Killing Tradition Inside Hunting and Animal Rights Controversies by Simon J. Bronner
Kentucky, 320 pp., $40
Controversies over hunting are not new. The legend of Actaeon and Diana testifies to the sense of sacrilege aroused when the chase leads people into places where no mortal footstep should fall. Plato devotes a section of The Laws to defending hunting with hounds against those who saw it as a threat to sacred places. And from time immemorial there have been rules and conventions determining who can and who cannot hunt.
In ancient Persia, as in medieval Europe, hunting was a privilege of the king and his immediate entourage, protected by laws imposing severe penalties on those found guilty of poaching. In France hunting with hounds remained a sport of the aristocracy right through to the 18th century, since it involved ownership of the land and the habit of galloping across it. Resentment at this was sufficiently strong that the right to hunt in the royal forests was the first right granted to the new body of citizens at the French Revolution--a symbol of their release from class oppression.
In England the resentment was softened by a long tradition of social mobility. The expansion of the class of yeoman farmers meant that the middle classes were included in the hunt, with the small-holders and farm laborers eventually joining also. This inclusiveness was not an expression of egalitarian principles. It arose from the need to ensure the cooperation of those whose land and crops were threatened by the stampeding horde.
Whatever the cause, however, by the time of Robert Surtees's celebrated novels of fox-hunting life in the mid-19th century, hunting with hounds had become, in England, a social melting point in which incomers from the towns--lawyers, tradesmen, civil servants--rode side-by-side with farmers, squires, and lords, in pursuit of "an Englishman's peculiar privilege," as a contemporary writer put it.
Surtees's master of foxhounds, John Jorrocks, is a Cockney grocer, who sells tea to the squirearchy as he charges beside them over hedge and ditch. Trollope, perhaps the greatest recorder of the fox hunt, took up the sport when working for the Post Office, while two other delightful chroniclers--Somerville and Ross--were women, for whom hunting was not just a recreation, but an integral part of daily life in the countryside.
So it is in rural England today. But resentment has reared its ugly head nevertheless. The sight of whole communities prepared to dress up and scramble across the neighborhood in the wake of foxhounds, some on horseback, others on foot or bicycle, some in automobiles or ATVs, is so offensive to urban socialists--for whom the countryside should be a scene of "class struggle" and certainly not one of cheerful solidarity around a shared and sociable sport--that it is hardly surprising that the Labour party has made the banning of fox hunting its main legislative priority.
Indeed, for the last ten years, the party has had no other consistent policy, devoting (according to Killing Tradition) 700 hours of parliamentary time to debating the matter--compared with 18 hours allotted to the question whether to go to war in Iraq, and no hours at all to the question whether to ratify the Lisbon Treaty, which relinquishes vast areas of national sovereignty to the unelected bureaucrats of the European Union.
There are two reasons why it is difficult for Americans to understand this particular debate. First, "hunting" does not, in America, mean the noble sport of hunting with hounds but the activity known in Britain as "shooting," and is widely frowned upon, especially when the quarry is an animal such as a fox or a deer that could be properly hunted in the traditional way. Second, for that very reason, hunting has not had, in America, quite the connotations of class privilege and land ownership that it has for urban people in Britain, and has not been seen as a standing offense against the ordinary citizen and his rights--including his right to forbid pleasures enjoyed by the wrong sort of person.
As everybody knows, this right to forbid has finally been recognized by the British Parliament, and hunting with hounds is now practiced--officially at least--only as a form of "trail hunting," in which hounds follow a scent but in which the intention is neither to kill nor to pursue a quarry but to provide sport for the followers. Of course, it is not always possible to prevent hounds from following a real scent, with a live creature at the end of it. But so far, at least, members of the parliamentary Labour party, prey to a residual doubt as to whether a dog could be a fully incorporated member of the English upper class, have not sought to forbid this.
On the other hand, the philosophy of animal rights--to which the Labour party subscribes, having been persuaded by the powerful arguments, which included a million-pound donation advanced by the Political Animal Lobby--ought to imply that animals have duties, too. Maybe this controversy will not be finally brought to an end, therefore, until dog jails and horse jails have sprung up across the English countryside, with foxes granted the right to bring actions for damages against those who have disturbed their tranquility.
Simon Bronner is a professor of American Studies and Folklore, and looks at the growing conflict between hunters and the defenders of animal rights in terms of the folk culture of hunting. His book is not a lively read, being a survey of controversies which, whatever their social and political importance, are largely devoid of intellectual interest. He is more interested in the sexual symbolism of hunting than in its deep social origins. And his argument is flawed by his failure to notice that hunting with hounds is an entirely different activity from shooting.
Of course, the same kind of person objects to both sports: But that kind of person also objects to fishing, horse racing, meat eating, and zoos. This should not lead us to overlook what is (from the anthropological point of view) the fundamental difference, which is that, while shooting is about killing animals, hunting with hounds is about joining them. It has far more in common with the American rodeo than with the thing that Americans call "hunting." Indeed, like the rodeo, it belongs to the ancient forms of totemic religion that were implanted in us by our hunter-gatherer ordeals, and which express a love of animals far deeper than anything revealed in the sugar-coated tear drops of PETA.
Bronner takes time off from the American controversies--for instance, over the Labor Day pigeon shoot in Hegins, Pennsylvania--to consider the U.K. Hunting Act of 2004. But he focuses on the marginal sport of hare-coursing, and touches only glancingly on the two most important targets of that malicious legislation: deer hunting and fox hunting, both of which involve the arduous pursuit of quarry in ways that pose as great a risk to the pursuer as to the pursued. And although, as his title rightly implies, the controversy is as much about tradition as about killing, I do not think that Bronner gets to the heart of it.
The conflict between hunter and settler is ancient, and underlies the first murder: Cain's offering of fruit having failed to please the Lord, while the savory odor of Abel's quarry, duly offered on the altar, had been accepted with relish. This story says something important about the deeply interred guilt of the human species. At some point humanity shifted from the hunter-gatherer life, in which man is one species among many, competing for territory, confronting danger, and acting always as a tribe or a group in the search for nourishment, to the life of settlement, in which man takes charge of the earth and its fruits.
This shift involved a defiance of the created order as great, in its way, as that original theft of fruit from the tree of knowledge. By settling and farming, man begins to turn nature in his own direction, to elevate self and family over tribe and comrades, to drive competing species from their habitats, and to remake the landscape in his own image. In short, he sets out on that long journey towards the suburbs, the disastrous ecological consequences of which are only now fully apparent.
Looking back on it, the Lord was surely right to favor Abel's offering. And Cain's crime is one that we all need to atone for. That is how I see hunting with hounds: as atonement for our settled ways, and as a collective activity which briefly returns us to the hunter-gatherer condition, so as to enjoy tribal and communal relations with our fellow humans, and species-ties with horse, hound, and quarry. This activity sets us aright with the animal kingdom, and enables us to rejoice in life and death as gifts that we share with other species.
Seeing it in that way--and what is the point of being a professor of folklore if you don't take the long-term anthropological perspective?--Bronner ought to have recognized the potentially tragic nature of what is now happening, in both Europe and America. We are witnessing the final conflict between the suburbs and the countryside. Organizations like PETA are composed largely of people for whom animals are pets, things to be caressed and fawned over, creatures deprived of any independent reality and maintained in hothouse conditions as proof of their owners' cost-free moral virtues.
In Britain the RSPCA, one of the principal agitators behind the Hunting Act, raises vast amounts of money from cat owners and emphasizes kindness to cats in all its propaganda. That these vile killers are responsible in Britain for 180 million cruel deaths annually, that they have cleared the landscape of songbirds and many protected species, that they are now breeding in the wild in ways that threaten the ecological balance--all such facts are irrelevant in the eyes of the activists.
The purpose of cats is to fawn on the people who fawn on them; they are an immovable part of suburban sentimentality, and anything similarly endowed with bright eyes, four legs, and fur will be the beneficiary of the same corrupt emotions that are lavished on them. Foxes and hares, deer and badgers--all gain instant support from people who know only their appearance, and never have to confront their reality.
In the days before the automobile it was possible for rural people to avoid the censors, to re-create some version of the natural relation between man and animal, to devote themselves to preserving the habitats and meeting the needs of quarry species, and to reap their reward on their festive days of hunting. The countryside is now patroled by suburban vigilantes, who are outraged by activities that have "no place in a civilized society," as we were told by our Labour party nannies in 2004.
Fortunately, the American country- side is vast, and the price of gas is sure to increase. However, even if this protects the more isolated and small-scale forms of hunting, it does not protect the great social events, such as the Hegins pigeon shoot. As we have seen in Britain, it is not merely the sight of people killing animals that disturbs the vigilantes. They are animated also by puritanism, which H.L. Mencken accurately defined as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, might be happy."
Far more troubling than the sight of pigeons fluttering to the ground in their death throes is the spectacle of people enjoying themselves by shooting them. That was the kind of sentiment that led to the U.K. Hunting Act. And it will lead to similar legislation here, if Americans do not wake up now to what is at stake: not just the rights and freedoms of rural residents, but the very identity of the countryside, as a place where people live in equilibrium with other species, and relinquish the desire to tame them.
Roger Scruton is the author of the forthcoming Beauty (Oxford).