From D&DH Forum

Everyday Hunter asks:

Is it a moral decision to hunt or not to hunt? 

Let’s get philosophical. I recently re-read an article in Sports Illustrated (Nov. 24, 2008) on the decline of hunting. It ended with this sentence:
“Wolves do not make moral decisions, he decided. They just hunt.”

So, if hunting is not a matter of morality for wolves, is it for man? Why, or why not?

Steve

My response:

Is hunting moral?  Everything is moral or immoral to one extent or the other.  A lot of it has to do with motivation.   A man can go hunting and follow all of the game rules, engage in Fair Chase, but still commit an immoral act if his intentions are wrong– say his motivation is to hurt living things.  On the other hand, you have the example of the man who poaches to feed his hungry family.  Is it a reasonable motivation, or is it just a sly excuse to get off being prosecuted?  The question comes down to what is in his heart.

I could say that a man who goes hunting and does not contemplate what he is doing is acting immorally.   However, I would also have to confess that the closest I have have come to achieving Bliss was while I was hunting.  In doing that, I was able to shed thinking altogether.   I could run down the bunny hole further, and say that any man who is not fully aware of what he is doing, aware of where  his weapon is pointed, aware of what lies in the path of the projectile, etc. is acting in an unsafe and therefore immoral manner.  Having said that, I will also say that all that careful thought, as well as the thought of the hunt, the dilemma that we kill so that we may consume life and continue living, the enormity of taking life–   all of that has to be turned off and we need to act in a state of non-thinking so that we can make a successful, ethical shot otherwise we are acting immorally.  When we squeeze the trigger or release our arrow we should be acting mostly out of muscle memory.

Why I prize hunting is that it brings all this out.  It brings all this out in me.  I learn more about myself in a day in the field than I learn in a year of the rest of my mundane life.  Hunting tempers me.   It brings it out in my sons.  Hunting with them got this fire of ambiguity going in them, and it gave me a chance to show them how I have been dancing with it all these years and let me give them guidance as to how to work with it themselves.  I doubt we would have had the same talks over the years if we had been discussing golf.

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