Modern hunters must link arms

openDemocracy has hosted a spirited dialogue recently about hunting, humankind and its relationship with nature. Roger Scruton has argued that current, highly ritualised forms of hunting intimately reconnect us with nature, allowing ‘primal’ urges to be acted out in a regulated, socialised manner. The result is to break down (albeit temporarily) the barriers of a class-bound society, by uniting a group of people from disparate backgrounds in a common cause – the chase and the conservation of the quarry.

Hugh Brody, by contrast, feels that these modern rituals were appropriated from earlier hunter–gatherer societies. Once agriculture made hunting unnecessary for survival, the wealthy classes ‘stole’ the freedom of the hunt and its access to the land from the majority of the society and made it their own form of recreation.

In response to both (but mainly Hugh Brody), Richard D. North leaps across the fence, charging that Brody over-romanticises hunter–gatherer cultures, puts his own politically-correct agendas (and that of anthropology as a discipline) first, and ignores the fact that many people in ‘primitive’ cultures actively want to move away from their ancestral lifestyle. North cites in evidence several examples from his own experience.

Making dialogue practical

As a foxhunter, journalist, and environmentalist – someone, moreover, who has worked fairly extensively with hunter–gathering peoples in the process of transition, the arguments of Scruton, Brody and North all seem to me to hit on certain truths. What puzzles me is that, with so much obvious common ground, their views should be presented as debate, rather than dialogue. To me, it’s not so much a question of who is the most right, but what can be done with these truths. Is there any point in trading insults (such as accusing Brody of practising ‘Anthropology Lite’)? Where does this get us?

Hugh Brody is right to say that modern, western hunting cultures have appropriated the ancestral freedom of the hunt. But it is also true that hunting, shooting and fishing have been re-democratised – that is, anyone can do it if they join the requisite club, whose prices are in most cases not prohibitive. Roger Scruton alludes to this trend as representing a move back towards the hunter–gatherer ethos, where everyone in principle has equal access to the land and its resources.

And if, as Richard North correctly points out, many people in hunter–gatherer or otherwise ‘primitive’ cultures want modern comforts and consumer goods, then there are at least an equal number of those who don’t, and want the right to decide the method or pace of these changes. The Bushmen are a classic case of a culture where some people want to live traditionally and others want to change, but almost all feel that control over their land and resources (something that western hunting cultures have) is key, because otherwise change will overwhelm them in an aggressive, destructive manner.

If all this knowledge is real, what to do with it? Western hunting cultures have money, political clout and relative control over the land they ‘play’ on. Hunting cultures in the developing world do not. Why then, are we arguing about exactly what a modern or a traditional hunting culture consists of? Has the time not come to address the fact that both these cultures are under threat? And if there is inherent good in them – conservation, connection with nature, satisfaction in fellowship – then what can the hunting cultures with money and political clout do for the hunting cultures who do not have them?

Britain: the way forward

One way of approaching this question is across the territory of British foxhunting, one of the most vigorous of those modern hunting cultures, yet one under apparently continual threat of being legislated into history. Britain’s parliament is again debating whether or not to ban foxhunting. The Countryside Alliance and hostile Labour Members of Parliament have prepared their verbal artillery, and the hunting debate is again in the headlines alongside Iraq and royal scandal. We seem to have reached an impasse in which neither side, despite repeated attempts, seems able to neutralise the other. We need to change the narrative.

As a lifetime foxhunter, I share Roger Scruton’s love and concern for the sport, and obviously don’t want to see it banned. But I am also worried that a ban may come about in the long term if we are not prepared to look at possible changes in the way we hunt. The debate needs to be taken out of the moral sphere – precisely because hunting for sport is morally questionable, it is impossible to say categorically that it is right or wrong. Yet Hugh Brody’s point, that hunting needs to be considered in the wider context of how human society relates to nature, is also vital. In short, we need to find a middle line between the ideological extremes of either banning hunting or insisting that it should go on in its present form.

Freedom under licence?

There are many questions to ask about reform. Should we adopt a licensing system? Should we ban terrier work? Should we even kill at all? In America, where there are about as many hunts as in Britain, only one or two foxes are killed each year. Few if any American packs make any pretence of acting as predator control, and landowners – unlike their British counterparts – do not in general expect hunts to fulfil this role.

As Dennis Foster, the executive director of the Masters of Foxhounds Association of America (MFHA), states: ‘We need a new vocabulary for hunting. For example, does “accounting for a fox” have to mean killing it? Can’t it also mean putting it cleanly to ground?’ Or, as Lynn Lloyd, master and huntsman of the Red Rock Hunt in Reno, Nevada, asks: ‘Often when my hounds bay a coyote, we lift them off – it’s like “we won”, and then we let it go.’

Of course, as all American foxhunters know, hunting has been a virtually bloodless sport for generations, and each successive generation of foxhunters seems to take this compassionate ethic closer to heart. In over ten years of foxhunting in the USA, I can count on one hand the number of times I have seen a kill. Because of this, the animal rights groups have so far been slow to target our sport. This does not mean we should be complacent, but it does show a certain flexibility of mind that puts the sport first and tradition second – and that is how institutions survive.

Whatever changes and reforms we end up with (and for some perhaps irrational reason I don’t think it will come to an outright ban), many seem to agree that a licensing system would be a good thing. It’s a tricky one: because of the varied nature of hunting territories (most include some hill sheep farms, where local fox control may be necessary, and some lowland arable, where it may not be necessary at all), only the hunts themselves are in any real position to decide how best to implement a code of practice.

But it won’t happen that way – there will be blanket policies from Westminster (or Brussels) that may or may not work. And the British public, many of whom view foxhunters as reactionary toffs, are not going to trust the hunts to implement any change unless under direct governmental pressure. However, many hunting folk themselves express the worry that licensing hunts could be a slippery slope. Licenses, once given, can be taken away.

The problem, in media and public opinion terms, is that hunters are seen as villains in need of some kind of policing. Hunters, shooters and fishers – even if they are (in botanist David Bellamy’s words) ‘the unsung heroes of British conservation’ – have lost the moral high ground to the animal-rightists. The reason is clear: while hunters are seen to be simply protecting a blood sport, the antis are seen to be fighting for the lives of foxes.

Yet there is another moral high ground that organisations such as the Countryside Alliance have so far ignored: human rights and the environment.

A global partnership

Hunting cultures, indeed rural minorities in general, are under threat worldwide. And of course the most threatened hunting cultures are not foxhunters or duck shooters, but the hunter–gatherer peoples of the developing world.

These are people such as the Bushmen of the Kalahari, the Yanomami Indians of the Amazon, the Inuit of Northern Canada and Alaska, the Aborigines of Australia – and the dozens of other threatened groups who stand in the front line of globalisation, and who face imminent cultural extinction as the demand for timber, oil, diamonds, cattle range, industrial fishing, even for water continue to rise.

But if they are in the front line, so to speak, then the indigenous hunting cultures of the west – to continue the military analogy – are the reserves; the ones with the money and power to make a difference.

There are many organisations and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) who fight for the rights of indigenous hunting cultures – such as the pan-Arctic group Indigenous, the London-based Survival International, America’s Cultural Survival and the Institute of First Nations. So far these have operated on the fringes.

In the west, hunting minorities are not poor and occupy the political centre and right. For that reason they have ignored the plight of the indigenous hunting cultures elsewhere in the world. That has been a political mistake. For if western hunters were to champion the rights of indigenous hunting minorities abroad, they could begin effectively to challenge at home the moral high ground occupied – at least in the eyes of the general public – by animal rights groups.

Britain’s Countryside Alliance (CA) has at last woken up to this. Before 28 September’s record-breaking Liberty and Livelihood March (at over 400,000 people, the largest protest march in British history), the CA began forging links with London-based Survival International, which champions the rights of threatened hunter–gatherer communities around the world. It also sent CA representatives to join the weekly vigil outside Botswana’s High Commission, protesting the forced eviction of Bushman hunter–gatherers from that country’s vast Central Kalahari Game Reserve to make way for diamond mining. (The Bushmen had their traditional hunting practices replaced with a government licensing system, which now that the diamonds have been found, it has been convenient to revoke.)

‘This is a departure for us,’ the CA’s director of the Campaign for Hunting Simon Hart told me in a recent interview, ‘but one which is long overdue. There is a global issue here – the constant pull away from nature in every society. We need to bring hunting communities around the world into closer contact, to campaign both for their human rights and for the continued existence of their cultures – whether Bushmen or foxhunters – and by extension for the continued existence of the land they hunt on.’

There are projects to initiate bridge-building trips of CA members to threatened hunting communities in the developing world. The media could soon be covering pony clubbers making exchange visits with the Bushmen, or with Amazonian Indians. And in the planning stages for the summer of 2003 is an international conference of hunters, environmentalists and academics at London’s Commonwealth Institute.

Hunting in defence of wildness

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, the idea is beginning to catch on with the MFHA, which until now has represented the height of the insular, establishment political outlook in the US. Both executive director Dennis Foster and president Daphne Wood have expressed their support for the new direction currently being taken by the CA in Britain; protests in support of the Bushmen may be seen this year both in Washington and in the diamond district of New York.

Of course, cynics will sneer. That’s what they’re for. But as Garry Marvin, a British-based anthropologist in the forefront of this new development states: ‘People like the hardcore animal-rightists will never be appeased by any kind of reform or good intent. The point is not to try to appease them. They represent only a small, if vocal, minority. The vast majority of people might raise an eyebrow but ultimately they will judge the matter by whatever results it brings.’ In other words: watch this space.

For a foxhunter like myself, this is highly gratifying. Largely because in my non-foxhunting life I am a journalist who specialises in the pressures faced by indigenous hunting cultures – working mostly with the Bushmen/San of the Kalahari. The parallels between indigenous hunting cultures and our own have long been obvious to me, especially as the cash economy is now so ubiquitous that hunter–gatherers no longer hunt solely for survival as they once did but – like western hunters – increasingly for cultural and environmental reasons.

Ironically, this very lack of immediate necessity is often used as an excuse for hostile governments to ban their hunting activities. The revoking of hunting licences is almost always the first step taken in removing such people from the land. Whether in Britain or the Kalahari, the case could not be clearer.

As the saying goes: it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good. The continued hunting debate may be a running sore in British politics and a dark cloud of worry on the horizon of most country folk. But if the debate ends up bringing about the championing of hunters’ rights on a global level – or at least the beginnings of such a process – then it will have been worth it.

Foxhunters, along with rural and hunting minorities the world over, form part of the fragile but effective mosaic that defends and nurtures what remains of our open, wild space. The voice that they are fighting to have heard is, ultimately, the voice of the land itself.