Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Dakota in 1900, or Jim Corbett waiting for a tiger in the 19
th
century, the words connect,
have meaning and stir emotions.
One of the beauties of hunting is that you have to be outside to do it. To hunt one must be
exposed to our planet and subject not only to the earth's beauty but also to desolation,
extremes of weather, and the vagaries that the earth and its nature can throw at us. You
cannot hunt indoors. It is not a video game. Even beautiful places become not so beautiful
when the snow, or wind, or heat, or rain, moves and whatever the earth is dealing that day,
the hunter becomes part of. It is real and it seems to connect the hunter to the earth and to
the game. There have been days when it has felt good to be cold and wet. The connection
to the earth seems to offer freedom from a lot more civilized pursuits. This freedom, of
course, is not unique to the hunter. The photographer, the mountain climber, the surfer, the
sailor, the bicyclist, the hiker, all can participate without the potential for killing. But
hunters are consistently great defenders of our wild places and in hunting participate with
the hunted in being subject to the earth and her inconsistencies.
Hunting is a feast for the senses and its processes contain a myriad of sensory clues that
further bind us to past and future. For a prairie duck hunter, rising before dawn, the all
night radio stations (KOMA in Oklahoma City or WLS in Chicago), musty clothes, sage,
alkaline mud, Hoppe's #9 gun oil, spent shotgun shells, sweet clover, alfalfa, hen mallards,
geese, Sandhill cranes, dead ducks, cooking bacon, wet dogs, cold, wind, rain, snow, the
sun, all provide us with sights and smells and sounds that are pleasurable in the moment
and that link people and time together. Humans are storytellers. Uniquely storytelling
appears to be one of those things that set us apart from other primates. For tens of
thousands of years our stories of hunting have been rich and valued, even when our cultures
were most primitive. We have seen few cave paintings that depicted gathering. Hunting
stories have defined the events that humans have needed to record since they recorded
anything, and we hunters remember both myth and reality. The hunter wishes the hunt to
never end.
Perhaps our predatory instincts are more fundamental and profound than we admit. For
many hunters, including me, it is not an avocation. Hunting is not golf with guns. There is
seriousness about it and a depth to it that other pursuits do not provide. The evolution of
the behavior of humans has produced a capability of hunting and killing, in at least some of
us that our cultural evolution has not completely ablated. We are not very far removed
from our hunter-gatherer origins, and hundreds of thousands of years have produced
behavior and emotions within us that allowed us to be successful as hunters. The time since
the Neolithic revolution is short, a pretty small number of grains of sand in the hourglass of
time that humans have been around. We have been farmers of some sort for only about
10,000 of our 200,000 years of existence, and tens of thousands of years of evolution of
behavior do not disappear overnight. There is an emotional tie to hunting as there is an
emotional tie to sitting around a campfire. Both are deep within us. It appears that I am
one of us with a persistent hunting instinct. It may be a reflection of something dark within
me, but I know that hunting makes me happy.
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