Dr. Krasny's fine show

Perchance you were able to listen to Dr. Michael Krasny's radio show "Forum" a couple of weeks back, say, August 5th? No? Well, in the 10 o'clock hour the show covered "the future of hunting" for an hour, with guests from Ca. Fish & Game, the Orion Institute, and Born Free. Guess which guests were pro-hunting, and which were against. Well, after some incessant telephone calling, I was able to get in and say about a half a cent (my two cents, as you know, tend to be long-winded). I did get a follow-up question from Dr. Krasny, who I respect and admire, but I don't think it was his best question: He refers to a middle-school short story and subsequent Ice-T thriller. You can hear the radio show here; I'm at the very end, the last four minutes or so.

Well, the program was purported to be about the "ecology and ethics of hunting", in light of the opening of deer season the following Saturday. They didn't get the date for opening day of "deer season in California" exactly right, as it was just opening day of the A-zone rifle season, archery having opened a month earlier. Unfortunately, they didn't get to the ethics of hunting, either. This is where I was frustrated, and my call in was an attempt to bring a little bit of the ethical conversation back.

The two gentlemen who defended hunting, with Fish & Game and the Orion Institute, focused almost exclusively on two important contributions of hunting to conservation: 1) the creation of the conservation movement by hunters like Roosevelt, and 2) the continuing contribution of the lion's share of conservation dollars and volunteer time to habitat restoration and protection. The lawyer for Born Free, and to a bit of an extent, Dr. Krasny, focused on the personal act of killing something, and of human's effectively trespassing on wild land. At one point, the Born Free rep. says that wild animals should be left in the wild, and that people shouldn't be bothering them.

Needless to say, most of the time the folks just talked past each other. Animal rights folks called in and said that hunters were probably exhibiting psychological disorders, and that people should be leaving animals alone (I've got a blog on that here), and pro-hunting folks called in and said that hunters are the backbone of conservationism, and either they or the ones they know are very respectful of their game. Anti-hunters couldn't come up with an alternative to hunting as a revenue stream for real conservation measures, and pro-hunters shied away from the personal experience that includes killing something.

My call was to bring up the personal ethical implications of hunting vs. vegetarianism, and when I was asked by Dr. Krasny if I'd ever thought what it would be like to be the animal, I responded that everybody dies, and that the act of killing and taking responsibility for one's food and the sacrifices that requires can make a person more human. I'd hoped the whole show would look clearly at the ethics of hunting, at the nature of death and life and food and sacrifice, in addition to conservation and heritage and a true, real, and contemporary understanding of wildlife and the wild. I was disappointed, because everybody just went back to their safe corners, instead of really stepping out. But, I'm glad this topic was broached in a broader venue, I learned one sad statistic from it, that fewer than 1% of Californians hunt, and I re-learned an appreciation for Mr. Posewitz of the Orion Institute. He's a good guy.

On omnivory

If you are looking for a great, mindless Summer thriller to read before heading into Fall, don't pick up "The Omnivore's Dilemma". It's got mysteries, and gruesome killings, and racy scenes all right, but probably not in the sense you'd hope for a Summer book. However, I took it upon myself to read it, because it tackles the ethical implications of humans in relation to the environment in probably its most profound realm: what we eat.

Spending about a third of the book in industrial ag., organic ag., and hunting/gathering, Michael Pollan delves deeply into Americans' relationship with food, coming to many interesting and compelling conclusions about why and how we eat, and pointing a direction for eating better while maintaining a journalist's distance vis a vis moralizing, for the most part. In laying out his descriptions of current mainstream agricultural enterprises, he doesn't rely upon controversial chemical analyses to condemn them, but he does provide as bulletproof a condemnation as I've seen. He uses (gasp!) economics, and is so effective at explaining it that this book should be required reading in every economics class.
And I used to teach the stuff.

American (and world) agriculture is a vastly complicated, horribly designed system, with too many incentives for genetic hoarding, market manipulation, and artificial scarcity. Add to this mix political boundaries, and fully one fifth of the world goes hungry each night, though we grow enough for everybody. Pollan's book outlines just how we've settled into this industrialization of our food supply, including one of our most hideous creations, the industrial slaughterhouse. He focuses on the manipulation of corn as an industrial commodity rather than a food commodity, and how the largest ag. corporations have gotten past the "problem of the fixed stomach", that while people only eat a certain amount of calories per day and our population only increases about 1% per year, corporations typically need to show 5-8% annual growth in profits in order to stay in the market. Wanna know how it happens? Read the book.

But he spends equal portions of the book discussing organic agriculture, and the manipulation of this term as it applies to what he calls, "big organic". He compares this with locally grown foods such as one might find at farmers' markets or roadside stands, and spends a week at the Platonic version of this ideal, Polyface Farm. This place, owned by a conservative Christian, Bob Jones University graduate, "Mother Earth" magazine reader, shows a beautiful way to farm, working chickens, pigs, cattle, grass, and forest in an amazing orchestration. The farmer also constantly touches on a concept I have often considered in the ethical implications of places like slaughterhouses, and in my defense of hunting: The ability of an animal to get to be that animal. He talks about the pigness of a pig.

Last, Mr. Pollan tries hard to be a hunter/gatherer, and does a great job of it, in my opinion. He did get a bunch of help, including the ability to hunt for pigs on private property in Sonoma County (about which I am jealous), and hunting wild fungus, but the camaraderie, the relationship, the apprenticeship are equally important aspects of hunting. He toys with the philosophy behind vegetarianism, ultimately labeling animal rights a, "parochial, and urban..." ideology because of his getting to actually experience animals, and in killing them for his food. "It (animal rights) could only thrive in a world where people have lost contact with the natural world...", surely a stinging rebuke to people who consider themselves saviours of animalkind. Mr. Pollan seems to fall squarely into the land of people who abhor animal cruelty, and feel that killing and eating animals has helped them to more clearly comprehend the world's realities.

This is a wonderful book, well-organized and eye-opening. Michael Pollan delivers a fascinating expose' into what we put into our bodies every day, and how we interact with nature, every day.

If you've read it, or haven't and have questions, please comment!

More on ethics and hunting

There has been much controversy of late around hunting. Over at a wonderfully written blog, the Hog Blog (just google it), the author posted a defense of hunting as a response to some pretty nasty stuff written to him by an anti-hunter. His response is a good response, and the ensuing conversations are wonderful to read.

The conversation spins round the ethical question of hunting. Many, many arguments pro- and con- are made to the management of hunting, but most often these arguments spring from an ethical decision about the nature of hunting. People seem much more comfortable arguing the 'objective' criteria of management, probably as a result of our attempts at basing our society on science. Very often this is a good thing, but at times it too effectively hides the ethical component, the very impetus for our decisions. Our choosing science as the determining factor in management (game, land, or otherwise) is in itself an ethical decision. Aristotle hit on this point when, in his Nicomachaean Ethics, he determines that politics is the greatest good, as it determines the nature and direction of all other endeavours. It is important to bring to the fore, to discuss, argue, and come to understand the nature of our ethical decisions. In this light, here are some thoughts about hunting as an ethical activity:

Just as one cannot help but impact the environment, so one cannot help but kill. The nature of the physical world is such that things die, and that many living creatures gain or maintain life by killing other creatures. Our very bodies kill living beings every second of the day, and if they did not, we would die. So the question cannot be: should we kill? "Should" implies "can." Because we cannot help but kill, we must ask more thorough, more nuanced questions, because we understand killing as the finality that it is, and we understand that death and dying often brings sorrow, often goes hand-in-hand with suffering, and we are sympathetic creatures.

Before we single out hunting, consider all of the times and places in which we are responsible for killing: Driving is a direct action which kills countless animals, insects on the windshield; eating farm-raised meats kills animals for our sustenance; eating grains, fruits and vegetables kills countless plants, animals, insects, and fungi, through pest eradication (even organic farms need to keep pests down), harvesting and sowing methods, and the taking of millions of acres of habitat; electrical generation kills many thousands of birds each year, as do skyscrapers. So many ethical questions come from lists like this. Many of these questions are easy to answer, but difficult to carry out truthfully. Many others are difficult choices in and of themselves. Here are a few:

Should people allow other people to do their 'dirty work'? Should people move so quickly through the world that we become a danger to others? Should people use electricity at all?

As for hunting, for me it answers many important ethical questions: Should I take active responsibility for the consequences of my existence on this earth? Should I understand, truthfully, the nature of sacrifices for me? Should I incorporate myself more naturally into my local environment? Hunting is just one "yes" answer to this question. I cannot in good conscience allow others to kill for me, to kill secondarily, as a result of transportation or television, and not, at least occasionally, take up the responsibility for myself.

Hunting answers other questions as well, and hunting opens my eyes to the nature of, well, nature. It gives me a real, physical place in this world, a niche we have filled for untold millenia. We have relationships with others of the wild, as creatures in the wild. Our conscious minds offer us the opportunity to know this on a grand scale. Sometimes we succomb to our baser tendencies (to avoid pain, hunger, heat or cold or sadness), we suppress these lived experiences, and begin to believe that we are no longer a part of the world. Later, to justify our actions (the gentleman who writes the Hog blog stated that, "man is the only animal who rationalizes", a great quotation), many elevate this illusory distance to the level of ethics, and deride actions which have "impact" on the "resource."

But, when we lose understanding of our real, physical connections and relationships, we begin to cloud the nature of our ethics. Ethics are not mere words, but lived experiences.