Whitewashing Hunting
In recent decades, we have witnessed a profound transformation in people’s attitudes toward animals, especially wildlife. With greater awareness of sentience, we are moving away from treating animals as commodities or resources and, instead, affording them the recognition of their intrinsic value. The trajectory of the trend is undeniable. The percentage of Americans who believe animals should have the same rights as people rose from 25 to 32 percent between 2008 and 2015. The mutualistic paradigm is taking hold. It is displacing the domination paradigm in shaping public views about wildlife.
This shift has also been reflected in the decline in the number of hunters and hunting activities in North America. It couldn’t be otherwise. Hunting is antithetical to appreciating animals’ sentience and intrinsic value; it trivializes their right to exist by equating killing them with leisure and sport.
But the decline in hunting differs from its disappearance. On the contrary, feeling besieged, hunters have doubled their efforts to defend their lethal lifestyle against the growing wave of compassion. Yet, even this defence implicitly acknowledges the change in public attitudes. Hunters’ pronouncements and marketing efforts strategically downplay the desire to kill that underpins and feeds hunting. Instead, the “recreational” shooting of animals is sold as a conservation benefit, a healthy nourishment alternative, and a bonding experience.
Overall, programs developed to rebrand hunting aim at hunter recruitment, retention, and reactivation (3Rs). Ironically but not accidentally, 3Rs trace back to the 19th century’s three “Rs” — Reading, WRiting and ARithmetic — used to foster education with a focus on the fundamental skills. The allusion to this worthy initiative obscures the sinister reality of hunting. As conceived, 3Rs attempt to give the violent endevour a socially redeeming value that killing for fun clearly does not possess. In such a devious and bizarre reinterpretation, hunting becomes not only defensible but also, preposterously, conducive to the betterment of society.
Still, the absurdity does not discourage hunters. The mission demands what it demands, no matter how outlandish it sounds. Hunters also realize that the successful promulgation of the scheme cannot happen in isolation. They know that 3Rs depend on gathering public support, which will, in turn, translate into political support. Therefore, in British Columbia, the Lower Mainland becomes the focus of attention. On the surface, concentrating on the Lower Mainland seems counterintuitive since the region comprises mostly an urban and immigrant population less likely to affiliate with hunting than its rural counterpart. However, Jesse Zeman, Executive Director of the B.C. Wildlife Federation (BCWF) — which, ironically, advocates for hunters — rightly acknowledges that the Lower Mainland is home to 95% of the province’s population. People live there; decisions are being made there. The region’s immense political sway necessitates it becoming the center of hunting promotional efforts.
Moreover, any reluctance to hunting can be overcome by its skillful rebranding. In specific terms, some central themes emerge in the effort to gain public support for hunting. Food is a critical one. As Victoria Vayer, the lead author of a study on hunters’ recruitment and retention, states, “recruiting potential hunters could be a simple shift from talking about hunting as a leisure/sport activity to talking about hunting as a means to “fill the freezer.” It’s revealing, indeed, that even hunters realize that the pursuit’s brutality and emotional triviality demands concealing it behind more basic human needs.
Similarly, Travis Bader in his interview with Zeman states that food is the “common universal vehicle to be able to reach people who may be adverse or disinterested, or just ignorant to what hunting is all about.” Of course, this is not what “hunting is all about.” It is about the joy and desire to kill, and the product of the kill is merely an opportunistic selling point.
Zeman also emphasizes approaching non-hunters with stories related to the “harvest”. As Vayer argues, the best way for hunters to welcome others into the community is by mentoring them, “tak[ing] […] a potential hunter into the field, showing them the ropes, and then sharing the products of the hunt, even if the products are intangible things like stories .” Again, a more socially acceptable activity conveniently supplants the reality of lethal shootings. Food sharing and storytelling are meant to attract people by rendering killing less deplorable.
Such “deconstructing” of hunting trivializes a sentient life and desensitizes people who extinguish it. Both animals and humans become casulties of hunting. Animals pay with their lives; humans with their capacity for compassion. For instance, the group of students from the UBC Backcountry Hunters and Anglers (UBC BHA) posted the following tweet: “We harvested ducks, we laughed, we ate good food, we learned from our incredible mentors, and we watched the retrieving dogs hard at work throughout the morning. We made a community out in the marsh that day.” According to Mateen Hessami, a co-founder of UBC BHA, it was a day of “a powerful intersection of conservation, food security and mental health.”
Absurdly, shooting birds in the air provided an opportunity to laugh and was conducive to mental health. Life is first taken away and then trivialized.
And yet, in the end, even when defending and promoting hunting, supporters remain uncomfortable with the act that is at its center. Hunting is not killing, they claim, but “harvesting”. It is as if they intended to convince themselves and the public that a sentient life they annihilate is nothing more than a harvested crop.
It is precisely for this reason — hunters’ reluctance to admit their desire for the kill — that all the writing about conservation, food sharing, storytelling, laughter, good time, and even mental health is being deployed. After all, it’s hard to face up to one’s joy in killing sentient creatures. Consequently, killing as central to hunting must be negated, suppressed, and trivialized. It’s a failed and desperate effort, though. Killing remains there, no matter what you do, no matter the insidious rationalizing. It is the main attraction, the only indispensable part; everything else is secondary.
Denying this reality is futile. Hunters often compare hunting to getting meat from a supermarket to argue the superiority of the former. Yes, the meat obtained from a store, even the most ethical, is, inevitably, the product of the kill. However, a crucial motivational difference exists on the level of the consumer. Buyers of meat from a store are only interested in getting food. They might be indifferent to the fate of animals sacrificed for meat production, but they don’t seek and enjoy the process of killing.
Though morally concerning, indifference or obliviousness to cruelty differs fundamentally from finding joy in active participation in it. The modern world is fraught with examples of our passive acceptance of morally or ethically questionable consumer goods. The smartphones we buy and the T-shirts we wear partially result from exploitative and inhumane working conditions or even child labour. Ethically wrong? Quite possibly. And yet, while being consumers of various products, we can’t imagine ourselves enjoying enforcing the dangerous and inhumane conditions that went into creating these products. We might be indifferent to the suffering of others, but it does not equate with finding joy in the suffering of others.
In fact, whether it is meat from a store or a smartphone or a T-shirt, the vast majority of consumers would likely feel better if no suffering of any kind preceded their buying a given product. Those of us who wouldn’t feel any better are indifferent, which differs, again, from inflicting pain ourselves. This is a crucial distinction between a passive meat consumer and a hunter.
For a hunter, the thrill of killing must precede food sharing, telling stories, bonding or whatever rationale is being employed. Without the joy in taking life, hunting as a “hobby” loses its purpose.
To be a recreational hunter means enjoying hiding behind a tree and lodging a bullet into the flesh of a wild animal who, just a moment ago, was happily going about its life in the depth of the forest. The joy in ending this life is what motivates humans to pursue recreational hunting, as opposed to true subsistence hunting. Regardless of whether it is for food or a trophy, recreational hunting is driven by the thrill of the pursuit. No amount of rationalizing or pointing to other meat consumers will erase this troubling truth.
And it is a troubling truth because we find it wrong and immoral to enjoy killing. Killing a wild animal to satisfy a despicable need angers most of us. Hunters realize that and, for the public and themselves, strive to bury the joy of the kill under a layer of distractions and justifications.
Having gullible and amendable subjects always helps. That is why, once the strategy to rebrand hunting from a vicious pursuit to a non-threatening pastime has been established, the goal of finding the most susceptible followers remains. The selection criteria are predictable. Since grooming is always easier if you catch them relatively young, Vayer recommends college campuses as a great place to expand the hunting support base.
This is why Backcountry Hunters and Anglers (BHA) launched Collegiate Program (e.g. UBC BHA). College students are perceived to be an easy target because they prefer local and ethically obtained food. In addition, young people are keen on supporting conservation efforts. Unsurprisingly, BHA launched the Sky 2 Skillet which advertises itself as a program to help foster a community that cares for conservation and healthy and ethically sourced food.
This is an especially skillful distortion. The innocuous and cynically attractive phrase “ethically sourced food” plays on young people’s sensibilities without clearly revealing what it means: an enticement to violence. On the other hand, the topic of trophy hunting, which can rub young people the wrong way, Veyer suggests, should be abstained from for the greater good. Though implicit and packaged into carefully sounding euphemisms, the real goal remains the same — growing ranks of people who actively kill wild animals as a leisure activity.
Hunting groups rightly believe that introduction to hunting is best accomplished through a gradual process peppered with euphemisms. But, in their view, it is achievable. Once such tactics are firmly adhered to, a successful conversion is guaranteed. As the UBC Hunters and Anglers group confidently predicts, that black bear croquetas “could turn vegans into a black bear hunter.” And why not? Right? The moral objection to killing is not a value but merely a negotiable position, something as open to trade-offs and compromises as everything else.
The sole obstacle might be money. Hunting is costly, and the Backcountry Hunters group recognizes that many students struggle financially. To prevent them from “flipping a coin between a piece of new hunting gear and a required textbook,” Sky 2 Skillet provides free gear and pairs up novice hunters with mentors. Again, every effort is made to render the transition to recreational killing smooth and hurdle-free.
Apart from post-secondary students, hunters also target women and visible minorities. Two arguments justify such a focus. Firstly, having women and visible minorities among the ranks of hunters could better insulate hunting from criticism. Ethnic and gender diversification would disassociate it from its current image of an old white man’s activity and link it to historically underprivileged sectors of society. In other words, making hunting less white and less male could offer a protective shield and a useful tool for marketing purposes. Clever, indeed. One might accuse hunting proponents of crass opportunism and virtue-signaling but cannot deny them an astute reading of the current zeitgeist.
Moreover, not only is the recruitment of underrepresented groups an asset to showcase hunting, but it is also easier to accomplish. After all, those who struggle financially, have fewer opportunities and find themselves cast aside, overworked and overburdened are likely to follow if something is given to them. The BCWF believes thus that single mothers constitute an excellent target population. As Zeman points out in his interview, many single mothers lack means, knowledge or time to provide their children with outdoor activities. Conveniently, fishing and hunting groups come to the rescue. For instance, moms with their kids can enroll in the Conservation and Outdoor Recreation Education Program (CORE), which will give them “confidence and practical knowledge […] to begin a lifetime of adventure in the outdoors, hunting, angling, and feeding family and friends.”
Moreover, the BCWF classroom education program boasts that it can bring “a busload of high school students out to the Seymour River” to teach them about salmon, take them to the hatchery and give them a T-shirt. As with university students, grooming is subtle and gradual, beginning with socially acceptable activities to get hold of the young population that is especially pliable for future psychological engineering.
Shaun Hollingsworth, the president of the Seymour Salmonid Society, rightly sees the value of the salmon program in “helping to create a bond between urban kids and nature.” Indeed, connecting urban kids to nature is a valuable initiative that can lead to a greater appreciation of wildlife and its habitat. This benefit becomes, however, questionable if it constitutes a step on a trajectory to recreational killing; appreciating wildlife and shooting it for leisure cannot go together. Loving and killing are not two sides of the same coin.
Again, this contradiction escapes hunters. Zeman hopes to reach 1500 students yearly through the salmon education initiative to incentivize them to become members of the BCWF and remain with the organization for a long time. Eventually, a new generation of hunters and anglers can be nurtured, promoting a positive image of hunting and fishing. By the way, isn’t it interesting how often, in public pronouncements, hunters are paired with anglers and hunting with fishing? The hope is, of course, that the greater acceptance of fishing as a leisure pursuit will help instill subliminal equivalence between the two activities.
Overall, in promoting hunting, a clear trajectory becomes evident. Following the time-tested “foot in the door” selling approach, hunting organizations begin with more innocuous and less controversial indoctrination. After all, providing opportunities for children to learn about salmon and hatcheries can hardly be faulted. But it is only a first step. As with ideology or, more ominously, cult recruitment, the first stage is always the least objectionable. The focus remains to get attention, hold interest, and have opportunities for further, more difficult proselytizing. Predictably, once less controversial aspects have been internalized, the path to inculcate a more sinister reality brightens. And this is the path that the BCWF is not ambiguous about pursuing. It might begin with taking “students out to the Seymour River,” but the ultimate goal is to have them join the ranks of hunters dressed in camouflaged uniforms, a rifle in hand, finding joy and laughter in killing a wild animal in the depths of the forest.
Killing. Yes, it all comes down to the perpetuation of killing — ensuring that the future is as bloody as the present, regardless of how phrased and filled with euphemisms the messaging is. More killing; this is what remains once the smokescreen is gone. What’s worse, the rebranding plan is striking not only in its insidiousness but also in its scale. The BCWF intends to “educate” 20,000 people per year. The number is large and ambitious, and hunters are eager to do the work.
Inescapably, therefore, we, who abhor violence, need to do our work, too. We must reveal the malignant reality underpinning the 3Rs by providing citizens of the province with a complete picture of what is at stake, because only then can they make informed choices.
In private and public, hunters call for putting personal differences aside to pursue a common goal: strengthening the support for hunting in the province and increasing the number of active hunters. This singularity of purpose distinguishes hunters from a larger group of people who oppose them. The mutualistic paradigm might be taking root on a societal level, but what it gains in numbers, it lags in intensity.
However, to eradicate killing as a leisure activity, we must match hunters’ single-mindedness. Just like them, we must judge political candidates through the prism of their wildlife beliefs. Let these beliefs not fall into the background and become the victim of our perennial focus on taxes, interest rates, or culture wars.
Opposing hunting is more than just a dislike or disinterest in the activity. Hunters might be sugar-coating their message, presenting a more acceptable face to the public, but it is all a façade. Killing wildlife for pleasure goes against the value system we hold dear. Our values are not disposable or transient; they are guiding principles and a weapon against giving in to dishonest persuasion. They cannot change over a meal.
Hunters are not compromising on the core activity — aiming their rifles at and shooting wild animals. Of course, they can’t compromise because, for a recreational hunter, killing is what gives pleasure. The thrill is in the kill; this is what hunting is all about. As such, hunting, in whatever incarnation, is not only lethal to animals but, in the end, damaging and corrosive to the human psyche. It trivializes sentience and cherishes violence as a way of life. Its persistence in our culture evokes sadness, and the fact that it is insidiously being sold to our youth is a tragedy.
In the end, it is up to us to turn the tide. The time and the underlying trends are on our side, and the hunting culture need not have to succeed. If we are not complacent and let our commitment match our beliefs, a paradigm shift will happen, and recreational hunting will become a rare relic of our shameful past.
