FOOTLOOSE FOOD - MEAT: A Benign Extravagance - page 146

rural population. Now pheasant shoots almost give their birds away, and rabbits are impor-
ted from China.
Similar struggles took place in virtually every country in Europe over the same period. 9
Ortega y Gasset in his Meditations on Hunting writes:
In all revolutions, the first thing that the 'people' have done was to jump over the
fences of the preserves or to tear them down, and in the name of social justice pursue
the hare and the partridge. One of the causes of the French Revolution was the irrita-
tion the country people felt because they were not allowed to hunt, and consequently
one of the first privileges which the nobles were obliged to abandon was this one.
And this after the revolutionary newspapers, in their editorials, had for years and years
been abusing the aristocrats for being so frivolous as to spend their time hunting. 10
During the 19th and 20th centuries, the colonial administrators commandeered the lands
of indigenous hunters and pastoralists and demarcated them as forest reserves' or 'game
reserves'. A member of the Baiga tribe in central India, whose lands were confiscated by
the British forestry administration, took much the same attitude as our Berkshire peasant:
'Even if the Government passes a hundred laws we will do it. One of us will keep the of-
ficial talking; the rest will go out and shoot the deer.' 11 And the same struggle is being
played out today in areas of the world where forests are being taken over by Government
departments and state approved logging companies.
Nowadays when the rights of indigenous or local people to take wild meat are restricted
or withdrawn it is on conservation grounds, rather than by reference to the divine right of
landlords; but the language of ecology often masks social struggle. Communities usually
evolve ways of managing their natural resources to ensure stability and security, and
erosion of these resources is often a result of external or urban forces. This is Jane Goodall
on the hunting of wild animals in Tanzania:
The decline is due in part to habitat destruction as human populations increase and
need ever more land for crops, livestock and settlements. But the greatest threat is the
bushmeat trade - the commercial hunting of wild animals for food. For hundreds of
years the indigenous people have lived in harmony with their forest world, killing just
enough animals to feed their families and villages. Now things have changed. In the
1980s foreign logging companies moved into the last of the great African rainforests.
And even if they practise 'sustainable logging' they open up the forests with roads. It
is these roads that are the problem. Hunters ride the logging trucks to the end of a road
and shoot everything from elephants and chimpanzees to antelopes, birds and reptiles.
The meat is cut up and smoked then transported to town. There, the urban elite will
pay more for bushmeat than for chicken or goat. It is their cultural preference. The