Ecological Intelligence (24 page)

I
n conclusion, what, if anything, does the correspondence between humans and animals mean to us? Lopez answers this question, albeit cryptically: “If you are trying to fathom wolves,” he says, “ I think it can mean almost everything.” He could have been referring equally to elephants, leopards, or hyenas. To understand this correspondence will be a huge step toward rediscovering ourselves in Nature and to seeing the world, at last, as a mirror. We will come face-to-face with ourselves. It will certainly bring us face-to-face with one of the most emotive issues of the new millennium—the ethics of recreational and trophy hunting of wild animals.

Rainer Maria Rilke

9

THE KEEPING OF THE ZOO

A
S A YOUNG BOY GROWING UP IN PRESENT-DAY ZAMBIA, I LIVED IN A neighborhood where it was not uncommon for people to display kudu horns or elephant tusks in their homes. My uncle kept a lion skin, with its snarling head attached, spread out on the floor of his veranda. He didn’t shoot the animal, but he was nevertheless honored to accept the trophy as a gift from a professional hunter. No one thought anything of it, except that my uncle, years later, removed it from its position of display. Somehow, it was no longer appropriate, he said. It was about this time, prior to entering medical school, that I spent a short period as a farm manager in Zimbabwe. The owner of the farm was a man who loved hunting. Suspended on the walls of the family room in his home were the heads of at least three of the Big Five. Other heads included that of a spotted hyena as well as a variety of antelope. Today, that same farm is a wild animal sanctuary where tourists can walk among elephants, rhino, and the kin of those antelope that adorned the walls of the family room. Today, that man is no longer a hunter.

What makes a professional or recreational hunter suddenly lower his gun, no longer able to pull the trigger on the animal in his sights? What causes the sudden wave of tiredness that makes him say, “That’s enough,” turning his attention instead to taking photographs of the animals and to protecting them? Has the hunter gone soft, or has he become strong? Perhaps hunters simply get tired of their way of life, the novelty wears off, the animal-human contest becomes hollow, or they ultimately prefer to see the animal alive. Wild animals know when they are being hunted and the hunters know it. On the other hand, could there be a more complex reason for why some hunters put away their guns. Was it something about the creature in their sights? Was it the sheer elegance of the animal or perhaps the look in its eye? Was there a deep, unarticulated realization that it is not the way of Nature to kill anything for amusement?

These are debatable reasons for laying down a weapon, but there is one more, a less obvious reason, that I would like to propose. My proposal is in defense of what I would like to call the “authentic” hunters of the world. From the bushmen to the likes of early-twentieth-century hunter Frederick Courtney Selous, after whom the Selous National Park in Tanzania is named, these are the hunters who know and understand the behavior of every animal they hunt—from lizards to lions. The arrows or bullets they use are associated with the self-preserving hormone adrenaline. These hunters are not dependent on trackers, trucks, or geographical positioning systems. They know the tracks of the animals, their terrain, which ones to kill, which ones to leave alone, and, more importantly, they know that crucial invisible line, which once crossed is to betray an unwritten pact between the hunter and the hunted: that the contest be fair and
necessary
. Grounded in experience and a deep sense of respect for the animal, this awareness is the defining characteristic separating the authentic from the unauthentic hunter. These hunters are among the finest guides, naturalists, and wilderness educators I know, and they have good reason to regard themselves as genuine conservationists. Few of them remain, and as Map Ives, a former professional hunter turned professional environmentalist, ruefully observes, “they are a dying breed.” Could it be that these hunters have put down their guns because of an ethical imperative—they have become increasingly ill at ease, repelled by their association with, or worse still, their financial dependence on, unauthentic hunters, especially modern trophy hunters and the industry that supports them?

To me, the trophy hunter is the opposite of the hunter I have just described. Because they own guns, know how to shoot, and love being in the wild, they would like to be seen as authentic, but a love of the wild, and of guns, is not enough. With rare exceptions, even among professional hunters, they have little more than a superficial knowledge of how the animals, the birds, and the landscape are intertwined. Instead, their mission is clear—they have come to kill the animal of their choice, and they have paid good money to do so. What is more, there must be as little physical risk to themselves as possible. Supported by an industry that practically guarantees their safety and their kill, they know little, if anything, about that invisible line. When their bullets are fired, they are associated not so much with adrenaline as with testosterone, as I will show. Governed by time constraints and heavily reliant on trackers and sophisticated weaponry, for the unauthentic hunter the trophy, rather than the human-animal interaction, is paramount.

T
here is presently an unprecedented groundswell of public antipathy toward recreational and trophy hunting and it is coming from all corners—from animal rights movements and those who simply espouse animal welfare and protection to conservation biologists and those same hunters who have downed their guns. Hunting—and particularly trophy hunting—has become more of a moral and ethical issue than ever before. In spite of rebound protest from so-called ethical hunters, one of the reasons for the growing mistrust, in addition to certain highly questionable present-day hunting activities, is that Nature’s backlashes are inevitable and usually slow. In other words, much of the antipathy is inherited from the past. From Gordon Cumming in the nineteenth century to the well-documented escapades of Theodore Roosevelt, Ernest Hemingway, and many others, the image and ethics of the archetypal trophy hunter is not as admirable as we were sometimes led to imagine. What these men may have been admired for or been proud of in their time, we would be ashamed of today. Some would call it carnage. In their defense, and it is a poor one, it could be argued that they were less informed about the science of ecology and evolution than we are today. However, I believe, in the words of Oedipus: “They should have known.”

As we are witnessing now, it could be as much as the sixth or seventh generation later who are left to repair the damage of the fore-fathers. It is no wonder, therefore, that the nonhunting public today is mistrusting and critical of modern hunters. As for the hunters, it is not enough to change their vocabulary. For example, what was once the Botswana Professional Hunters Association is now skeptically known as the Botswana Wildlife Management Association. It is going to take time to believe in the new hunting terminology of ethical versus unethical hunting. Nobody can convincingly describe himself as authentic or ethical—he has to be known to be so, consistently. In other words, you cannot be your own judge. It may be to their credit that they are reconsidering the impact of their choice of lifestyle, but it is not going to help their cause when they refer to their critics as “vociferous minorities…sensationalists…self-styled, pseudo-environmentalists…bent on imposing their intolerant views on society,” as was written by Gerard R. Damm (
Africa Geographic
, February 2003). Whether it be the voice or pen of the hunter or that of their critics, contempt usually says more about the one who has it than the ones toward whom it is directed.

What follows, then, is not a demand but rather an appeal to those who continue to justify any form of hunting outside of food and food production to reconsider its history, its validity, and its ethic. It is an appeal to read the message of the thorns of the ziziphus—to remember where we have come from.

T
he roots of hunting have a remote origin in the psyche of the human animal, and as psychologist William James wrote in 1896, “it is just because human bloodthirstiness is such a primitive part of us that it is so hard to eradicate, especially where a fight or a hunt is promised as part of the fun.” But is the hunting of a wild animal in our blood? Is it an instinct? In defense of their sport, recreational and trophy hunters often urge us to believe that it is so; that it is linked to deep-seated predatory drives; that it confirms that human beings are the evolutionary champions of the animal food chain and that for a man to be a man, he must hunt.

I will argue that the roots of trophy hunting are in the evolution of culture rather than biology; that the hunting of wild animals is learned behavior and that as the context changes, what we have learned can not only become inappropriate, but maladaptive.

First of all, we must not confuse hunting with the instinct to protect and to provide. Secondly, we must learn the difference between an instinct and a habit. If the hunting of wild animals were an instinct, then surely it would have to be shared by everyone. Instead, because recreational and trophy hunting is largely a first-world practice, we would do well to reflect on the The Fund for Animals report of 2000, which records that in America, 14 million people hunt compared with 62 million who practice “less consumptive activities such as bird watching, hiking, and photography”—to say nothing of the growing number of people who oppose hunting altogether. If anything, it is the aesthetic, “less consumptive” activities that appear to be “instinctive.” To me, the latter group are evidence of what it means to unlearn or to redirect old attitudes. The gun has been replaced by a camera; telescopic sites by long-range lenses; the bullet by a film or memory chip, and the trophy remains alive.

L
ooking back on our early beginnings, it is likely that one factor more than any other was responsible for our progression from individualistic foragers to collective scavengers and then hunters—the quality of our diet. The protein derived from eating small mammals, reptiles, and the scavenging on carcasses was not enough. We needed more animal protein and it needed to be fresh. Bone marrow and organ meat became increasingly important as “brain food,” necessitating that we invent more sophisticated ways of obtaining it. As human animals we did not come blessed with the ability to outsmell, outsee, or outrun the animal meat we desperately needed. Instead, in conjunction with a remarkable increase in the size and neural circuitry of the hominid forebrain, our ancestors learned to outthink their prey. They formed hunting alliances, the equivalent of today’s goal-oriented economic and political alliances.

There is little doubt when viewing the stone tools of
Homo erectus
that he was a more sophisticated hunter than his smaller-brained predecessor,
Homo habilis
. But there was more to it than just tool making. The need for meat and marrow, combined with the neurological equipment to plan its acquisition, predisposed the species to a huge leap in the sophistication of animal tracking—checking, comparing, collating, interpreting, testing, and retesting—a process akin to modern scientific thinking. It almost goes without saying that to have been a successful hunter one had to be a successful tracker, but even that was not enough. Not only did the hunters have to learn to read the signatures in the sand, they had to learn the ways of the animals, their applied anatomy, physiology, and their behavior. They had to learn about the environment in which the animals moved and lived and about the seasons of water, wind, and fire. They had to learn how to put the elements to their advantage, and finally, because the emotions of fear and anxiety were always with them, they had to learn how to interpret and prioritize their own emotional responses to threat and danger.

In his book
Affective Neuroscience
, neurobiologist Jaak Panksepp writes the following:

As the humanoid brain developed enough cortex to think and to elaborate complex ideas, hunting became an acquired practice of the human lifestyle. Humans eventually developed the habit of stalking prey and eating meat as do some present-day male chimpanzees in the wild. It is likely however that this thread of character emerged independently of the intense and persistent carnivorous hunting urges of the cats and dogs of the ancient plains.

Shaped by the environment, by necessity, and aided by an intelligence that made it workable, hunting became an adapted form of what neurobiologists refer to as seeking behavior—in this case, the seeking of food taking priority over the seeking of companionship, attachment, and approval.

In summary, the seeking of food is one thing, how it is achieved is another. We had to learn how to hunt and it did not only apply to the human animal. An example of what I mean can be seen in the food-seeking behavior of baboons and otters. Try raising a baboon and an otter in captivity and then, after three years, releasing them into the wild. Within an hour, we could expect the otter to have caught a fish. Instinct. The baboon, on the other hand, will not have a clue about what or what not to eat. It would have to learn the hard way that a scorpion (a wild delicacy), for instance, has to be detailed before eating it.

Hunting, as essential as it has been to human survival, has to be understood as an important part of the
learning
curve of human culture. And yet, precisely because of its cultural significance, there are reasons other than the learned skills of acquiring food and skins for blankets and clothing why hunting continues to hold its appeal.

Historically, for communities like the Kalahari bushmen, the many hunting tribes of Africa, the Nunamuit people of Alaska, and the traditional Native Americans, hunting was never simply an act of throwing a spear, pulling the bowstring, or aiming a gun. It was also central to healing rituals and to the initiatory rites of passage of young adolescents into manhood and womanhood. Hunting, then, was also a symbolic act. To face and to kill a wild animal was about proving oneself in one’s community, that a young man, for instance, could face his fears and that he could provide food, skins, and ornaments for his people. The trophy was the evidence of a man’s skill, courage, and prowess. To succeed was to gain wide-ranging approval and privileges from one’s peers and from one’s community. In many instances, hunting in this form was part of a mate-selection ritual. Today there are few areas in the world where such traditional lifestyles prevail. However, the need to prove oneself remains. It is part of our nature, and while there are other ways of proving oneself, approval, as we shall see, is central to the psychological dynamics of trophy hunting.