Orion's Lament

   Hunters are now the hunted.


   There was a time when hunting was so pervasive a part of American culture, it transcended all strata of society.

   Presidents hunted; Roosevelt (you know which one) and Eisenhower, to name a couple. Celebrities; Clark Gable, and Errol Flynn. Audubon hunted. Hemingway hunted. So did the guy next door who worked at the same factory as your dad. Different places on the line, though.

   Today, hunting carries the sour odor of cave dwelling.

   What caused this shift?

   Jeremy Bentham, an 18th century proto-progressive, first posited the notion of animal rights. Curiously, Bentham insisted, by contrast, that humans had no natural rights.

   In the age of Rousseau, Bentham’s ideas were antipodal to the trends which inspired both the French and American revolutions.

   He was a statist, a misanthrope, and all in all, a strange and bitter little man. Naturally, the progressive movement canonized him, along with Margaret Sanger, John Dewey, and Woodrow Wilson.

   But Sanger was an arch bigot; a devotee of eugenics and the Nazi party. Dewey concocted the pseudo-philosophy of Pragmatism. In a nutshell, Pragmatism means compromising your principles in order to get along at a bargaining table. It’s sort of a morality play for people with no attention span. Woodrow Wilson, whose salient accomplishments included WWI (directly), the Sedition act (criticize the war and you went to prison), the Palmer Raids, and WWII (indirectly) was a Benthamite who viewed inalienable rights as ‘mere sentiment’.

   Of course, Bentham was as crazy as a rat in a coffee can. Nonetheless, his ideas held fast and were used to weave the rubric of the Progressive movement.

   The anti-hunting movement is part of that rubric. Once the stuff of scattered loons, it’s gone big time today.

   Its flawed premises drive a passel of reductio ad absurdae. PETA equates chicken coops with Auschwitz. They re-name fish ‘sea kittens’ to coerce school children to condemn fishing. And they’ve convinced pulchritudinous female celebrities to shed their clothes as a means of protesting the use of fur for garments. Ok, so not everything they do is bad.

   Shelters will refuse to allow a person to adopt a dog if it is to be used for hunting --- even though this may mean euthanasia for the dog.

   And environmental extremists were spiking trees in the 1980s, to discourage logging -- a practice that in at least one instance, had lethal results.

   Anti-hunting sentiment is hypocritical nonsense. The ranks of vegetarians have not swelled. In fact, most anti-hunting liberals continue to eat fish and meat. Including veal. Deer, fish, and game birds are not, to my knowledge, kept in a tiny box for their entire lives. And as John James Audubon opined, “a species cannot be hunted to extinction. Only the destruction of their habitat can achieve that.”

   I don’t know if we will go the way of England, where there is a full-scale de facto ban on hunting, but it would be sad if we lost yet another cultural aspect that distinguishes us as purely American.

   We're not citizens of the world; that is a contradiction in terms. We are citizens of the United States.

   And hunting is in our cultural blood.

JDF
8.16.10