The Trouble with *both* Hunters and Animal Rights Nuts
The reaction to use (or not) of animals is often one that involves psychological transference.
There can be good motivation about the issue on either side, but everyone should examine the possibilities for delusion.
It is no coincedence that antihunting and vegetarianism matches up with modern culture9s nervousness about itself in general. If those who were either pro or con to AR were to find themselves on the wrong side of any of the dozen ways in which they themselves are complying with the modern mentality, then their interest would be severely strained and probably drop to near zero.
One test of the limited truth of AR *or* hunting positions is that country and primitive people don9t hold to themexcept occasionally and for religious reasons.
(Primitive people don’t emphasize personality or individual egos very much in their cultures thus mistakes in psych transference are hardly ever made.)
I.e., if primitive folk need meat to live, they eat meat. If meat moves, they move or they develop a new food source. Generally, also, if they find that one source is easier and more reliable to get than another, they choose the more reliable. Hunting doesn’t make them men, per se, but eating does. Pure, objective need drives most of their culture (and religion). However, another interesting facet to primitives is that nomads have always stayed on top of the respect list—when Khan took over the known world, he let urban institutions persist to the extent that they provided support for the noble wandering warriors and hunters. He considered that real men didn’t have property like farms or businesses.
Note that primitive people don’t usually have snowballing bad effects on their environment. Sure they change their enviro, but that’s beside the point. Note that the Amish, who are primitive, live sustainably….while both hunters and ARA’s usually live in the modern paradigm involving cars, airplanes, modern housing and food supplies…none of which is sustainable as currently practiced. I’d suggest that it’s in HOW it’s used not that cars or meat is used. I suggest it’s largely because the Amish are more clearsighted about what they’re doing due to their primitiveness which happens to minimize psych transference. We, on the other hand, commonly kill the very things we claim to love due almost entirely to the syndrome of psych trans. (I.e., we don’t really see what we’re doing or why.)
Anyway, to the extent your own situation might be biased or influenced is the extent to which you should moderate your stand. Follow the grinding axe!
Honestly, a person can’t even take a position on all this until they know themselves. Not the self they think or guess they are, but the one that’s the true one after the chips are down…
If you can9t see it, here are a few of the influences on moderns which influence their stand on AR, either for or against:
**Frustrations from work creating bloodlust, the desire for adventure or for a political cause.
**The shopping/gadget/achievement impulse. If modern hunting didn9t involve gadgets and difficult challenges, how many would be interested? Primitive hunters work to guarantee results by any means necessary, which moderns would quickly find boring—primitives don’t know the meaning of boring. Moderns spend endless hours fiddling with gear, building sinew-baked replica bow&arrows…while those who hunt to live would get rid of a sinew bow (or finicky rifle&scope) and grab a beat-up old single-shot shotgun the first chance they could get.
**Today’s definition of skinny beauty which prefers pale and thin fits veggie.
**The macho mentality fits hunting.
**The need to have an enemy or a strange Other you can work against or shoot fits both ARAs and hunters.
**The differentiation and rebellious phase of life fits anti-meat.
**The college experience fits ARA and its tendency to awaken a view that your parents are stupid and that you need to change things. Kids tend to want to change obvious, easy, superficial things which also put them in with a community (the ARA ‘scene’)
**Powerless and confused feelings coming from a pointless society, the extreme cruelty of humans to each other—fits both ARAs and hunters.
**Permanent adolescence. Kids achieving contemporary social privilege of judging adults. Childhood extending well into adult years. Kids wanting to boss other people around in ARA. Kids wanting to make loud noises and kill things in hunting. The whole concept of adulthood has to be taken differently than on a literal or technical basis. Adulthood is more likely the phase where one has the ability to see past one’s prejudices, biases and tendencies, fractious wants and desires (pull in opposite directions which require modern ‘balance’ to live with but which are unsustainable just the same), especially past those which formed the developmental ego phase of the teens and the modern extended childhood into the 20’s.
**Class prejudice against rustics and the uneducated fits the ARA profile whichs enjoys making an enemy of hunters.
**The lack of contact with animals, with contact often being pets which are often used to mimic human friendship—fits ARAs. How many ARAs grow up on farms or are real rural people? (Not just commuters.)
**Too much pride in limited capability of modern science and expertise plus the insecurity of modern academia and the resulting all-too-common arrogance of professors who exagerate to students and to themselves—all this works to create arrogance in college student ARA activists. The very incompleteness and temporariness of science is overlooked as kids confidently desire to permanently change the cultures of people other than themselves.
**People who either hate or pursue death often suffer from incomprehension of the death/rebirth aspect of growth in life, which all true cultures maintain solid contact with and which our modern culture has very little concept of.
**Greed exemplified in liability, trespassing and property rights concerns—hunters ‘damaging’ property that owners possess only for psychological reasons is a modern syndrome. Private property used to be yours to develop the assets thereof; trespassers were a problem only when they were actual thieves. You didn’t want to lose your crops, minerals, timber, stock. Now one’s biggest asset is a place where other people aren’t, and where you have no liability as defined post-1970’s. Thus someone being on your land is considered a major affront. This factor is possibly providing over 3/4’s of the finances behind the ARA movement (kids don’t have money).
