This ran last fall prior to hunting season

The TV commercial is cute as all get out. It is set around an African waterhole, where all the animals have assembled to drink and play. A meerkat, one of those darling bowling pins of the animal world, dives from the head of a giraffe into the cool water, and then goes for a fun ride on a swimming crocodile. The lion and zebra slake their thirst side by side on the beach. Birds flit around a smiling leopard as it watches the elephants spraying water over the wildebeests. Insipid music plays in the background, proclaiming that everyone gets along. And the voiceover asks something about how nice it would be to not have to worry about risk anymore.

In this fantasy wonder world, the cute meerkats don’t need to worry about being eaten by a crocodile. The wildebeests won’t be consumed by that smiling leopard, and the zebra is carefree around a lion that would chase down and kill it in the real world. How heartwarming such an existence would be! This is put up there by an insurance company after all, and they pretend to protect us from all that is bad in life.

This ad runs often enough that the music sometimes pops into my head when I should instead be doing something productive. It’s like some annoying buzzing bug in my ear. Some commercial maker probably got a big bonus after this one, but I’m tired of hearing the thing. I cannot stop feeling bad for the lion, crocodile and that lovely leopard, because in this magical alternative world, all the other animals are safe and happy, but these hunters don’t get to eat. And how much fun is that? Besides, if they have to starve to death in this wonderful land, doesn’t that qualify as risk?

Unlike this commercial, the real world is a messier place, filled with risk, and sometimes unhappy endings. Some people hate this reality, but in the real world, the lion, crocodile, and leopard are not evil because they cannot “get along”. They are merely driven to survive, so they kill and eat other animals. And without their role in culling the population of the animals they consume, those preyed-upon beasts would suffer from overcrowding, disease, and starvation. Predators and prey…it works out.

I have a theory….

In human medicine the docs know that some people perceive pain worse than others. Two folks with the same headache might react totally differently, with one crawling off to bed whimpering and the other off to work to get on with the day. As a veterinarian I see similar behaviors. The poodle with a broken toenail trembles, whines and cries out, while the pitbull doesn’t even notice.

The many dog breeds were developed over the years by mankind, when we wished to attain different behaviors from our little four footed friends. The pitbull was expected to fight without quarter, so it adopted a certain tenacity and the ability to ignore pain. The poodles were expected to nestle in a lap as a recipient of nurturing, babies that never grow up and move away. So I guess they figured out how to tug on human heartstrings.

Selection or creation, choose your poison, also resulted in humans with a wide range of behavioral traits. I read once that those antsy kids who cannot sit still may carry a hunter gene from their ancestors, so they are innately encouraged to wander off seeking something, and are subject to being distracted by all those little incongruities that might catch their eye. For these become useful skills in a successful predator. Those descendants with the farmer gene may really be good at patience, as they can comfortably wait for the corn to grow and the paint to dry. We need both types to make society function, as we also need the warrior gene to motivate linebackers, and the artist’s eye to capture the beauty in a sunset that the rest of us miss.

With all these different types of people, with all the different things that motivate these people to be who they are, it should surprise no one that we often react differently to what life presents us. Sometimes, when one group garners pleasure from something, another group may feel only pain.

Tomorrow I’ll be joining the roughly 50,000 people who will hunt pronghorn in Wyoming this year. And I won’t be joining that other group of people who find this activity so painful to contemplate that they not only wouldn’t do it themselves, but they would find a way to stop me, if they could.

I believe it was Cleveland Amory who once proposed a utopian world for the animals. People would build large fenced enclosures that would hold all of nature’s animals, with the plant eaters in this pasture, and the meat eaters kept away from them over in the other. The carnivorous animals would be fed from the other group as individuals died off from age or disease. No chasing and killing would be allowed, because that was just too painful for Mr. Amory to bear.

Mr. Amory claimed to be an animal lover, but I wonder how he missed the part where these animals don’t want to be locked up safe behind tall fences. He also missed the part where the prey animals benefit from having some predators around. And he missed the part where the predators would be denied the hunt, a most significant part of their lives.

Predators are highly motivated to find, chase down, and kill the animals they eat. Once immobilized behind a fence, like those specimens held in zoos, predators turn into lifeless slugs, and often they pace aimlessly and constantly in a form of neurosis that also afflicts their prey animals when they also are confined too closely. If you ask any of these animals if they would choose to live behind a fence, my guess is they would rather take their chances out there. For they need more in their lives than just safe.

Those folks who are pained by the notion that some animals want to kill and eat other animals are generally distressed when people choose to hunt for their food. Others will concede that animals should be granted their permission to hunt, but they would never be comfortable extending the same right to humans. And of course, some people like to hunt, and they derive pleasure and quality nutrients as a consequence. When these disparate humans interact, debate often follows.

I stumbled upon one such discussion while researching my upcoming hunt on the Net. An opponent of hunting was constructing an argument condemning the practice, and to make a rather long story short, he was demanding that hunters, not defend their participation in the hunt, but rather defend the rape, by humans, of animals. I believe he was suggesting that the ethics of a human hunter were no different from the ethics of some pervert who enjoyed raping animals. And if we could not defend animal rape, how dare we try to defend our desire to hunt?

He is pained by knowing that someone hunts, so he demands everyone cease this activity. And I guess if we don’t, we must be indescribably depraved.

Wow! Not sure how to answer that charge, but I did wonder whether this hunting opponent, with all his research into the question, had found among all the insects, fish, birds, reptiles, and mammals that hunt for a living, even one species that enjoys raping their prey.

And I also wondered how this fellow could disregard all that hunters have done over the decades to preserve and enhance wildlife habitat, and to ensure that wildlife populations continue to thrive in a world that increasing would crowd them out of existence. Instead of fencing them in, hunters far more than theorists like Mr Amory, or this rabidly nasty anti-hunting fellow, put their money where their mouths are.