When I was eight years old I watched Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier and read a biography on David Livingstone for the first time. The stories of the plucky Tennessee frontiersman and the intrepid Scottish explorer so highly colored my imagination that I decided to emulate these childhood heroes. And so, one fine chilly autumnal morning, with a pellet gun in hand and the smell of woodsmoke hanging in the air, I set out to go hunting.
There was a small lake near my house surrounded by a walking trail, which was bordered on the shoreline by all manner of trees. It was on this path that I walked, as bold and buoyant as any safari-hunter, on a fine carpet of fallen leaves, keeping my eyes peeled for quarry. I wasn’t sure what I might find (a rabbit? Deer? A buffalo if I was lucky) but I was in a nervous state of anticipation every time I rounded a corner in the trail. It was late fall, and most of the leaves had lost their color or already fallen off the trees. The branches were smooth, grey, and barren. Then, as I took the next turn on the path (I couldn’t have been out for more than 15 minutes, but to my boy’s mind I had been trekking for hours), I sighted the long-expected prey. There, on a low-hanging branch thrust out above the path, a fat chickadee sat, plump as an overripe peach. Without hesitating I quickly shouldered my pellet gun, took aim, and squeezed the trigger. The chickadee fell like a stone and struck the ground. It is curious to me, even now as I write this many years later, that I remember exactly how the bird hit the ground. Though it fell with such frightful rapidity, it literally bounced off the ground, much like a slightly deflated tennis ball would, and slowly rolled over. As I hastened up to glory in my success, I noticed the bird had come to rest face up, and seemed to be glaring at me reproachfully. I didn’t touch it and stood rooted to the spot, staring at this now small and fragile bird I had just killed. Something in me broke, and I remember crying my eyes out as I rushed home, conscious of doing something horribly wrong. I have never hunted since.
I mention this story because I recently finished reading an essay by George Orwell called Shooting an Elephant. In it, Orwell recounts a time in Bermuda when, as a police officer, he had to shoot an elephant. The elephant had gotten loose and caused considerable damage to some village, it even killed a man. Orwell, surrounded by a crowd of natives, shoots the elephant multiple times and eventually kills it. Gruesomeness aside, what struck me most when I read this (and lead me to write this article) was Orwell’s reason for killing that elephant. It wasn’t because he enjoyed hunting. It wasn’t even to save property or “avenge” the man it had killed. Orwell killed it, as he states, “solely to avoid looking a fool”. This is brutal honesty of a kind seldom seen today. And while I admire Orwell’s honesty I detest his reasoning and think his action morally reprehensible; just as I condemn my action of killing that bird all those years ago.
Children have the seemingly uncanny ability to know the difference between right and wrong. Indeed they are more conscious of when they have done wrong or someone has done something wrong than adults are. They are a sort of moral-canary, the first to decry when things are contrary to how they ought to be; for instance how often have you heard a child cry that something or someone isn’t fair or seen a guilty look on their face when they have done something they shouldn’t? And though at the time I killed the bird I knew I had done something wrong, I was unsure as to why it was wrong. Unsure, that is, until I read Orwell’s essay. What I had done was wrong precisely because my motivation behind killing the bird was wrong. Orwell killed the elephant to avoid looking foolish, I killed the bird for sport. Purely because I could, and because the heroes I idolized had killed animals, too. As an aside, please don’t take this to mean that I believe that if you have good intentions that renders a bad act morally right. Wrong is still wrong.
This leads us back to consider the moral dilemma of hunting. I believe, having felt this from a young age and being convinced by Orwell’s account, that killing animals for sport is wrong. I have no qualms with hunting if it is done to kill animals for food, or even if someone kills animals for sport but gives the meat to others. There the intention is good and proper. What I object to is the senseless killing of animals because one can, and because one wishes to display its head or some other grisly trophy above one’s mantelpiece. It is indicative of a desire to triumph in the basest of ways and to assert one’s will over nature in a domineering fashion. There the motivation is utterly abhorrent to me.
I believe that humans have an obligation to steward the earth, animals included. And while we are to exercise dominion over animals that doesn’t mean we are free to tyrannize them. Nobody except a morally deficient person cuts down a tree just to watch it rot. Unless the lumber were being put to good use, anyone with an ounce of sense and feeling would protest such savagery against nature. How much more should we protest the barbarity of killing a conscious creature just so its pelt can decorate someone’s home. Can we justly praise an action that’s sole goal is to gratify man's inordinate pride in proving himself king of the animals? I need not mention the absurdity in considering yourself mighty because you killed an unsuspecting creature from a safe distance with a rifle. There would certainly be a smaller number of hunters if gunpowder had never been invented and even fewer if his subjects were armed too.
I do not wish to denigrate those who enjoy hunting. I only want them to reconsider what their motivations are the next time they go hunting. And I would caution them that we are all stewards, and every steward is one day called to give an account of how they managed the charges entrusted to them.
Happy Reading,
Drew
I probably could have fleshed that section out more, but was trying to keep it short! What I primarily meant was that we all have an internal moral sense of right and wrong, and that children are more prone to show that than adults because they haven’t learned to dissemble yet. So while you might think something that someone does isn’t fair you’re not likely to shout it out like a child should. I wasn’t trying to say that children are inherently moral in that they are “good” because they are children. That, I certainly don’t believe.
As a Hunter only in name, I definitely don’t get the fascination in hunting for sport. Not sure I agree with children being moral canaries. I would argue that civilized children probably are but a room of 2-year olds isn’t a moral place at all.