What make's a hunt?What make's a Hunter?
This was a thread I started on another sight due to a few differences on harvesting deer. These are not my words but something I think is very true. Don't judge other's by the size of there deer. Be happy for them.
These are not my words but something I agree with.
What Makes a Hunt? What Makes a Hunter?
An attempt has been made to define hunting in the words of thoughtful writers and philosophers. In each case, they reached back to ancient times when man was simply a part of the larger natural community - when hunting was a way of life. They describe modern hunters as maintaining that connection.
The importance of the hunt itself - and its natural outcome, the death of an animal - was discussed. The necessary approach required by hunters to fully participate in hunting was identified by Ortega: "one does not hunt in order to kill; on the contrary, one kills to have hunted." That there is no "one factor that motivates all hunters to hunt or even that motivates one hunter on each hunt." was set out as a premise by Ann Causey. Yet, the evolutionary heritage of hunting is celebrated by all hunters. Their desire - their need to have millennia-old experiences releases them temporarily from stresses of modern life and provides communication lines with family and friends.
Hunters possess the knowledge and skills to turn the world from a path of certain destruction to one where humans live in peace with nature rather than constantly being at war with her. Hunters know their place in the natural community and can provide a bridge so that others may know it too.
"It is not essential to the hunt that it be successful. On the contrary, if the hunter's efforts were always and inevitably successful it would not be the effort we call hunting, it would be something else. ... The beauty of hunting lies in the fact that it is always problematic. ... Doubtless, man opens this margin (ecological distance) to the beast deliberately and of his own free will. He could annihilate quickly and easily most animal species, or at least precisely those he delights in hunting. ... There is, then, in the hunt as a sport a supremely free renunciation by man of the supremacy of his humanity." (Ortega 1942: 57)
Ortega argues that most all the things that man does are the means to an end - man works, expends energy, to achieve or get something. He then says: "But in hunting as a sport this order of means and end is reversed. To the sportsman the death of the game is not what interests him; that is not his purpose. What interests him is everything that he had to do to achieve that death - that is, the hunt. (Ortega 1942: 110)
He continues this discussion of the death of an animal: "Death is essential because without it there is no authentic hunting: the killing of the animal is the natural end of the hunt and that of hunting itself, not the hunter. ... To sum up, one does not hunt in order to kill; on the contrary, one kills in order to have hunted."