Hunting

This is an extension to my previous Blog Post. One thing I noticed in many of my hunter friends is that they are loving, caring, family-oriented people. They do lot of charity, go to Church every Sunday, love their pets, and are good Samaritans. I didn't find them to be any different from non-hunters.

They call themselves conservationists and they call hunting "food harvesting". I see their point to an extent. For example, deer populate very rapidly as we killed their natural predators (such as bob cats) in large numbers historically. So, with their rate of growth, the deer would run out of food and could die of disease and starvation, if we don't take up the job of their ex-predators. In Texas, Texas Parks and Wild Life, collects exhaustive data on game population (I don't like calling these animals, "Game"). They issue licenses to kill (sorry, harvest!) only x number of deer every year (similarly, they have regulations on quails, turkeys, and other game hunting).

Fine, our forefathers disturbed the ecological balance and we are trying to restore it. But why so much excitement on making the kill? I saw some TV clips where sons (~12-yr olds) shoot deer and their dads cry with tears of joy on the kill. BTW, there is a hunting channel on TV that shows things like tracking, masking human scent, shooting, rifle reviews etc. 24/7! As a stark contrast to this, I remember the refinement a Bushman displays by apologizing his prey prior to shooting it with an arrow in the movie The Gods Must be Crazy (hope this custom was/is true).

The only explanation I can think of for this erratic behavior in otherwise kind human beings is, we all get desensitized on different things. For examples, in India, we eat food without any guilt consciousness in rail stations and hotels knowing (sometimes seeing) fully well that there are starving kids within like 100-ft radius. Similarly, in India, we see trash on roads and we don't bother to pick it up. Bribery is no big deal for us. One of my friends was steaming mad at Mumbai Customs folks once because they asked for a lot more bribe than he was prepared to pay! I think the most of us are educated beyond our intelligence.

I was chatting with Kumar (childhood buddy and currently a student at Insead) about bull-fighting in Spain a couple of weeks ago. He too agrees that lots of otherwise very refined Spaniards are desensitized to this brutal sport. Similarly, vegetarians like me don't know if we are hurting plants for our survival, and we don't want to know - it could turn out to be an inconvenient truth! So, in conclusion, I guess I should refrain from criticizing the hunters too much.