This article was printed from KeepAndBearArms.com.
For more gun- and freedom-related information, visit
http://www.KeepAndBearArms.com.
----------------------------------------------------------------
|
For uncounted millions of years -- since long before they were fully
human, in fact -- people have hunted animals. If there's anything for
which we human beings are best suited, anything for which evolution
has naturally selected us, it is this.
For better and for worse, not only in my own opinion, but in that of
such diverse thinkers as Robert Ardrey, Jose Ortega y Gassett, Louis
B. Leakey, and Ernest Hemingway (to mention only a few), hunting is
what made us what we are. It's often regarded by the ignorant and
naive as a source of evil; far likelier it's the source of whatever
kindness, nobility, and aspiration we possess.
Unfortunately, just like a lot of other basic, earthy human activities
-- like sex, for instance, like childbirth, like Cuban cigars --
it can't adequately be described to the uninitiated, and can be
understood (if at all) only by someone who has experienced it.
I'm a hunter. Although I fail to fit the popular image of a
loudmouthed beer-guzzling machinegunner of the countryside which the
media have invented (and have come, themselves, to believe). I'm a
scholar, a philosopher, the author of seventeen published novels, many
short stories, and numberless essays like this one. Unprovoked, I'm a
relatively gentle soul, a reader, a student of economics and history,
a writer, a husband and father, a changer of diapers.
Yet I've held big game animals in my rifle and pistol sights and felt
my pulse throb, felt my blood sing with a melody vastly older than the
human race. I've pulled the trigger and ended the life of a creature
my own size. (Understand that "sportsmanship" has nothing at all to
do with it. The animal is prey and I am a predator, from an ancient,
honorable line of predators whose natural weapon, from slingstone
to scoped rifle, is technology. Is the cougar concerned with
sportsmanship when she breaks a rabbit's frail neck with her massive
fangs? Then why should I -- an organism just as natural as she is --
be any more concerned than she is?)
I've butchered an animal my own size with a knife, been steeped in its
blood up to my elbows (certainly not the most pleasant of experiences,
but one you accept as a responsibility of the hunt), smelled its hot
viscera steaming into the morning mountain air, and taken it -- my own
weight in meat -- back home to nourish my family. No camera "hunt"
can touch on this primal experience, any more than a trip to the
grocery store can. I am a "killer ape"; I acknowledge it; I accept
it; I rejoice in it. Hunting has given me the place I occupy as a
creature of history and nature, it took men to the moon, and it will
take them to the stars.
In localities where people don't hunt, they often kill each other by
the thousands, instead. People who won't hunt animals -- people like
the anti-hunting simpletons infesting the media -- usually spend their
time and energy hunting down and murdering other people's dreams.
Don't talk to me about animal rights -- animals have no rights, only
humans do, since rights are a purely human idea which without a doubt
arose in bands of humans hunting together. People who claim to speak
for the rights of animals are no more entitled -- and no more credible
-- than those who claim to speak for the non-existent rights of the
not-yet-human fetus.
To deliberately hunt members of your own species (especially at the
behest of man's natural enemy, the state) is a perversion. However,
to murder the dreams of others in order to aggrandize yourself is even
worse than a perversion, and there may be no adequately disgusting
word for it. So leave me and my dream, my primal experience, my
communication with my ancient heritage -- alone.
And I will leave you alone to pursue your own dreams and experiences.
My home on the web, The Webley Page: www.webleyweb.com/lneil/
My e-zine The Libertarian Enterprise: www.webleyweb.com/tle/
|
||||||||