Cartmill, Book Review II

The immorality hypothesis, that esteem for hunting and morality are inversely related, also receives extended treatment, showing that Europeans, in fits and starts, have viewed hunting with increasing moral suspicion throughout Western history. The importance and meaning of hunting does not depend on the amount of food it makes available. Rather, [it] is intelligible only as symbolic behavior, like a game or a religious ceremony, and the emotions that the hunt arouses can be understood only in symbolic terms” (29). The framework most crucial to the meaning of hunting has been the distinction, sometimes separation, of humans from nature. As he points out in his well-known essay, “The Bambi Syndrome,” both hunters and anti-hunters share this symbolic framework. They disagree only on how to value the different sides of the line. For many hunters, hunting is natural and morality is merely human sentimentality; for many anti-hunters, morality is natural and hunting is a human perversion.

Cartmill’s work moves quickly, as any survey must, over the cultural images of hunting throughout Europe and western history. He provides both the panoramic vision and focused snap-shots of particular episodes. It might seem unfair, then, to complain that he has not included enough, that his view is Eurocentric. But, on behalf of the hunter, I must raise this objection. The bow hunter from Wisconsin does not locate himself in a tradition that began with Apollo or Artemis. He thinks rather of Fred Bear, and Howard Hill, of Pope and Young. And Ishi. In the tradition of hunting, prior to Pope and Young there are only the native peoples who hunted this same land. This alternative genealogy raises a hornets’ nest of other issues, but these do not find a place in Cartmill’s account even though the Wisconsin bowhunter needs precisely this alternative genealogy.