A Matter Of Taste

For as long as people have been writing about the ethics of hunting, they've been bemoaning the loss of them. Xenophon, an early Greek military historian and a disciple of Socrates, chided the hoi polloi for hunting too close to town and ruining what he called "the sportsmen's game."

Twenty-four hundred years later, Theodore Roosevelt and George Bird Grinnell, the founders of the Boone and Crockett Club and the inventors of "fair chase," wrote about how subsistence and market hunting were the scourge of North America's wildlife. By imposing rules of conduct, for instance not driving animals with fire, and by removing wildlife from the marketplace, they transformed hunting for survival, our most elemental pastime, into one of our most compelling games--one that 13 million Americans still enjoy, dream about and argue over with a passion rivaled only by the subjects of politics and morality.

Indeed, one can make the case that when we argue over these topics we frequently don't discuss ethics at all--that is, questions of universal rights and wrongs (though we often allude to them in these terms)--but rather we're debating questions of values and taste, in other words things that are deemed desirable by individual preference. So, too, with hunting. Thus a lot of what passes for conversations about hunting ethics is really hunters and nonhunters saying, "I like this, and I don't like that." Case in point: When an individual declares, "Hunting on game ranches is unethical," what he or she probably has meant is, "I find hunting on game ranches distasteful."

One can, of course, mount arguments about the downside of game ranches, and many have: Game ranches have been implicated in spreading diseases to wildlife outside their fences; they have been known to capture and keep the public's wildlife; they can make hunting the pursuit of the wealthy; too often they present hunting in a diluted form. Respectively, these are ecological, economic, sociological and aesthetic critiques, not ethical ones, and certainly not ones that are of the same gravity as embezzling money from one's firm or cheating on one's spouse. These are forms of breach of contract or, in less legal terms, the breaking of vows to which one has freely consented.

That said, are there ethical breaches in hunting? You bet. Shooting two animals when you have a license for only one. Killing an animal on another person's tag. Hazing animals with aircraft or ATVs. Hunting before or after the legal opening and closing times. These are all instances of breaking the law--the law a hunter accepts as binding when he or she buys a hunting license. I suspect that everything else we argue over isn't a matter of ethics, but either of wildlife biology or manners, sometimes both.

Consider the frequently debated question of whether hunting has become too competitive, hunters concerned only with how well their trophies score and going to great lengths to kill record-book specimens.