Animal Aid

Our third article in the Great Debate is by Dave Eaton. Dave is 31 years of age and has recently finished a Masters degree in environmental philosophy at Lancaster University. Prior to this he spent five years studying for a part-time degree in Humanities, while working. He has been vegan for approximately thirteen years and currently lives in Nottingham.

In his recent paper for the Great Debate, Adam Kyd discussed the issue of deep ecology and the fact that some deep ecologists find a justification for hunting in their ideology (see Moral consideration - beyond the human community). Deep ecologists share a little common ground with animal liberationists in that both want to end the way that western humans see the human species as inherently different from all other creatures - as inherently more important. Both want to overthrow the conceptual boundary between humans and other species. Deep ecologists are very concerned with the problems caused by human alienation from nature and wish to re-embed humanity more firmly in the functioning of natural ecosystems. They tend to take the philosophical view that it is possible to derive moral values directly from nature.

This philosophical view is often called the 'naturalistic fallacy' and tends to be opposed by most moral philosophers (Peter Singer, for example, claims that "We do not find our ethical premises in our biological nature, or under cabbages either. We choose them" (1)). Deep ecologists have what I believe is a very strong case when they point to the need for humans to think in ways that are more in tune with natural systems, however this cannot be a wholesale adoption of the 'law of the jungle' as the only principle to guide behaviour. Such an attitude is short sighted and extremely dangerous in allowing no negotiation with other moral principles. As the French writer Luc Ferry has claimed "From Lenin to Hitler, the notion that one is basing one's actions on an objective science of nature or of history has always ended in human catastrophe" (2).

The perception by deep ecologists that many environmental problems are caused by human alienation from nature has been adapted by some hunting enthusiasts to provide a justification for their hobby. They claim that hunting is an activity that connects humans on a symbolic and practical level to natural processes and to the functioning of natural systems such as food chains. This argument is most strongly espoused by American environmental writers such as Paul Shepard (3) who see many environmental problems as arising from human reluctance to come to terms with our own animality, and who claim that hunting constitutes a means of renewing the vitality of human connection to the land. This argument is obviously at its strongest when hunted animals are taken as food, however "sport" hunting is also included because of its symbolic dimensions and because the practicalities of hunting bring hunters into contact with nature. In the American context it tends to be associated with stalking and shooting, which perhaps rely rather more on the wits of the hunter than hunting with hounds as practiced in Britain.

However, the argument that hunting restores a symbolic bond with nature has been adapted and applied to the British context by Roger Scruton (not a deep ecologist), who links the pursuit of foxes by a group of mounted hunters with hounds to the experience of hunter-gatherer tribes. He does this through the concept of totemism, by which the individual animal pursued symbolically comes to represent its species. Scruton claims that "The experience of the hunter involves a union of opposites - absolute antagonism between individuals resolved through a mystical identity of species. By pursuing the individual and worshipping the species, the hunter guarantees the eternal recurrence of his prey" (4). Scruton's account is essentially incoherent when applied to fox-hunting as the common representation by hunters of the fox as a pest cannot be equated with "worship" and, as in the case of the otter (which is fortunately no longer hunted), sport hunting may contribute to the serious decline of a hunted species. Although modern hunters may have learnt the need to refrain from overhunting if their pleasure is not to be curtailed in the future, history suggests that there is nothing inherent in the nature of sporthunting that ensures that this will happen. Scruton himself claims that "Although the conditions no longer obtain, in which totemism could be a real moral force, the desire for guiltless killing endures" (5). Scruton manages to offer no evidence that this desire is anything more than a romanticisation of violence and a fascination with the ability to impose one's will on the world.

Others have claimed, however, that the desire to kill represents the awareness in an individual human of being part of ecological processes that transcend the individual. Shepard claims that "To share in life is to participate in a traffic of energy and materials the ultimate origin of which is a mystery, but which has its immediate source in the bodies of plants and other animals. As a society, we may be in danger of losing sight of this fact. It is kept most vividly before us in hunting" (6). Shepard's argument draws upon a particular representation of nature and ecology as a system of energy flows within which individual plants and animals are what he calls "temporary formations". He is therefore able to condemn the "naïve assumption that order in nature is epitomized by living objects" (7)>. For Shepard, to destroy these temporary formations offers access to the sublime and somehow permits him knowledge of the "mystery" which is lost to those who do not hunt.

This interpretation of the ritual significance of hunting seems to ground it in basic ecological discourse, yet it is not unproblematic. Matt Cartmill (8) and Roger King (9) both link hunting in complex ways with rape, pointing out the sexual imagery that tends to accompany many descriptions of hunting. Cartmill points out the confused nature of many emotions associated with the hunt, among which "The false and contemptuous affection for the victim, the refusal to think of the victim as an individual - are also common feelings among rapists" (10). These emotions are particularly relevant here as Scruton rather falsely writes of "worshipping" the fox while both him and Shepard base the major part of their argument on a denial of the status of the hunted creature as an individual, and invoke differing discourses in order to do this. The purpose of discussing this here is to illustrate that the psychological and metaphorical processes underlying hunting may not be as environmentally benign as hunting enthusiasts claim. King emphasizes the process of objectification that is required in order to abstract a hunted animal both from its status as a creature that can suffer and from its web of living, familial and ecological relationships. The effect of this is that the hunter "Must in fact be blind to much that is present in the lives of animals, regarding the animal as a social atom, an object, living in no essential relations to other individuals" and that predation, for hunters is, "not just the primary animal relation; it is the only one which they notice" (11). Therefore, the claim that hunting restores the human hunter to a natural order that is otherwise inaccessible may be seen to be somewhat delusional. Indeed, "Men pursue game as they pursue women who evade them, as vigilantes pursue the escaping slave. The hunter must not only defend the hunt, therefore, but also the very desire to hunt. The will to violence demands moral justification no matter what its object" (12).

This account of the motivations behind hunting and the justifications advanced for it is dependant upon context. It refers to hunting that is carried out without any necessity being involved, but upon which cultural understandings and indeed even entire worldviews may be based. For example, Shepard's claim that hunting keeps "vividly before us" the "complex flow patterns" (13) which are, to him, the only true understandings of nature is actually crucially dependant upon a cultural construction of ecology that allows such an interpretation. It may either be naively taken at face value or seen as an opportunistic rationalization of a drive toward violence and conquest. Whether this drive is considered "natural" will depend upon how "nature" is understood, but to label it as environmentalism would be to ignore the role it has already played, in diverse ways, in the destruction of nature and the creation of environmental problems. Cartmill describes two distinct strands of thinking about nature:

The tender-minded, romantic vision of nature as a harmony threatened by human incursion has encouraged the growth of such political phenomena as animal-rights activism, Greenpeace, tree spiking, ecofeminism, and the Green parties of Western Europe. The tough-minded, Rooseveltian view of nature as a competitive hierarchy was intimately connected with nineteenth-century European imperialism and doctrines of white supremacy, and it continues to make an important contribution to conservative political thinking. (14)

References

1. Peter Singer, The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology (1981), Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson Ltd., p.114
2. Luc Ferry, The New Ecological Order (1995), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p.86
3. For example in Paul Shepard, Encounters with Nature (1999), Washingon DC: Island Press
4. Roger Scruton, "From a View to a Death, Culture, Nature and the Huntsman's Art" in Environmental Values, Vol.6, No. 4, p.474
5. Scruton, "From a View", p.478
6. Shepard, Encounters, p.69
7. Ibid., p.69
8. Matt Cartmill, A View to a Death in the Morning: Hunting and Nature Through History (1993), Cambridge: Harvard University Press, p.239-240
9. Roger J.H. King, "Environmental Ethics and the Case for Hunting", Environmental Ethics, Spring 1991, Vol. 13, No.1, p.79-84
10. Cartmill, A View to a Death, p.240
11. King, "Environmental Ethics", p.83
12. Ibid., p.84
13. Shepard, Encounters, p.69
14. Cartmill, A View to a Death, p.156

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