Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Guns, Killing, Hunting

Regular readers of this blog probably have a good idea of how I feel about guns: I think guns are horrible, appalling, loathsome things, and I hope to continue my record of never having touched one.

Nearly everyone is prepared to sanction gun ownership by hunters. I don't even approve of hunting. There may very well be some inborn and inbred instinct to hunt. Certainly for much of the million-year history of the genus Homo (as in Homo sapiens), human beings killed animals for their food, and in the course of that million years developed better and better tools (in this context known as weapons) for doing so.

It's only been 10,000 years since the twin, revolutionary inventions of agriculture and domestication of animals (the latter, of course, not precluding the killing of animals, but when we slaughter a domestic animal that does not constitute hunting) precluded the need to forage for edible plants and hunt animals. (We now know that our species can live without eating animal protein, but I don't think there were very many vegetarians prior to that 10,000-year-ago watershed. And I do not choose here to go into any of the pros and cons of a vegetarian diet.)

So my point is that possibly we have an instinct to hunt and/or kill animals. That is why, I think, when a driver more or less deliberately chooses to hit an animal in the road—yes, it happens, I am sure, and maybe not rarely—maybe he is just giving rein to his hunting instinct. I call it being "the great white hunter," in allusion to the image of the Western man on safari in Africa. You can also view it as machismo, though what is so macho about killing some poor little squirrel or opossum with your car is open to argument.

But we in so-called developed countries usually rely on others to provide our food, animal or not; so to a large degree the skills, instincts, etc., of a hunter are no longer needed, but evolution does not work quickly enough that we lose traits that are no longer needed.

Still, all that being said, I still don't sympathize very much with hunting nor with the people who want to  hunt. Hunters say they appreciate, even love, wildlife. I say, if you love something, you don't kill it.

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