Prior to the pandemic, we only had an antenna at our house for the television. We decided to try Netflix and Disney Plus. Since then we have a love/hate relationship with both and will likely end up terminating Netflix over Disney Plus. I have watched two documentaries on hunting that are available on Netflix, “The Women Who Kill Lions” and “Stars in the Sky: A Hunting Story”. Both reminded me again of the objections to hunting.
Often those objections come from people who have never done it or people who project human qualities so deeply into animal behavior that the thought of hunting an animal elicits a deep emotional response. The latter is what I believe drives so many social media posts on hunter’s profiles with vitriol hatred. These two documentaries, especially the former, illustrate this point. Rebecca Francis ended the documentary when she pulled out after getting so much hatred on social media. Watching these two programs and the talk of “unity” after the election brought up the memory of a conversation I had with my daughter a few years ago when two opposing views collided.
During my daughter’s fourth grade year she had an English teacher who loved wolves. She heard non-stop about really one perspective of wolves and wolf reintroduction in Idaho. The teacher took a very narrow view and openly stated she didn’t care about rancher’s concerns or the like. She hated the idea of wolves being hunted and wanted them to be protected. As elk hunting season started to get closer, my daughter came to me to talk about wolves and my hunting plans. She was concerned. She agreed with the teacher that wolves are beautiful animals. She knew I had a wolf tag as well as a mountain lion tag.
I sat down with her on the couch and heard her out. Then I asked if I could tell her my perspective on wolves and their reintroduction. She agreed. I started by saying that I too think wolves are beautiful animals. What we, meaning man, did during the western expansion of the United States lead to some unintended consequences and has made reintroduction difficult. Many hunters take issue with the reintroduction of wolves because large animals like deer and elk no longer had a predatory response to them and animal populations went down. Until that predatory response gets ingrained back into big game animals here in Idaho we are going to continue to see an impact on herd populations. Ranchers are concerned about livestock and the aggressive nature of the Canadian grey wolf.
My opinion is that it was man’s fault for nearly eliminating wolves and if we hadn’t done that things might be different today. I can apply the same logic to Eastern and Merriam Elk which are now extinct. However, the ideas of conservation and the expansion of ethical hunting were not around before Teddy Roosevelt and Aldo Leopold. To judge those events using today’s concepts isn’t appropriate outside of historical context. People make mistakes. In the case of hunting, we changed course in the United States with great success.
I talked to her about an encounter with an Idaho Fish and Game officer at a tradeshow. The officer talked about an incident where a herd of elk where trapped due to snow. Fish and Game were notified and put out feeders along with trail cameras. By their count, the herd was eighty plus animals strong until the wolves started in on them. Within the few weeks it took for the pass to clear out, the wolves had decimated the herd by more than half. Later when the snow had melted, Fish and Game found carcass after carcass of dead elk in this pass many of them uneaten and untouched after being killed.
At this point, my daughter asks me, “Dad, are wolves evil?” I looked at her squarely in the face and said, “No, they are just wolves.” I made the point to explain to her that wolves are Apex predators. They are highly intelligent and efficient predators who have instincts and a social order relative to their pack and other wolves around them. Humans are not part of their social order. Projecting a human value of good or evil onto an animal is misguided and misplaced. Wolves do what they have learned to do just as our dogs have learned what behaviors we will reward or punish. To suggest they know human concepts of right and wrong, good versus evil, would also then suggest some sort of social collectivism shared among all living things driven by God-given human morality. There is no evidence of this biblically or in science.
She then asked, “So why do you have a tag? Are you going to kill a wolf?” I knew this was where the conversation was headed and was glad she finally felt comfortable asking me the question. I explained the monetary reason first, expressing the fact that Idaho Fish and Game only gets funding from the sale of licenses and tags along with Federal funding from the Pittman-Robertson Act. They do not have a state budget. Buying tags, even if I don’t intend to use them, support their efforts and programs. The second reason was a bit more personal. I told her I had them in case I needed to use them which is true. I hunt for sustainment and honestly, I don’t have any interest in eating a wolf or mountain lion. I made sure she understood that part of my responsibility as a hunter is to come home to her and Mom safely. I had to explain to her that unless an animal was starving or I had completely missed the signs, I would not likely have to defend myself from an attack. I told her that wolves are musky in smell like the foxes and maned wolves at the Boise Zoo. She recalled that smell in her mind and scrunched her nose. “Yeah”, I said, “Kind of stinks and not something you forget, right?” She shook her head in agreement. I told her if I miss that smell I might have to get my nose checked to which she laughed.
She then talked to me about how her teacher said that hunting animals was wrong and animals suffered. I began to think her teacher might be a member of In Defense of Animals or similar associations. My good friend Brian had given me an answer to this question a few years before that I recalled. I looked her in eyes and asked, “Have you seen a wolf or pack of wolves take down large game?” She said she had in videos and it was horrible. She explained to me that it seemed like a long time before the animal died and the wolves would just keep biting it, pulling, and jumping on it. A month before, she was with me when we hunted pronghorn. I asked her, from her memory, how long it took for the pronghorn to die after I put an arrow in it. She said, “I think less than a minute”. I agreed with her. “So did the pronghorn suffer less or more than the elk you saw being taken down by wolves”, I asked? “Less, definitely less,” she replied. I said, “That’s right, so why would your teacher or anyone be okay with an animal suffering a prolonged death by another animal but not okay for a hunter to make a clean lethal kill with less suffering?” She didn’t have an answer.
The truth is most people don’t have an answer. Some anti-hunters will redirect the conversation to missed shots or wounded animals but again, they dismiss it when the same happens naturally from predators when the prey gets away. Objections to hunting and hunters are varied. As far as vehement Anti-Hunters, I question the sanity of anyone threatening a hunter with physical harm like Mrs. Francis. But sanity is too often cast aside over emotionally charged reactions. At a deep, personal, intimate level, hunters know what it means to take a life and therefore have great respect for it. Online bullies should really think before threatening to harm or kill a group of people well equipped to defend themselves. Strip the emotion away and understand this. All life, including human life, sustains itself by taking nutrients from the former life of something else whether plant or animal. That is the full measure of meaning behind the Circle of Life.
Projecting human ideas, values, and morality unto animals is wrought with inherent flaws because it predisposes something that is patently false. There are times this projection has led to catastrophic ends, for instance, watch the 2005 movie, “Grizzly Man”. While we have a great capacity to love and respect animals, especially our pets, it does not make them more human. Rather we project human traits unto them to feel more connected and use our concepts to explain their behavior. As a pet owner, I have talked out loud to parody the thoughts of our dogs or horses much to the enjoyment of my wife and daughter. However, the reality is our animals have their own social construct forced into intersecting paths with ours. In the wild, these constructs often intersect whether during a hunt or in quiet observation of nature’s beauty.
-L. Yarbrough, Bucks & Beers
