concerned about the pain, suffering, and loss of life inflicted on hunted animals, about the motives and attitudes of those who hunt. They're offended by references to wild animals as "resources." They're angered by the sterile language and, by implication, the emotionally sterile attitudes of those who speak of "culling," "controlling," "harvesting," and "managing" animals for "maximum sustained yield." And they're outraged by those who cite habitat protection and human satisfaction data while totally disregarding the interests of the sentient beings who occupy that habitat and who, primarily through their deaths, serve to satisfy human interests." 

"Antihunters insist that nontrivial reasons be given for intentional human-inflicted injuries and deaths - or that these injuries and deaths be stopped. An eminently reasonable request."

"It has been said that hunting is the most uncivilized and primitive activity in which a modern person can legally engage. Therein lies ammunition for the biggest guns in the anithunters' arsenal; paradoxically, therein also lies its appeal to hunters and the source of its approval by many sympathetic nonhunters." 

"To what extent is shooting an animal over bait or out of a tree at close range after it was chased up there by a dog a morally enriching act?" 

"The real threat comes not from outside criticism but from our own complacency and uncritical acceptance of hunting's status quo, and from our mistaken belief that to protect any form of hunting, we must defend and protect all forms. In fact, to protect the privilege of morally responsible hunting, we must attack and abolish the unacceptable acts, policies, and attitudes within our ranks that threaten all hunting, as a gangrenous limb threatens the entire body." 

"Today's ethical hunter must abandon the concept of hunting as fact and replace it with the more appropriate concept of hunting as challenge - the challenge of identifying and promoting those attitudes toward wildlife that exemplify the values on which morally responsible hunting is based. Heel-digging, and saber-rattling must give way to cooperation, to increased awareness and sensitivity, to reason and critical analysis, and to honest self-evaluation and assessment." 

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Essay: I like to Talk About Animals - CL Rawlins

"That's the worst part of hunting - to pull the trigger knowing what will result: pain, shock, blood, death. To die of wounds, whether by tooth or bullet, hurts.  But it doesn't last forever. And there is no branding or castration; no being herded by electric prod into a crowded, heaving truck; no frantic struggle over a concrete floor awash in blood. It doesn't have to be ugly. The whole point of a rifle and scope, of knowledge and practice, is that the animal goes down quickly from wildness into death." 

“But I avoid hook-and-bullet magazines, which put me off with their photos of bows that look like missile launchers and weird-shaped rifles with ever larger scopes and ever more deadly loads. They promote technological prowess far above knowledge of animals or skill in the outdoors. And they'll  focus on killing. They show animals with crosshairs superimposed, or sprawled with unshaven men hunched over them - a friend calls this Horn Porn. And it is. What it urges is that the act of possession is supreme. 

"Hunting season, 1995. Before opening day small aircraft buzz the uplands to locate elk. Then bowhunters, dressed like commandos, form the advanced guard. Later comes a wave of grunts in their chugging pickups, trailing horses and ATVs. Then the executives, in bush suits with matches leather gun cases, fly in their corporate 'copters to lodges and camps to pore over maps with glasses of single-malt, nodding like generals.

This doesn't make sense as a way of getting something to eat. Instead, it seems like a drama in which men troubled with frustrating airless lives dress up as soldiers and cowboys. They marshal their weapons and movable goods to invade a primal landscape, one in which they are licensed to kill. And in this post-frontier passion play, animals are not food or wild companions, but the enemy. 

I dread hunting season for its resemblance to war, which reveals something about us - American men - I'd rather not have to confront: our hunger for money and possessions, and our taste for killing, apart for legitimate hunger or need.

There's a kind of contempt in the way we hunt, for animals and the natural world. How many so-called hunters go out before the season to look for tracks? How many, on the ground they hunt, could name ten native plants? How many of them even know what a deer eats." 

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Essay: Dealing with Death - MR James

"Not dead animals. Meat."

"Not dead birds. Meat."

"Compare the calf with a fawn, born free yet fated by nature to almost certainly die a violent death. Such is the way of wild things. So what is it, I muse, that somehow makes veal acceptable table fare while venison is not? If it is not a matter of life, it surely must be the means of the death." 

"Despite our ever-changing, ever-indignant world with its growing ignorance and indifference to the ways of the wild, I remain a predator, pitying those who revel in artificiality and synthetic success while regarding me and my kind as relics of a time and place no longer valued or understood. I stalk a real world of dark wood and tall grass stirred by a restless wind blowing across sunlit water and beneath star-strewn sky. And on those occasions when I choose to kill, to claim some small part of nature's bounty for my own, I do so by choice, quickly, with the learned efficiently of a skilled hunter. Further, in my heart and mind, I know the truth and make no apology for my actions or my place in time." 

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Essay: The Hunting Problem - Bruce Woods

The killing bothers me.

Even so, I haven't stopped hunting. Killing is, after all, the only way to make meat, and I enjoy meat. Raising grain kills, too. Every additional acre in cultivation is an acre not available as wildlife habitat, and acre lost to indigenous flora, and acre that loads another chamber in humanity's slow game of pesticide roulette." 

"I hunt, and force myself through the training that I feel any hunter must have, because hunting reminds me that I do have a home in this world." 

"It has been said that we don't hunt to kill, but kill to have hunted." 

"Consciousness becomes concentrated into a laser-focused bond between the eye and the animal. At such moments I am as pure a creature as I'll ever be, involved in an act of monumental seriousness. It really has little to do with sport as the term is used today, and it sure as hell isn't a game." 

"And then I also hunt for the moment after the shot. Because, and I must face this too, there is a primitive sort of triumph in having killed; the hand reaches out beyond the body to touch with terrible magic, to make food. The war of celebration and regret that defines such moments leaves me awash with emotion, hyperaware of colors and scents and feeling physically lighter, as after extraordinary sex or a purging cry." 

    So now we must turn our attention to the event in between these defining moments. The success of the hunt demands that it, the killing, be gotten over with as quickly as possible. That's the reason for the scouting and study of natural history, the regular, disciplined physical and mental training.  Because killing is always ugly, and if poorly done it can forever poison the moment of anticipation with doubt, replacing triumph with self-disgust." 

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Essay: A Hunter's Heart - David Petersen

"The greatest threat to hunting isn't external, my friend; it's internal, arising from our collective failure to police our own ranks and morals. There's a lot wrong with hunting today, and I don't mean just illegal activities like poaching. The root problems is the hunting community's hardheaded refusal to admit that some things some hunters do, even when legal, are ethically indefensible; baiting, using hounds to tree bears and mountain lions then executing them like bass in buckets, rich man's globe-trotting trophy hunting, canned 'hunts' on fenced 'game ranches,' rampant littering and ATV Abuse, road 'hunting,' contest killing, employing space-age technology to minimize challenge, dead animals conspicuously displayed on vehicles, aligment with the no-compromise, anti-environment, far-right radical mentality, and the general care-less-ness in our behavior afield." 

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Essay: What The Hunter Knows - Thomas McIntyre

"That the hunter has a special relationship, more nearly a kinship, not only with wildlife but with the wild itself has long been understood, however, grudgingly." 

Traditional Hunting Groups - RMEF, Wild Sheep Foundation, etc  ... "heroism through money" 

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Essay: Space Age Technology. Stone Age Pursuit - David Stalling

"High-tech gear makes hunting easier, attracting more people to the sport. A compound bow doesn't require the time and patience of a recurve to master.

Good, say some hunters. If hunting is to survive, new hunters must be recruited. The hunting industry warns us that the percentage of Americans who hunt has declined steadily over the past twenty years. True. What it doesn't tell us is that the actual numbers of hunters, particularly elk and deer hunters, have climbed just as steadily. About 4.5 million people hunted big game in 1955, compared to 10.7 million in 1985. In Colorado, the number of people hunting elk each year has rocketed from 102,000 two decades ago to more than a quarter million today." 

"Do we really need more hunters ... or better hunters, more conscientious hunters? 

"You're either with us or against us." 

Don't question the ATVs whining through the mountains, often illegally. Don't question bear baiting or executing hound-treed cougars. Challenging the sanctity of hunting - any part of hunting - can get you labeled "one of them," and "anti," with McCarthy-like vengeance.

"A survey of Missouri bowhunters revealed that hunters using compound bows with release aids and lighted sight pins killed 28 percent more deer - but wounded 75 percent more deer - than hunters using traditional recurves and longbows. The hunters who didn't wound game were generally more experienced, knew the limitations of their weapons better, and were more conscientious about shot selection. Wounding, the survey showed, is based on hunter skill and ethics, not equipment. Many of the hunters using high-tech gear thought their equipment would make them more proficient at killing deer. Maybe it did - but far too many of those deer died in thickets where only crows and coyotes ever found them. Technology creates the illusion of proficiency." 

"Hunting is supposed to be tough, the meat earned. Real hunting is stalking, tracking, and penetrating an animal's natural defenses. Certainly, we all buy equipment designed to make elk hunting easier. But today more than ever, we need to question just how easy we want it to be. We need to see ourselves as hunters, to think a lot more about why we hunt."

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Book: Sand County Almanac - Aldo Leopold

"The sportsman has no leaders to tell him what is wrong. The sporting press no longer represents sport; it has turned billboard for the gadgeteer. Wildlife administrators are too busy producing something to shoot at to worry much about the cultural value of the the shooting .... I do not pretend to know what is moderation, or where he line is between legitimate and illegitimate gadgets. Yet there mist be some limit beyond which money-bought aids to sport destroy the cultural value of sport ... Our tools for the pursuit of wildlife improve faster than we do, and sportsmanship is the voluntary limitation in the use of these armaments. It is aimed to augment the role of skill and shrink the role of gadgets in the pursuit of wild things."

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Essay: A Failure of Spirit - Tom Beck

"Most state wildlife agencies have developed along a business model, with hunters and fishers their primary "clients." Consequently, these agencies have adopted a restricted circle of information and influence. Wildlife agencies provide a product for which hunters pay. And because they pay, hunters have come to believe the agencies owe their loyalty to them alone. Such a closed system leaved many concerned citizens disenfranchised." 

"I discern two distinct factions among the antis: those who oppose hunting based on philosophy, and those who oppose hunters based on observed behavior."

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Essay: Dark Days in the Glass House - John Wrede

"There is grudging recognition that a difference exists between a hunt and a slaughter." 

"In some cases, errant or unethical behavior may not have a significant biological impact on the wildlife resource, yet it invites - and deserves - public scrutiny, and will ultimately further restrict hunting opportunities. Greed, competition, ego-driven attitudes, commercialization, or any other behavior that deviates from a high moral standard is a direct affront to all ethical hunters, to concerned non and antihunters, to wildlands and wildlife. The killer or shooter who hunts to achieve bragging rights or judges his success by body counts is clearly an albatross around the necks of everyone who cares about wildlife - but so, albeit more subtly, is the hunter who is not deeply committed to conservation." 

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Essay: From a Hunters Road - Jim Fergus

"In any kind of economic footrace, the natural world always loses, and too often the same people who are backfilling wetlands to build the shopping mall with one hand are bidding on bad sporting art at a Duck's Unlimited banquet with the other." 

"These are hunters who pursue their game more for the intense aesthetic value of the sport than for the killing." 

"It becomes harder and harder to be a son of the forest." 

"But don't you every worry that by over-promoting the sport, you might also do hard to the resource, to the very thing you're trying to protect?" 

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Essay: Dust to Dust - Russell Chatham

"The media, with the exception of that small part if it devoted specifically to the blood sports, tend to view hunters as people of imperfect character; macho, overly competitive boors who are boisterous, boastful, uncultured, rude, insensitive, violent."

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Essay: For a Handful of Feathers - Guy de la Valdene 

"Dogs, like men, lose their range and enthusiasm for life from having the wildness in them questioned." 

"Our credentials are that we are out there, in nature, when others are not, and that we are out there because we want to be, not because we have to or are paid to be." 

"We are the wildlife thermometers, poling about in rivers and swamps, in the shadows of forest canopies, under flashes of desert suns, and the force that drives us is our soul." 

"Because we understand and feel these things more acutely than our peers, it is sacrilegious of us not to protect with all our might what resources remain to be saved. If we neglect our obligations, we stand to incur the contempt of generations to come." 

"On the other hand, I know deep in my heart that there is something basically wrong about killing for pleasure." 

"Killing for no reason is killing with malice." 

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Essay: Restoring the Older Knowledge - Ted Kerasote

"Most importantly, though, we dislike hunters for their dishonestly - for how their actions do not live up to their claims that hunting is such a noble and conscientious activity." 

"....the truth: the hunting community has denied the character of many of its members and until very recently has refused to address - deeply, with commitment, and spiritually - what constitutes appropriate behavior toward animals." 

"Young Hunters ... goal is to be intensely involved in nature through hunting." 

"Indeed, the story of the modern hunter as the best of conservationists often seems, at least to this hunter, like an exhausted myth."

"The old hunting myth goes on to say that the hunter is a disciplined, reluctant, taker of life." 

"The myth goes on to say that hunting is a courageous and sometimes dangerous activity." 

"Developing codes that distinguish the appropriate from inappropriate technology is one of the challenges hunters need to face and have not.

     "All these examples show the discrepancy between who hunters claim to be and who their actions demonstrate that they are. Many outdoor people, including backpackers, canoeists, climbers, and skiers, have noticed that the hunter hasn't cornered the market on nature lore, woods savvy, or hardihood. In fact, he is frequently lacking in them."

"Actions also speak louder than words when it comes to the hunter's relationship with the animals he kills. When the hunting community, believing it can't lose any form what it calls "hunting," refuses to denouce such activities as shooting live animals for target practice or for competition, its moral stature vanishes." 

"Hunters must say that certain species which aren't eaten can't be hunted ... wolves, bears, etc."

"Second, de-emphasize the record book and the pursuit of trophies for the trophy's sake .... I would also suggest that if records must be kept as a way of honoring animals, only animals are listed, not hunters." 

"The terms "Sport" and "recreation" ...."have become pejorative terms when used with reference to killing animals."