Hunting for Dollars

I wondered when this would happen. From yesterday's Detroit Free Press:


The World Hunting Association announced its plans Tuesday to create a competitive hunting tour around the world, with the 2006 inaugural season beginning this fall in Gladwin, Mich., at the Lost Arrow Ranch.

Hunters will shoot white-tail deer and other game with tranquilizers, which should not kill the animals.

"For far too long, hunters have looked forward to the day when we would eventually get our own professional sports league," WHA hunter Brett Hankins said in a statement. "Well, that time has arrived and we are extremely excited."

Though Hankins portrays this as fulfillment of a longstanding grassroots desire, I suspect few hunters will welcome this development. A statement by WHA founder David Farbman points to the true driving force behind these tournaments: "The WHA fills a void by providing a platform that benefits the entire international hunting industry today and for generations to come." My hunch is that the "void" he's concerned about is the one likely to form in the balance sheets of outfitters and equipment manufacturers as hunter numbers dwindle. Although there is some indication that decline has been checked, it is likely to resume or at least be an ongoing threat, since for a number of reasons related to demographics and sensibilities, fewer and fewer children are exposed to hunting by a parent or other adult. If the bug isn't caught early, it's unlikely to affect people later and life, and to encourage them to teach their kids about hunting, etc. Kids get all sorts of exposure to television, though, and a few might happen on televised tournaments and so get a glimpse of the challenges and satisfactions of hunting. So yet another way (and certainly one of the more curious ones) in which people are looking to television to raise children.

There are all sorts of reasons hunters are likely to object to this: the commercialization (at least to an unacceptable degree) of something that connects people to their primitive nature; the appropriation of wild animals as marketing tools; turning an active sport into one for spectators. I think the last of these points to what about these proposed tournaments--and about what I think is their motivation--is most contrary to the essential nature of hunting: the ambition to attract eyeballs, to get people to watch.

Hunting is an act of revealing what is hidden. Animals try (and are equipped in all sorts of ways) to hide. For them, being seen by another creature is potentially a mortal danger. The objective in hunting is defeat animals' instincts and capacities to hide and to bring them into view. But to do so, the hunter must, in most cases, strive to remain hidden also. Hiding from the view, or smell, of animals by using cover and locating oneself downwind of potential prey, the hunter increases the the likelihood of an animal showing itself. Besides this, hunters famously strive to avoid the notice of other hunters, lest these others begin seeking and seeing game in their productive spots. So it was in the Stone Age, and is in the electronic age. On all sides, hunting is at bottom an occulted undertaking. What becomes of it, then, when all those eyes, electronic and natural, immediate and dispersed around the television sets of the world, are drawn to it at great effort and expense?

Most basically, sport becomes entertainment, which I think poses some problems for these tournaments as hunter-recruitment tools. Outdoor programs by and large are not that entertaining, at least for people without some prior connection to the sports presented. Addtionally, to be entertaining, the tournament shows will need to present a level and continuity of action that doesn't occur in actual hunting, or fishing. Any sportsperson will tell you that at some or most points in the course of these activities, you will spend a long time on the water or in the field seeing and doing very little. A kid who goes hunting wanting to replicate the experience he saw in the tournament is likely to be very disappointed.

Some may well make their way through that disappointment to develop a realistic and personal appreciation of hunting. The handful of those who will may be enough for the tournament creators. Still, the WHA tournament scheme strikes me as an act of self-mutilation undertaken in hopes of strengthening oneself.

Much of what I said above could be said of fishing tournaments, of course. Those strike me as misguided too, although the kinds of fishing that are foci of competition (bass and walleye) can actually accomodate spectators better (beyond staying in a boat, concealment isn't all that much of an issue). The addition of hunting tournaments to fishing tournaments is a bad idea going worse. We trout-fly fishing types may have to take some of the blame, though, since tranquilizer-dart hunting may be the logical end result of the catch and release ethic. What have we wrought?

When the hunting tournaments finally make the airwaves, may they survive as long as a blind pheasant.

Tags: Outdoors; Hunting