by Charles Whitwam
Throughout history humans have needed food to survive(the obvious). Not everyone was a hunter, not everyone was a gatherer, not everyone was a tool maker. But the hunters brought back the protein, the warmth from furs, the bones for tools. You can see glimpses of proud hunters painted on cave walls, or through decorations celebrating the success of a hunt.
Today, hunting is a bit different, but not as much as some may claim. Do we still need to food to survive? Yes. But we can go to a grocery store to get our food. We can go to a farmers market, we can grow our own food. With billions of humans now on the earth, it’s necessary to have these luxuries. However, whether vegan, vegetarian, or meat eater, something still needs to die. Tilling the ground, exchanging habitat for bean fields for example, all have their positive and possibly negative consequences. But the main focus here is something needs to die.
So are we hunting for survival? I’d say yes. We need food to survive and for those who choose to source their food from the wild (which I can only see as the mountain top of food sources, being that it’s wild); I’d submit that it’s the ultimate method to get food, which again, one way or the other we need for survival. And let’s not forget the adventure, the skills necessary, the camaraderie, or the connection with the earth, nature and the cycle of life that comes with being a hunter. It’s an intrinsic human value.
Vegan – something dies.
Vegetarian – something dies.
Meat eater – something dies.
Hunter – if successful, something dies.
Taking away the experience of hunting is an attack on being human. An attack on a means to food that should be celebrated as the highest form of sourcing food. An attack on wildlife management that only humans can uphold and implement through our species unique intellect that others species simply do not have. It’s an attack on getting in touch with our positive human roots in it’s purest form.
This art piece by @banksy inspired my thoughts on this and the overall anti-hunting movement. What do you think of when you see this? I’d like to hear your thoughts. Comment here or below
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Very well stated, and something I’ve been saying on my YouTube channel all along. The activist crowd gets wound up over the possibility of any animal potentially being eradicated from the ecosystem because of the impact it would have on that environment. Well, what do they think would happen if we were to remove ourselves? We play an active part in the natural balance as well, and hunting is a big part of that. I’ve had conversations in which people tell me that people literally have no place in nature anymore. They fancy a world in which we keep to our manmade little boxes and concrete jungles. I have a channel dedicated to outdoors stories, mainly accounts of man vs nature and animal attacks. It never fails the majority of my comments are from people that state the human “invaded” the animal’s territory and got what they deserved 😳 I constantly make the argument that the victim did not “invade” anything. We share the landscape. It’s our territory as well, and always has been. If you go to the jungles of India, you find tigers. If you go to the shores of Alaska you find brown bears. The mountains of the west, cougars. But these animals have a range that they inhabit and don’t typically stray from it. Humans can be found in every single environment on every continent across the world. From the most arid desert to the coldest most barren tundra. And the people that live there have adapted to survive in those conditions perfectly. We’re the most adaptable species on the planet. We don’t have any one place that we belong, much less a confined box. This is by design, and it makes us possibly the most important being there is of any ecosystem. The general consensus seems to be that our way of thinking is antiquated and destructive to the natural world, but it seems to me the folks who subscribe to that ideology are in fact the only ones making themselves obsolete. I’m afraid one day, they’ll learn the hard way.
I ve been talking about the people viewing nature and humans as separate for a long time . id love to discuss this sometime with you
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