Abstract
Popular green thinking today, often manifested in vegetarianism and support for animal rights, rejects hunting as cruel and argues for minimal interference with the lives of animals, both wild and domestic.1 On the other hand, field biologists and others who work with animals professionally recognize that to know animals well, to learn about their lives intimately, requires close study of the sort that is bound to interfere in some sense, that might require direct intervention or otherwise make a difference in those lives, and that involves an uneasy combination of scientific skepticism and anthropomorphic thinking.2 There is an important distinction to be drawn here between empathy, based on knowledge of the other party, and sympathy, based on personal feeling and projection. Here pet-ownership and attitudes toward animals derived from pet-ownership may diverge most sharply from scientific or professional practice. The sympathy felt by the animal lover seems to arise naturally and to require no special knowledge or preparation. Field scientists, professional animal trainers and farmers engaged in traditional husbandry would disagree.3
A man cannot be a true sportsman who is not also a true naturalist.
Attributed to Thomas Smith by C.E. Hare, The Language of Sport (1939)
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Notes
Alan Rabinowitz, in his study of jaguars in Belize — which was devoted explicitly to their conservation and to establishing a large enough rainforest preserve for them to survive in — did not extend his fieldwork beyond the initial time frame on the ethical grounds that his trapping and radio-collaring of jaguars had led to a number of early deaths, and that since he had enough data, he should stop; Jaguar: One Man’s Struggle to Establish the World’s First Jaguar Preserve (1986; Washington, DC and Covelo, CA: Island Press/Shearwater Books, 2000), p. 339. See also Jeffrey Mousaieff Masson and Susan McCarthy, When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals (New York: Delta by Bantam Doubleday Bell, 1995);
and Vicki Hearne, Adam’s Task: Calling Animals by Name (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986).
On relations between farmers and animals in traditional, or non-industrial, husbandry, see Ted Benton, Natural Relations: Ecology, Animal Rights and Social Justice (London and New York: Verso, 1993), who argues: ‘In general, traditional practices of animal husbandry involve a practical acknowledgement that more-or-less autonomous animal social-processes are a precondition of the achievement of human purposes … That the animals incorporated into these human social practices are themselves living natural beings, with organic, social and ecological conditions of survival and thriving is therefore a practical recognition built into their intentional structure. It may also be, and generally is, experienced by the human agents involved as an affective disposition — something they choose to acknowledge, and gain satisfaction from — as well as a normative requirement’, p. 153.
A ‘bioregion’ may be identified ‘by its mountain ranges and rivers, its vegetation, weather patterns or soil types, or its patterns of animal habitats, whether birds, ground mammals, or humans’; Brian Tokar, The Green Alternative: Creating an Ecological Future (San Pedro, CA: R. & E. Miles, 1987), p. 27. Historical ecologists ‘wish to stress that a false dichotomy between “natural” and anthropogenic causation glorifies a nonexistent “pristine” nature. No spot on the earth is unaffected by humans’, as Carole L. Crumley puts it; ‘Epilogue’, in Crumley, ed., Historical Ecology: Cultural Knowledge and Changing Landscapes (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1994), pp. 239–41; this passage p. 239.
For Foreman, see Steve Chase, ‘Introduction: Whither the Radical Ecology Movement?’, in Murray Bookchin and Dave Foreman, Defending the Earth: A Dialogue Between Murray Bookchin and Dave Foreman (Boston: South End Press, 1991), pp. 7–24; this passage p. 21; and Foreman’s own contributions, esp. pp. 37–46, 107–19. Benton, Natural Relations, pp. 194–221.
Jonathan Bate’s Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London and New York: Routledge, 1991) and The Song of the Earth (London: Picador, 2000) are exemplary in this respect. See Peter J. Manning’s review of Romantic Ecology, ‘Reading and Writing Nature’, Review 15 (1993), pp. 275–96, and Morton, Shelley and the Revolution in Taste, p. 229.
Wyatt, Wordsworth and the Geologists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 6.
Ashworth, The Economy of Nature: Rethinking the Connections Between Ecology and Economics (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995), p. 237.
Jefferies, The Gamekeeper at Home: Sketches of Natural History and Rural Life (1878), in The Gamekeeper at Home and The Amateur Poacher, ed. Richard Fitter (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 83.
[Gascoigne], The Noble Arte of Venerie or Hunting (London: Henry Bynneman for Christopher Barker, 1575), [Bodleian Library shelfmark: Douce T 247(1)], reprinted as Turbervile’s Booke of Hunting, 1576 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908). Formerly thought to be by George Turbervile, because it is usually bound with Turbervile’s companion book, The Book of Faulconrie, or Hauking (1575), issued by the same printer, Henry Bynneman, for Christopher Barker, The Noble Arte is now generally attributed to George Gascoigne; see Jean Robertson, ‘George Gascoigne and “The Noble Arte of Venerie and [sic] Hunting”’, Modern Language Review 37: 4 (October 1942): 484–5; Charles and Ruth Prouty, ‘George Gascoigne, The Noble Arte of Venerie, and Queen Elizabeth at Kenilworth’, in Joseph Quincy Adams Memorial Studies, eds James G. McManaway, Giles E. Dawson and Edwin E. Willoughby (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1948), pp. 639–65;
and Marcia Vale, The Gentleman’s Recreations: Accomplishments and Pastimes of the English Gentleman 1580–1630 (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer and Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1977), pp. 31–3.
Dame Juliana Berners may have been the author of The Boke of St. Albans (St. Albans, 1486; 2nd edn, Westminster, 1496), or at least the compiler of the hunting section, but ‘behind her stands the legendary originator of all hunting lore, Sir Tristram’, popularly supposed to have been one of King Arthur’s knights. When Gascoigne, or after him, Sir Thomas Cockaine, author of A Short Treatise of Hunting: Compyled for the delight of Noblemen and Gentlemen (1591), refer to Sir Tristram’s book ‘they mean the successive editions of The Boke of St. Albans’; Vale, Gentlemen’s Recreations, pp. 30–1. See also Anne Rooney, Hunting in Middle English Literature (Cambridge: The Boydell Press, 1993), pp. 7–11.
John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 356; Salisbury, Beast Within, p. 44.
Nattrass, William Cobbett: The Politics of Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 216.
Daniels and Watkins, ‘The Picturesque Landscape’, in Stephen Daniels and Charles Watkins, eds, The Picturesque Landscape: Visions of Georgian Herefordshire (Nottingham: Department of Geography, University of Nottingham, 1994), pp. 9–14; this passage p. 10.
There were limits to the democracy of Cobbett’s vision in another respect as well: the question of political rights for women. See Catherine Hall, White, Male and Middle-Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), pp. 124–50.
On the pleasures of fox-hunting shared between horse and rider, see Budiansky, The Nature of Horses: Exploring Equine Evolution, Intelligence, and Behavior (New York and London: The Free Press, 1997), pp. 6, 170.
Goldschmidt, Bridle Wise: A Key to Better Hunters, Better Ponies (London and New York: Country Life, Ltd. and Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1927), p. 61.
Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy, rev. edn (Montreal and New York: Black Rose Books, 1991), p. 362.
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© 2001 Donna Landry
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Landry, D. (2001). The Greenness of Hunting. In: The Invention of the Countryside. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230287570_2
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