Hunting Think Tank Report

16-18 January 2009
Max McGraw Wildlife Center, Dundee, IL
Sponsored by: Orion-The Hunter's Institute, Max McGraw Wildlife Foundation and Colorado State University
Prepared by Eric Nuse

History

The idea to hold this event was conceived at the North American Wildlife Conference held in Arizona in 2007. In a series of conversations with John Organ, Del Benson, Ron Regan and Jim Posewitz it became clear that we all need time to think, discuss and ponder some of the big issues affecting conservation and hunting that our work time does not allow. Several issues of mutual interest emerged:

• Social support for recruiting and retaining hunters
• Looking deeply into the value of hunting
• Defining hunting in an honest and positive way

Thanks to Del Benson and Charlie Potter for providing the use of the wonderful facility at the Max McGraw Wildlife Foundation in Dundee, IL.

Participants in the hunting group included:

Jim Posewitz, Executive Director of Orion-the Hunter's Institute
Josh Winchell, Public Relations, USFWS
John Edwards, Professor, University of West Virginia
Scott Craven, Professor, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Thomas Baumeister, Director of Education, Montana Parks, Wildlife and Fish
Jim Tantillo, Professor, Cornell University
Eric C Nuse, President, Orion-The Hunter's Institute
Kerry Luft, Associate Managing Editor, Chicago Tribune (Saturday morning only)

Preliminary Goals of the Think Tank:

1. Cut through the complexity and come up with a clear statement on what hunting is and why it is relevant and important
2. Develop a definition of hunting at some level that we can all agree on
3. Articulate the thinking behind this definition
4. Find a range of practices that are acceptable and justifiable
5. Identify uniform terms for teaching purposes and communicating with the public
6. Uncover words and phrases which effectively convey to the public what we mean by hunting and which clearly express why we hunt
7. Deepen support for hunting by the public
8. Assist in closing the gap revealed in polls between public support for hunting and support for hunters
9. Improve recruitment of hunters by identifying ways to appeal to their higher selves rather than the lowest denominator (Focus is on quality rather than quantity)

If all else fails-The Think Tank is time to actively listen, discuss, disagree openly and think. These activities are a rarity for all of us and may be worthy goals in and of themselves.

Questions we grappled with:

1. At the core - why do I hunt?
2. What is hunting - what is not hunting?
3. Why is hunting important to me and to humans in general throughout history?
4. Do you need the intent and possibility to kill in order to hunt?
5. If so, is hunting important enough to justify the kill?
6. What is the goal of hunting?
7. Is hunting a sport? If so, is it also something more than a sport?
8. Can we define hunting, or is it an open concept with underlying values but multiple faces?
9. Should we add a modifier to hunting such as; sport hunting, modern hunting…?
10. How should hunters be referred to? E.g. responsible hunters, certified hunters, sport hunters…

People in the room

To give some background on the participants and our differing experience we spent some time getting to know each other. Here is what we found:

• We're all hunters and we identify ourselves as hunters
• Yet we hunt differently, in different environments and in some ways we are different
• Intellectual and purist hunter from the West
• Urban hunter who came to hunting later in life and who hunts infrequently
• Prof who teaches college students about hunting including taking them to a pheasant shooting preserve
• Purist New England grouse hunter who writes on the morality of hunting, but hunts deer for meat
• Public land hunter who stresses hunter-conservation connection and the history of the successful restoration of game in North America
• Prof. of wildlife management who prepares conservation leaders for tomorrow
• Workaholic hunter from northern New England who uses the excuse of bringing home meat to justify the time and enjoyment he gets while hunting

Our experience begs the question of whether our differences are so great that they warrant some differentiation. Or is there sufficient overlap so we can continue to call ourselves hunters belonging to the same lineage and having a common history, motivation, and values.

Process

We started with an exercise where one person took on the persona of a non-hunter whom they know well. The other person played themselves and started a conversation such as you would with a seatmate on an airplane. The hunter first interviewed the non-hunter to find out about them and their lives. Then the non-hunter questioned the hunter about hunting and why they hunt.

We then listed from the hunter's point of view what was difficult, what did they grapple with, what were the hard to explain parts? All noted as a hard spot the killing part; especially so when questioned about hunting practices that kill without eating the animal. Several listed talking about negative aspects of hunting as portrayed on TV hunting shows. Also named was putting in words why they started to hunt.

Then we looked at the conversation from the role-playing non-hunter's viewpoint- What resonated with them? What worked to help them understand? The following points stood out:

• When he struggled to explain - the tone changed and it became very personal and the passion came through. The answer was not rehearsed and came across as honest and compelling.
• Describing game as a locavore food, and explaining how the game was specially prepared and served for special occasions with friends and family. This demonstrated respect for the animal to me.
• When he demonstrated his knowledge of the animals and the environment. Also the fact that he was willing to take the time to teach me.
• When the emotion of the hunt came through. His story of recording his heart rate during a hunt and matching seeing game with an off the chart spike. This graphically showed how excited he got.
• His story of how hunting created a strong bond with his son and that continues today with annual hunts even after 20 years and 1,000 miles of separation.

John Edwards note - Yes, this was an interesting exercise, but we must remember that none of us are "non hunters" so this information is based on our experience and perceptions.

Eric Nuse - It would be interesting to this exercise with a variety of non-hunters in a focus group setting and document the results.

A follow-up discussion of these comments revealed that personal stories are very effective, letting the passion, emotion and feelings come through, relating hunting to family bonding and equating hunting to gardening, local meat and self-sufficiency. Respect for the animal in using it and caring for where it lives also made sense to the non-hunters. When the hunter is knowledgeable about the environment, is willing to share, and then related hunting to things non-hunters do and care about also was effective. Above all being honest and real makes you credible.

What didn't work in explaining hunting was talking about hunter-generated money that pays for conservation, defending poor hunter behavior and going on the defensive. Pat answers didn't work and trophy hunting had very negative connotations.

(It was interesting to note that while we grappled with this topic the SHOT show was going on with its emphasis on technology and gadgets that makes hunting easier and less challenging).

Why are our experiences and this discussion relevant?

The future of hunting is uncertain with hunter numbers on the decline and a big drop off coming as the baby boomers become too old to actively hunt. How we define ourselves will have an impact on this future. If the threshold of what is allowed, either legally or ethically, is set too low, people could decide not to try hunting because they don't want to associate with folks they perceive to be behaving poorly. To offset this we could take the "elitist, yet democratically available notion" that narrowly defines hunting and makes all other practices illegal.

On the other hand, if the bar is set too high some people will be excluded and never get started. Taking an inclusive approach allows a diversity of philosophies, motivations, and behaviors and follows the Jeffersonian notion of live and let live.

What are the pros and cons of using a broad or narrow definition of hunting?

On the pro side, the higher numbers of hunters translates into financial and political support for agencies and conservation. However, this user-pays model is not viable now and will be less viable in the future, as more non-traditional wildlife users demand more services from Fish and Wildlife agencies.

More hunters also help with hunter recruitment (it takes a hunter to make a hunter has been the mantra).

On the con side, the attractiveness of hunting diminishes as it moves towards the lowest denominator. Non-hunters' support for hunting in the context of hunter conduct, fair chase, utilization, etc. could and probably will erode if the definition is too inclusive.

Eric Nuse - Is sport an adequate term to explain hunting? It doesn't seem to go quite far enough to justify the death of the animal. Should we coin a new word or find a better one to represent the context of what hunting represents? Words that come to mind are: the sacred sport or beyond sport, spirit of sport…

Should we come up with an adjective to describe hunting such as: responsible hunting, modern hunting, certified hunter…Or would it be better (although harder) to elevate the term hunting to where we feel it should be and debunk the negatives now attached to it by some?

What is recreational hunting: a conceptual model

Dr. Tantillo presented his research on hunting as a sport. Starting with play (unstructured or free, done for pure enjoyment) to games (rules, specific setting, goals, can be competitive, but done for its own sake) to sport (physical, written and unwritten rules, takes effort, competitive, done for the enjoyment).

Logically speaking, hunting as a voluntary leisure activity (play) has structure and rules that make it structured play (game) and a physical aspect that make it a physical game (sport).  These relations are logically entwined whether we like the term 'sport' or not.

Why this matters is because the structure and rules of the game give rise to our concepts and beliefs about fair play and fair chase. Again, this is true whether we like the term 'sport' or not.

Some sports are a variation referred to as athletics. Here the goal is to get the prize, to beat the competition and win. The goal of sports like hunting is in the enjoyment, or recreation of the activity itself -getting the deer is icing on the cake. The possibility of the kill is necessary but accomplishing it is not, because the joy is in the striving or the hunt.

J.W. Keating addresses this in his1964 article in the journal Ethics, "Sportsmanship as a Moral Category," where he writes about the "purpose" of sport:  The primary purpose of sport is not to win the match, to catch the fish or kill the animal, but to derive pleasure from the attempt to do so and to afford pleasure to one's fellow participants in the process.

Tantillo thinks           this gets the issue exactly right, and offers one reason why food-based justifications fail: they make hunting ALL about the results, meaning, all about the killing.  A hunt is not successful unless it yields meat. The pleasure of the hunt is the hunt itself.

Understanding hunting as a sport helps to cut through the complexity and diversity of hunting practices. Hunting as a sport and the concept of fair play or fair chase in hunting have infinite variety; thus, the notion that hunting is an open concept. It can be defined at the value level in the context of sport, but definitions seem to fall apart at the position or specific practice level.

This understanding could help hunters think about what they do, align their behavior with their reasons for hunting and assist in communicating this clearly to others. If we are successful, hunters will not have to sell the value of hunting. We will have to demonstrate that it is part of our sacred world and as important to our lives as religion and other types of recreation are to all people.

The importance of placing hunting right in the middle of the play universe, delays the tricky question (justifying death of animal) for later.

Additional Comments

Jim Posewitz summed it up: "Play>recreation>re-creation>eating the hunted validates the hunter and the hunted. "The Hunt" is born as play amid the pure joy of nature; the game becomes recreation to nature as re-creation. Through the kill and utilization, the hunted and hunter becomes one.  When the hunted's renewal precedes all else, the circle closes and the game, sealed in blood, becomes sacred. They become one. Hunters validate the relationship when they assure the environment is suitable for the hunter and the hunted.

John Edwards - Rather than spend our energy defending the term sport hunting -that we already know many hunters and non-hunters find distasteful- maybe a better approach is to define what hunting is in the context of sport and pleasure without using the modifier.

Jim Tantillo - The importance of keeping the modifier 'sport' in mind is that logically this concept provides the only possible explanation of where ideas of "fair chase" come from, i.e. from ideals of "fair play" and sportsmanship--and explains why these ideals are important for thinking about recreational hunting.  Whereas law obligates us to maintain the bare minimum standards of codified acceptable behavior, sportsmanship holds us to higher, uncodified standards of behavior, i.e. to standards of fair chase.

And we *voluntarily* elect to follow these higher standards, as opposed to being obligated (legally or otherwise) to follow them.

Other benefits of hunting; and confusing these benefits with why we hunt

If you want to play, you need a playground. Our playground is the environment and all the necessities of life, which are necessary for our lives and the lives of all the animals including those we don't hunt. Creating this playground takes money, knowledge and skill. All of which hunters have supplied, thus the success of the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation. But all of these good things are not why we hunt.

When we try to justify hunting on these results, it comes off as self-serving and is easily countered. For example, a common justification for hunting is controlling populations. This falls apart when you look at a hunted species such as woodcock. There is no overpopulation of woodcock, yet we hunt them (and many other species like them). Does that mean they should not be hunted? Even species that need population control can be controlled by many other means such as sharp shooters, elimination of critical habitat or the introduction of predators.

Sacred vs. Profane

The profane world is the world of work and subsistence. You do work because you must in order to live. The sacred world gives you the reason to live beyond the basics of reproduction and survival. Play/games/sport are in the sacred sphere and are critical for man's psychological and spiritual well-being.

History shows that the Greeks hunted rabbits for fun. Sport hunting has a far longer history than the 100 year span that most people think.

(The rest of this section was added by Jim Tantillo)

The connection of sport to religion is made most explicitly in the literature pertaining to the philosophy of sport, for example in Charles Prebish's anthology, Religion and Sport: The Meeting of Sacred and Profane.

But before we ask how sport can be seen as religious, we need first to see more fundamentally how play and leisure are sacred to humans.

At the risk of over generalizing, the sociology of religion typically characterizes our daily work or our routine daily toil as the realm of the ordinary, i.e., as the realm of the profane; whereas play, leisure, festivity, and celebration are the realm of the sacred.

In Leisure as the Basis of Culture, Josef Pieper writes, "Leisure is only possible when a man is at one with himself, when he acquiesces to his own being. . . . Leisure, it must be clearly understood, is a mental and spiritual attitude."

This insight highlights the importance of meaningful leisure activities such as hunting for human happiness.  In this sense leisure (as is play) is generally seen in contrast to work.  Pieper comments:

"Compared with the exclusive ideal of work as toil, leisure appears . . . in its character as an attitude of contemplative 'celebration,' a word that, properly understood, goes to the very heart of what we mean by leisure."

As regards hunting, one might argue that it is the experience of authentic leisure in hunting that is the spiritual experience, not necessarily the experience of hunting per se. Or stated another way, it is the contemplative aspect of hunting that we enjoy most when hunting,.

Here again we see the importance of interpreting hunting fundamentally as a form of play, i.e., as first and foremost a form of recreational activity. As Huizinga writes in Homo Ludens:

"PLAY. It is an activity that proceeds within certain limits of time and space, in a visible order, according to rules freely accepted, and outside the sphere of necessity or material utility. The play-mood is one of rapture and enthusiasm, and is sacred or festive in accordance with the occasion. A feeling of exaltation and tension accompanies the action."

Essayist Diane Ackerman builds upon Huizinga's themes in her book, Deep Play, and she emphasizes both the religious aspects of play but also echoes Pieper's view that leisure is a spiritual attitude:

"Deep play is the ecstatic form of play. In its thrall, all the play elements are visible, but they're taken to intense and transcendent heights. Thus, deep play should really be classified by mood, not activity. It testifies to how something happens, not what happens. Games don't guarantee deep play, but some activities are prone to it: art, religion, risk-taking, and some sports-especially those that take place in relatively remote, silent, and floaty environments, such as scuba diving, parachuting, hang gliding, mountain climbing.

"Deep play always involves the sacred and holy, sometimes hidden in the most unlikely or humble places-amid towering shelves of rock in Nepal; crouched over print in a dimly lit room; slipping on AstroTurf; wearing a coconut-shell mask. We spend our lives in pursuit of moments that will allow these altered states to happen. The Australian Aborigines search for it on wilderness treks called walkabouts, during which young men of the tribe go alone into the dangerous outback to gain strength and wisdom. Buddhist lamas and Hindu sadhus travel, nearly naked, to pray atop glacial mountains in Tibet. People from many cultures have gone on soul journeys into the wilderness, where risk, hunger, pain, exhaustion, and sometimes self-torture might inspire visions. Young Masai men set off on a pilgrimage to Mount Kilimanjaro, the sacred center of their world, as part of the initiation rite known as Moranism. Native Americans have often used ritualized running to scale mental heights. The Hopis stage many such races every year, featuring paint, costumes, fasts, and prayer. The Crow Indians run to exhaustion to persuade the gods that they deserve good luck. The Zuni run twenty to forty miles while kicking a sacred stick. The official purpose of these ordeals may be religious, but the physiological goal is to impel the initiate into a higher state of consciousness that kindles visions and insights, in a locale where survival may depend on a combination of ingenuity and nerve."

The literature on play, deep play, and the theology of play is vast.  I used "sacred" and "profane" at the McGraw think tank as a kind of shorthand for the entire subject. To me the concept of hunting as play, i.e. as deep play, again is what explains so much, from understanding the rules of fair chase as resulting from the structure of hunting as play to the experience of the spiritual felt by hunters when they truly lose themselves in the activity.

Harm vs. Offense

This concept can be summed up as follows: "Your freedom to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose." Swinging a fist may be offensive but it is tolerated up to the point of doing harm. The American form of democracy allows for offensive people to do what they want as long as they do no harm.
This question gets tricky when you try to look at hunting practices through the eyes of non-hunters and when you project into the future. How much political consideration should be included in our decision making on practices that may hurt the future of hunting?

Definition of Hunting

Sunday morning we came back to the definition of hunting. On Saturday, we were divided on whether we should try to draw a line in the sand - on this side was hunting; on that side was shooting or killing or something else. Was high-fence hunting doing us harm or was it offensive? (It was noted that reasons to oppose high fence operations-such as denial of wildlife as a public resource; thus the denial of several components of the North American Model, such as "public resource", "democracy of allocation" and allocation by law, among others-are the best arguments against captive shooting operations.)

How about preserve bird hunting such as is practiced on the grounds where we were meeting? Again, evaluation of the circumstances is important, in this case looking at it from topography or location. The McGraw Center is an island of opportunity set in a sea of concrete/suburbia 40 minutes from downtown Chicago. It is as good as could be done in this place and time. Whereas, a western wilderness of millions of acres of public lands is as good as could be done in that place and time- both the product of the conservation ethic of hunters.

Conversely, a high fence operation out on the vast open spaces of Texas represents a denial of the North American Model and a retreat to the fortress that is not necessary for any real conservation purpose.

Consensus began to emerge that most of these practices did not rise to the level of harm, from the hunter ethic view. Most of us felt that they and some other hunting methods did serve as an entry point for new hunters and opened the possibility for them to gain more skill, so they too could eventually enjoy a wilder and more challenging hunting experience in the future.

Edwards' comment - We started to consider the benefits of hunting and hunter numbers and explored the idea that if the results of the hunting practice are positive then the practice should be accepted and would constitute hunting. Much of this we wrestled with and I don't think that we really arrived at a consensus - several unresolved issues. Do we want to make these "open" ideas available to misinterpretation?

Framework for thinking through hunting ethics and esthetics/preferences

We decided it would be very helpful for agencies, rule-making boards and hunters to develop a framework to assist in working through what is acceptable hunting and what is not. This could be in the form of a series of questions, a decision tree or something else. If we do this well, such a framework could over time become the equivalent of the seven sisters of the North American model, and we could offer talks, workshops, and guidelines for asking these questions and making informed decisions. This process could also help locate areas of disagreement and help focus the debate where it will do the most good. Currently there is a lot of time is wasted on fighting over preferences (mistaken for ethics), which only divides hunters and distracts from the pressing issues.

Edwards - the key may be understanding your view and perception of the hunter whose bar is set lower than yours.