The Call of the Wild

Abstract

Hunting is a prime subject for exploring our relationship with the wild and shifting conceptions of the nature/culture divide, for the hunter is a liminal figure, with one foot in the camp of humanity, pursuing his prey, but with the other paradoxically situated in the world of the animal, who he knows more intimately than other men, and with whom he is linked by empathy and identification. Matt Cartmill writes of the hunter as a fundamentally ambiguous figure, “who can be seen either as a fight against wildness or as a half-animal participant in it” (1996: 31).¹ Historically, nature lovers have more often than not been hunters, who have regarded themselves as friends of the animal kinds, and by extension friends of the wild, non-human realm that the animals inhabit, while hounding and shooting individual animals. Hunting is the traditional vehicle of our closest encounter with the wild animal, a site of immersion in nature and rediscovery of what is felt to be our true human nature.