Episode 2: "Philosophy of
Hunting."
Guest: Lawrence E. Cahoone.
Original air date: March 8,
2009, 5 p.m. central.
Why? - Philosophical Discussions about Everyday Life
is produced by the Institute for Philosophy and Public
Life.
A partnership of Prairie Public, The North Dakota
Humanities Council and The University of North Dakota, College of Arts and
Sciences.
Visit us at
whyradioshow.org
[Music playing 00:18 –
00:24]
Jack: Is hunting a sport or a cultural
practice? Is it a moral activity? Can it help us find the meaning of life?
Join me Jack Russell Weinstein and my guest Lawrence Cahoone for a discussion on
the Philosophy of Hunting and hear a listener essay by Gene Wohlsdorf on this
month’s episode of WHY - Philosophical Discussions about Everyday Life
broadcast live, right after the news.
[Music playing 00:44 – 01:07]
Jack: Welcome to this month’s
episode of WHY. I’m your host Jack Russell Weinstein, I’m glad you could join
us for this live broadcast. We’ve received tremendous feedback about last
months’ show on the Role of Philosophy in day to day Life and today we’re going
to take that conversation a bit deeper to discuss one of the oldest human
activities, hunting. Thanks to all of you who wrote or called to offer
congratulations and appreciation. I’ve been overwhelmed by the support and
well-wishers by press coverage, Internet chat and word of mouth. We’re building
up a great community of Philosophers both amateur and professional. I’m pleased
to report that we have already expanded our listening parties. There are 2 in
North Dakota that we know of; folks are gathered in Porpoura Coffee House in
Grand Forks and Boneshaker Coffee Company in Bismarck. Hello to everyone
gathered there and I want everyone who is sitting near their computers listening
online at whyradioshow.org. Once again Nancy Devine is live blogging this
episode but this time she’s trying it from Porpoura so say hello to her for me
and you can check out her comments at www.nancydevine with an E .blogspot.com.
In a few minutes you too can participate in the conversation. Call us at
888-7556377, that’s 888-7556377 or email us at askwhy@UND.edu.
We already have half a dozen questions from our guest, I’m sorry, for our guest
that were emailed in advance and we’ll be turning to Larry Cahoone shortly.
First I’d like to resurrect some older news. It’s one of the complexities of a
monthly show that sometimes what I want to talk about may have already left
national consciousness; but I can’t help be haunted by the specter of Tom
Daschle’s withdrawal from the nomination process for Secretary of Health and
Human Services last month. He hadn’t paid some taxes and the pundits, the
people who make a sport out of politics described the withdrawal as a failure of
the new President. Obama had done poorly they said, he chose badly and perhaps
they are right but what I would have said if I were the President was, “Look,
the system worked. I wanted to pick someone, he wasn’t the right person for the
job and when we put him before the community for judgment, they learned things
about him I didn’t know, things that disqualified him from office. I don’t work
against you.” he should’ve said, “I work with you and together we did well.”
instead of condemning a political [Inaudible
03:24]. We should have been celebrating the success of democracy. Now,
once again, this isn’t about politics per say, this is about an odd blindness in
the American culture. We have very little tolerance for the celebration of
process. We judge our art by how much we can sell it for and our movies by
whether they top the box office chart, not by the skills developed by the
artists over time or the creative struggles of those who have actually made
something from nothing. We value our houses by their potential for resale, not
the quality of life they offer to us everyday. We judge our education by the
degrees we receive, not by the individual minutes we spend in class engaged with
one another. Michael Phelps, the Olympic swimmer was brutalized in the media
for smoking marijuana with his friends and far be it for me to endorse illegal
drug use especially since I know we have younger listeners in the audience. But
don’t we think that Mr. Phelps earned the right to blow off some steam? His
success was not his celebrity nor was it only the gold medals he won. His
success was his discipline spending hour upon hour, week upon week, year upon
year, crafting his body and mind into a specimen of human excellence. At 23
years old, if we judge him by the product of his efforts, he has already reached
the greatest accomplishment of his professional life but if we recognize that
his work, that the process gets harder as he gets older, as his body slows down,
as his responsibilities grow more significant, as his expectations become more
sophisticated, then we realize that his work has only begun. I don’t mean to
belittle the eight gold medals, it’s certainly more gold medals than I’ll ever
win in my life, but competition is just part of the sport and winning is only
one key goal. The process is what made him what he was and not the reward and I
for one can’t condemn him for taking some time and stepping outside of that day
to day inflexibility that established his greatness. Especially since as we all
know, the harder we discipline ourselves, the more extreme we want to be when we
step outside and cut loose. The condemnation of Phelps choice to take a
vacation from his lifestyle, the refusal to acknowledge that the media analysis
of Daschle is itself part of the nomination process. These are indications that
we as a society should be more focused on what we are doing as opposed to what
we have already done.
Today’s episode of WHY is all about process, the slow and steady
exploration of the human relationship to nature, the loss of the self that comes
with hiding in a tree stand and trying to make yourself as quiet, as still, as
invisible and as odorless as possible. The process by which our meat once came
to the table and for many still does. It’s about, as our guest Larry Cahoone
once remarked to me, Hunters going into the woods and being the only ones who do
something that the animals understand. Larry describes hunting as incredibly
difficult. He doesn’t think he has ever done anything as hard as hunting deer.
The question for us and for him is what does all that mean from a philosophical
view. As we turn to Larry don’t forget that you can call us at 888-7556377 or
send us email at askwhy@UND.edu.
Larry’s joining us from Viscount Studios in
Cranston, Rhode Island. He is an Associate Professor at Holy Cross College in
Massachusetts. He’s the author of multiple books and edited a remarkable
collection on modernism and post-modernism. His most recent book and we’ll talk
about it a little bit later on is called Cultural Revolutions: Reason versus
Culture in Contemporary Philosophy, Politics and Jihad. Most recently he
published a paper called Hunting, as a Moral Good in the Philosophy Journal,
Environmental Values and the folks at that journal have given us permission to
post a copy of the article on our own website for a limited time. I would like
to thank them for their generosity. Larry, welcome to WHY, thanks so
much for taking the time to talk with us.
Larry: Jack thanks very much for
having me. It’s a pleasure!
Jack: I want to start off by
highlighting that question that you or rather that I refer to that you say that
hunters are the only one’s who go into the woods and do something that animals
understand. What does that mean?
Larry: Well, I would never want
to say that hunters know more about the wild than other naturalists or
photographers or people who spend a lot of time in the wild. But let’s just say
that hunters go into the wild, what you might call wild business because they’re
out there looking for something to eat, looking for an animal, acting like a
predator, a very special kind of predator, a human one. But at any rate, we do
something that the animals understand, it’s not something they like, but
something they understand.
Jack: But you described in your
article as well that humans are predators. Isn’t part of the enlightenment
vision of a human being, and I mention that because we talked about it last
month, isn’t part of the enlightenment vision of a human being that we can
overcome that predatory nature?
Larry: I don’t know why it would
have to be that way, and I’m not sure – I mean the enlightenment of the 18th
century certainly saw some things that many human beings did as being
uncivilized but I don’t think hunting was one of them.
Jack: Is hunting – and I’m
getting ahead of ourselves because there’s some questions that I want to ask
before this but is hunting natural? Is hunting unnatural? Is our culture right
now, and this is going to get into the meat of our conversation in a little bit,
does it take away the intimate connection that people have with hunting? Has it
eviscerated, to use that language, that part of us and hunters are recovering
something lost?
Larry: Well, it’s certainly an
archaic practice. I mean human beings have been hunting for a very, very long
time and engaged in sophisticated, social hunting, I think something like at
least fifty or fifty to a hundred thousand years. So hunting is a very old
process by which people go out and get meat to eat as opposed to eating the
product of the ground and I wouldn’t want to claim that there’s something
genetic about hunting, there are people, some people want to claim that, but
let’s just say that it’s a very old practice and hunters I think are people who
want to partake in this very old way. This way of, well, I know Leopold called
it getting his meat from God but we could just say that doing it yourself
instead of getting your meat from the store.
Jack: I’m struck by your
language, it’s a practice, it’s something we do, it’s not a sport for you, why
not?
Larry: Yeah! I came to the conclusion that sport’s not the
right word for hunting and I have no objection to – I mean there’s tons of
wonderful fishermen and women and hunting men and women out there who like to
think of themselves as sportsmen and sportswomen but you could argue and a lot
of the opponents of hunting have picked up on this and said, “What kind of sport
could this be?” I mean hunting is not a sport and I think actually their right.
A sport requires competitors and more than one. Well, the hunter and the prey
aren’t competitors. There’s certainly a challenge that the hunter is facing in
trying to defeat what you might say are the wilds of the prey or its strategies
of avoidance. Furthermore, any activity which specifically is aimed at gaining
a necessity like food, it’s kind of hard to call that a sport. I mean we
wouldn’t call gardening a sport, vegetable gardening a sport. So I don’t think
it’s a sport. I think it’s a cultural practice and it’s an old one and
contemporary people may choose to try to get back into it or try to recapture
some of that old practice.
Jack: So if it’s not a sport and if there are not
competitors then why do you object to Joy Williams’ description of hunting as
“essentially unfair” and as she writes, “Bam, bam, bam, I get to shoot you and
you get to be dead!”
Larry: Well, I don’t disagree with her because if hunting
were a sport, then her description would be pretty apt, but it’s not. So I
mean, I essentially agree with her, that hunting’s not a sport. She just got
into the wrong category.
Jack: What is it about the “Bam, bam, bam, I get to shoot
you!” that you object to? In your essay, you spend a fair amount of time
talking about just how difficult hunting is and there are plenty of hunters who
are listening right now, but there are plenty of non-hunters. So let’s take a
step back and in addressing Williams’ comment, talk to us a little bit about why
hunting is so hard and why that’s relevant to the way that we think about
hunting, philosophically in particular.
Larry: Well, this is also an individual thing. I mean
you’re talking to middle aged men who took up hunting in midlife and it maybe
that there’s a lot of people out there who were hunters from the time that they
were young, for whom hunting maybe isn’t so hard. But from my perspective,
hunting is just very hard. It’s really a process, put aside for the one moment,
you have some weapon and you have to become very good with that weapon so that
you can shoot an animal, whether it’s a bow or a rifle, or a muzzle loader, or a
shotgun with a slug in it. So there’s becoming proficient with the weapon but
then the real problem is you have to locate the animals that you’re trying to
hunt. I mean hunting is mostly a process of searching. And animals – I mean I
mostly hunt white-tail deer. And there’s an old saying, at least in my part of
the country that some hunters use, which is that there’s a thousand different
animals in the woods and they’re all smarter than you are.
Jack: (Laughs) For some people that’s even more true than
others.
Larry: (Laughs) Yeah! True enough! There’s a sliding scale
but the white-tail deer, they’re awfully good at not being where you want them
to be and you have to be scentless and you have to be quiet and lastly you have
to just make really good guesses about where they’re feeding, where they’re
bedding. You have to go out and find them. I’ll just add one more thing, now
where I live in South Eastern Massachusetts, deer population is probably about
twenty-five to thirty per square mile which probably pales in comparison to
North Dakota or Rural North Dakota but still there are certainly enough deer to
hunt and deer show up in my backyard but I can’t hunt them in my backyard. I’m
convinced that they know very well when the hunting season starts and they can
make themselves real scarce, real fast.
Jack: This leads to a biographical question, Tom from
Montana who is one of actually the first people to send us an email when the
show was announced, asked about your description of moving to a rural area or
rather the way that I presented your description, moving to a rural area,
thinking about where the food came from and deciding to hunt. And he asked,
“Isn’t it just as important to be urban and to know where your food comes from?
Why is hunting the result of a shift into rural life as opposed to just the
awareness of the food chain, of the food processing, of where our meat comes
from?
Larry: Well, I would follow Michael Pollan, who wrote the
Omnivores Dilemma and say that one of the first tasks, if you’re going to be
concerned about the ecology at all, is to figure out – to know what you’re
eating, to know what’s on the end of your fork and where it came from and by all
means, you can learn about that and know that while you’re sitting in an
apartment in Midtown Manhattan. What happened to me was simply that I had
always had a little desire to hunt but I have two young children and I can’t
take off long hunting trips to go someplace, take a week off and hunt some
place. So it just so happened that about seven years ago, I moved to a quasi
rural area where there’s a state forest so I can hunt on my street and I can
hunt very close and that’s how I hunt. I am hunting let’s say one morning, then
the next afternoon, then the next week on a Saturday, around the edges of the
day, so to speak.
Jack: Can you, and I’m not asking you to admit your
failures or successes but can you learn to be a good hunter in that way, using
the Michael Phelps example from earlier, in order to be excellent at something,
we have to focus most of our being on it. Can you be a part-time hunter?
Larry: Well, sure you can. Sure you can be a part-time
hunter. If you’re asking me how much it would take to be a really good hunter,
the hunters that I know who are a lot better than I am. I think what better
really means in something like deer hunting, to me, what it means is how often
do you get deer but also how often how often do you see deer. In other words,
are you able to walk into the woods, what percentage of time are you able to
figure out in this particular environment, where they’re going to be, now? Some
people, I know a guy who has a kind of a sixth sense about that but he’s been
hunting in the same areas, literally the same areas for forty years and I think
that has something to do with it. I think a lot of expertise in hunting comes
from great familiarity, continuing familiarity with a particular area, with a
particular piece of terrain.
Jack: Why is it that as you observe most philosophy is
anti-hunting and written by non-hunters and most hunting literature is
non-philosophical? What’s happening there?
Larry: Well, I think frankly, I would say it’s probably a
class issue. I mean it’s not just professional philosophers but I would say
most academics in the United States, don’t have a lot of experience with
hunting. Why? Well a lot of them are either urban or suburban bread or they
spent their time in graduate school doing other things and in places where it’d
be very unlikely to hunt. Hunting is kind of associated with blue collar people
in the United States. So blue collar rural people and so that’s of course a
vast generalization which is obviously not completely true but there’s some
truth to it. So I think it’s just a matter of great unfamiliarity on the part
of most academics. And I don’t mean by the way, that there are academics who
are against hunting, who write against hunting, who consider it immoral and I’m
not saying that their opinions are simply the derived to solve it for the lack
of familiarity but there are a lot of people who just kind of assume academics,
who assume that hunting is a kind of terrible thing to do, who haven’t actually
thought about it very much and for them I think it is just the lack of
familiarity.
Jack: I’m trying to figure out how to phrase this
question. Is the class thing in the United States unique, I mean historically
especially in England and in the continent, the game was the property of the
crown and there are some people who would suggest that hunting licenses and I
know you offer a different history of this in your essay but there’s some people
who suggest that hunting licenses is a legacy of this history and that, yes
there were people who had to kill for food but the better hunters, the more
noble hunters were the people who hunted again for sport who were the
aristocracy and who hunted with the king’s permission and so what’s happening in
the United States, what’s happening in our culture that these things gets
reversed?
Larry: Well we have a unique history here in North America
and that’s partly because of the fact that commercial hunting, uncontrolled
recreational or sport hunting, but even more so commercial hunting as we all
know, basically devastated game species throughout North America. I mean United
States and Lower Canada in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century until
legislation put an end to commercial hunting. And then strict limits were put
on - really strict limits were put on recreational or sports hunting. I mean
these valorous guys who are probably the greatest experts on deer and the
hunting of deer in North America. Geist simply says that the return of game
species in the last thirty years in the United States is probably the most
important ecological triumph of the twentieth century and so we have a very
particular history here. It’s true that calling hunting a sport was typically
done by people in earlier days who wanted to say, “I don’t need the meat!”
because that was a characteristic of the lower class people who would hunt.
Jack: Is my own experience in sort of, in growing up in an
urban area and then moving to North Dakota, my attitude about hunting has
shifted without any conscious thought. I never really read up on it, I never
had any debates in my head. I suppose I’ve had a couple of conversations in
classes with students and with friends but I just changed without being aware of
it. You’ve done a fair amount of research in your most recent book; Cultural
Revolutions is about trying to define culture. If there is such a passive
relationship between who we are and what we believe, where is the agency in
deciding whether we think hunting is moral or not? I mean that’s a complicated
question. (Laughs)
Larry: It is a really complicated question, Jack. (Laughing)
Do you think you could make it more a little complicated for me?
Jack: I could try and you only have about one minute and
thirty seconds before the break. (Laughing) But if my wife’s family from
Appalachia grew up wanting to hunt, and folks in North Dakota grew up wanting to
hunt, and you’re in Brooklyn or you’re in other places and you don’t want to
hunt, and then you move to Rural Massachusetts and now you want to hunt. I’m in
North Dakota and I think hunting is fine. Where is the decision making
process? Where is the agency in us deciding whether it’s right or not?
Larry: Well you know, I think agency is a pretty slippery
term there. I mean we human beings are different in different environments.
And I think it means you move to a rural area and you learn something about what
you were previously ignorant. I think I’ve learned a lot of things about
something of which I was also previously ignorant.
Well as I
told you the other day, I was walking on campus last year and one thing about
people would take up hunting to get very attuned to wild animals. And I was
walking across campus and I hear a hawk cry which is to me one of the most
beautiful sounds on earth, and I looked up and I saw what must have been a
mating pair near one of the tall buildings on campus and I was staring up and a
colleague of mine was walking by and she said, “What are you looking at? I said
“Look, two hawks!” and she said, “Oh, do you want to shoot them?” (Laughing) She
didn’t – I mean its good natured ribbing but she doesn’t realize that it’s
illegal to shoot hawks for one thing and secondly I don’t know who exactly would
want to shoot and eat a hawk unless you were starving to death.
Jack: We’re going to take off the gloves and actually have
the moral conversation that I think a lot of people are waiting for right after
this break. Give us a call at 888-7556377, 888-7556377. We’ll take a short
break; we’ll come back and talk more of philosophy of hunting with Lawrence
Cahoone.
[Music Playing 25:28 – 25: 51]
You’re listening to Prairie Public, a news
information and music service, in partnership with the University of North
Dakota and North Dakota State University.
[Music Playing 25:59 – 26:17]
Jack: You’re back with WHY –
Philosophical Discussions about Everyday Life in Prairie Public Radio. Give us
a call at 1888-755-6377. We’re talking to Larry Cahoone about the philosophy of
hunting. Larry, I’m going to start off with what sounds like a silly question
but I’ll explain why I’m asking and that is simply, what is hunting? I asked
you this because in your essay, you write that commercial hunting ventures,
hunting impends, all that sort of stuff, these aren’t immoral hunting. These are
simply not hunting and what is hunting and why is that distinction different?
Larry: Well, there’s partly what you’re
referring to is commercial hunting operations and I would never want to say that
none of those are hunting and I don’t want to say that. But hunting has certain
pre-conditions, for example the animals have to be wild. You can’t hunt a
domesticated animal. So for example if you start penning up deer or putting up
fences and if you winter feed the deer, you’re starting to domesticate them. To
me it’s a matter of degree but there are certain things that you can’t – this
goes back partly to the only book or essay by a really important philosopher in
the twentieth century about hunting was Jose Garcia y Gasset sets meditations on
hunting. As he said, “Well, you’re not a fisherman if you go to the stream and
you throw in dynamite and then pick up the dead bodies afterwards. So there’s a
whole bunch of things that are involved in hunting. One of the most famous is,
the sort of ethical guideline that we usually refer to is fair chase and there
are some things that we could do in the field that just violate fair chase.
Like for example, at least in my opinion and in the opinion of a lot of hunters,
let’s say chasing animals in either a helicopter or in a pick up truck and
shooting them from the truck or from the air, that’s just nor fair chase.
Jack: So there is then from a hunters’
perspective, a moral core to hunting?
Larry: Yes.
Jack: And what about the person who
says, well, the animals don’t get to decide what fair chase is, that only the
humans get to decide and that it’s stacked from the outset again there’s that,
“Bam, bam, bam, I get to shoot you and you get to be dead!”
Larry: Well, hunting is not a sport and
it’s not a relationship between equals anymore than when a group of lions are
trying to take down a wilder beast; or when a coyote or a group of coyote’s are
trying to take down a deer that a human hunter might be trying to take down on
another day. This is all quite true; this is about killing something and eating
it. It’s not a sport and it’s not a relationship among equals. It’s a
relationship between a crafty, very smart human being, well I mean in some
cases, (Laughing) very smart but compared to the deer we’re smart in a sort of
broader way. But the deer are incredibly smart at what they do, let’s put it
that way. And it’s a contest, well not a contest really but the challenges of a
hunter, trying to defeat the strategies of avoidance that the animal has been so
well endowed with. In other words, this is not based on some kind of an
agreement, where the hunter and the deer don’t shake hands and say, “Okay, you
run and hide and I’ll see if I can find you.
Jack: But isn’t that lack of agreement,
the core of what people object to about hunting? That the technological
advantage, certainly in some sense, especially in a state forest in
Massachusetts, we are penning in the deer, right? We are building cities and
urban areas and all of that sort of stuff around them taking more and more
land. I assume that it’s much harder to find one particular deer, not that
you’re looking for one particular deer but one particular deer in Western North
Dakota than it is in a state forest in Massachusetts so aren’t you fiddling with
words a little bit in the sense that already the whole situation is so stacked
against animals that they have no escape on any level, other than escaping for
another day?
Larry: Well, what you’re suggesting is
that there isn’t fair chase is because everything’s stacked in favour of the
hunter. I wish that were true. (Laughing) I’d be a more successful hunter. I
mean the last time I checked deer hunting is the most popular kind of hunting in
the United States and the last time I checked, 25% of deer hunters, take a deer
in a given year and the deer population continues to explode. What I said
before, about the penning in of deer, depends on a matter of degree. I don’t
think that the fact that I walk into a state forest that maybe has six hundred
acres and how many deer in there? Well, I don’t know maybe there’s twenty deer
somewhere in that six hundred acres. I don’t think that removes fair chase,
that there are roads or high ways that they have trouble crossing and because
they are very, very capable of hiding awfully well in those five or six hundred
acres.
Jack: Okay, so let’s take a step back
and I’ve gotten about four or five emails in the last ten minutes but Debbie
from Grand Forks wants us to take the question even further back and say,
“Alright! Well, let’s grant you for a second that hunting is associated with
eating meat and all other stuff but how can philosophers justify eating meat in
the first place, you yourself in your essay, someone is saying `There’s nothing
natural about meat hunting in our culture, meat eating and hunting are cultural
activities not natural activities.’ and in our culture, the implication is does
it need meat eating?” Aren’t we pre-supposing that meat eating is acceptable?
Larry: Right! I mean it’s a pretty simple
argument, if meat eating is legitimate, so is hunting and if meat eating is not
legitimate, then hunting isn’t either. I mean there’s a little wiggle room if
you accept either those premises’ to keep you from accepting the conclusions,
but very little so essentially that’s true.
My own view about meat eating, about hunting in particular is
farming also kills animals. Now how many animals are killed by farming? Well
that’s tough to know because we don’t measure so the research that I did, I mean
I’m just a philosopher, I don’t go out the field and try to count these things.
There is an essay that was published a few years ago which tried to - which
itself actually tried to examine other literature to try to see how much a
particular type of farming, how many local vertebrates were killed, in let’s say
a hectare of flaming soy beans. And they found that, what they were looking at
was farm machinery passages over the field and what they found was that, they
only looked at one species of rodent and they found fifteen of these rodents had
been killed by one machinery pass, harvest that is, over a hectare. Now, what’s
the total number of animals that were killed for that crop of soy beans and this
doesn’t even take into account, the other impacts of farming on wildlife. I
mean there are many farmers who hire, either they’re hunters themselves or they
hire hunters to kill deer, to keep them from eating their produce.
Jack: This was the most interesting, I
mean this was sort of the moment when I was reading your essay, that was just
sort of the most shocking and you have said in the essay, “Vegetarians have to
get used to the fact – or have to accept the fact that vegetarian diets kill
animals too.”; and you have a more detailed discussion that we can have right
now about exactly what you’re talking about now, which is the incredible amount
of death and killing that is involved in a vegetarian diet and then you seem to
suggest that in fact, meat hunting for food is less destructive of animal life
than farming.
Larry: Yes I do, but let me try to be
clear about that. The first thing to say is that nobody knows how many animals
are killed by agriculture or by particular kinds of agriculture and all this is
going to vary with the place, the kinds of species that live around there, the
kinds of farming. Certainly non-intensive so called sustainable farming would
yield a different number than intensive methods that use a lot of machinery. My
real point would be, there is no free lunch; that is there’s no lunch free of
death, vegetarian or meat eaters. It’s probably true that you could, if
everybody had their own little organic flat of vegetables in their yard and they
never used any heavy duty machinery on it and that they could probably get down
to killing almost no, let’s say, vertebrates. But it’s very hard to sustain a
society that way. Any kind of intensive agriculture is going to involve killing
of animals because agriculture after all is as Jared Diamond would say,
“Agriculture is the biggest technological impact that human beings have ever
made on the surface of the earth.”
Jack: So what you’re suggesting is that,
what people really object to about hunting is that it is making our place on the
food chain, explicit rather implicit. What you’re suggesting is that in the end
we are the predators, we kill although we may not individually kill, as a system
we kill and therefore what people are upset about is recognizing again that
agency that individual participation and so then, along comes someone who says,
“Well, but I don’t have to kill and when we farm,” at least the mice that you
were taking about, “that’s accidental. Intentional killing is something
different.” Someone, I’m afraid I can’t find out the name of the person but
someone simply asked in the email, “What does make someone want to hunt in this
culture? Is there something – is hunting a culture of death? Is hunting a
celebration of life? Is hunting an acknowledgement of the primitive? Is
hunting recognition of power? Why hunt now? Why hunt here when we can get food
elsewhere?”
Larry: Well again, we have to pre-suppose
that meat eating is legitimate but once you pre-suppose that, if it’s the case
that meat eating is legitimate, then you gave a long list of things that hunting
- that might be a reason why someone would hunt. And probably, there are people
who hunt for - every one of those reasons have some clientele out there. But
from my perspective, the reason to hunt is if you’re a meat eater, at a certain
point, there’s something to be said for doing it yourself and there’s something
to be said for doing it to a wild animal rather than forcing an animal into
domestication. Now I have nothing against the animal husbandry, there’s kinds
of animal husbandry today that I would object to on environmental ethical
grounds, like confined animal feeding operations, which I think are immoral
because of the way they treat their animals that they confine. The hunter takes
- instead of eating the meat that comes out of a big machine that’s being run by
minimum wage workers, who are killing the animal for you and putting in a little
package, the hunter says, “If I’m going to eat meat, at least part of the time,
I want to go out and kill a wild animal, eviscerate it myself, butcher it myself
and feed it to myself and my family.”
Jack: So is it immoral for me to have
someone else change the oil in my car? I mean in the sense that if doing it
yourself is the standard of knowledge and awareness and excellence and
participation, then I can – as you can list five hundred things a day that other
people do for me. What is it about hunting? What is it about meat eating that
makes doing it yourself a moral imperative?
Larry: Well it’s not a moral imperative.
I mean I would never say it’s a moral imperative. I mean you can go ahead and
have someone else change your oil whenever you want Jack.
Jack: That’s a relief! (Laughs)
Larry: That’s not a problem, okay? And
knit your clothes and everything. I think hunting does have something in common
with a whole bunch of activities like doing your own wood working, planting your
own vegetable garden. Hunting has something in common with those, in that it’s
a taking of personal responsibility for. Now in the case of hunting, it’s also
quite different I mean you ask, why with hunting? Well it’s because that the
process is so fascinating and it does involve a certain heavier responsibility.
In other words, doing your own woodworking means cutting up wood, planting your
own vegetables, means putting seeds in the ground and getting your own meat
means killing an animal not too terribly unlike yourself perhaps depending on
what you’re hunting. And cutting up its body and cooking it. That’s kind of a
more sobering experience maybe than wood working.
Jack: I want to go back to the
question. I could cut off a lot of digits with wood working. I want to go back
to the cultural question because we’re getting again a whole host of emails and
the tone of the emails has changed and I know that this is not uncommon for
you. So Jerry from Washington, DC has written, “So what Mr. Cahoone is saying
is that vegans are murderers?” and then Joyce, she doesn’t say where she’s from
says, “What do you feel when you hunt? Is it a high?” I mean some of these are
legitimate, I don’t mean illegitimate questions. Some of these are neutral
questions and some of these are tinted with animosity.
Larry: Well if I can just go ahead with
one of them.
Jack: Sure!
Larry: Are vegans murderers? Well, I’m
not calling anybody a murderer and I don’t think…
Jack: Is that just because you’re
chicken? (Laughs)
Larry: But it’s also, I don’t think
killing an animal is murder. If killing a deer is murder, then coyote’s are
murderers too but if the basic claim is that house building, road building,
eating and a whole bunch of things we do, including driving, kills animals.
Well you may say that is accidental. Well, you asked the question before, “If
anybody intentionally going out to kill an animal, isn’t that a worse thing
than, let’s say trying to farm beets or soy beans and realizing you’ll kill the
animals but you don’t rally want to.” Well, that’s a question ecological ethics
and people, and even in the animal rights people would have to think about
making that distinction. In other words, I don’t think, if you’re concerned
with the animal life, I don’t think you want to say that killing more animals
but unintentionally is morally superior to killing fewer animals intentionally.
Jack: This is a great place to end and
as always these conversations stop too soon. It is worth noting that the North
Dakota Constitution actually has the right to hunt, in the first section of the
first article. And so it is at least in the North Dakota culture countrified
into not only the law but the foundation of law. Larry, thank you so much for
joining us today; it’s a controversial topic, an interesting topic and it is I
think much more sophisticated and much deeper than we usually give it credit for
so thank you so much for joining us.
Larry: Thanks Jack, it’s been a real
pleasure!
Jack: You can write Larry at our email
address whyradioshow@und.edu and I’ll
be sure to pass along any messages. Read Larry’s essay, “Hunting, is a Moral
Good” the first paragraph and the summary is very overwhelming but then it
becomes quite accessible and I think everyone will really enjoy it.
On a different note, consider joining us at the Fire Hall
Theatre in Grand Forks on March 25th at 7 for the next
installment of The Institute for Philosophy and Public Life, Art and Democracy
Film Festival. We’ll be watching the musical HAIR and talking about it
after wards.
Coming up
next, we’ll have a listener submitted essay by Gene Wohlsdorf.
[Music Playing 46:08 - 46:28]
You’re
listening to Prairie Public, a news information and music service, in
partnership with the University of North Dakota and North Dakota State
University.
[Music Playing 46:37 – 46:40]
Jack: We’re back at WHY –
Philosophical Discussions on Everyday life at Prairie Public Radio here in
Fargo, North Dakota but it’s all over the State and many of you are listening at
whyradioshow.org. We have a listener submitted essay by Gene Wohlsdorf. Gene
is a North Dakota native, a retired English Teacher. He’s currently the
publisher of Rivers Edge Monthly and the Bismarck Mandan and a blogger at
viewfromthemiddle.org. He’s going to talk about his life as a teacher and the
way that philosophy emphasize the process of writing that he and his students
spent decades trying to master.
Gene: My name is Gene Wohlsdorf and for me
philosophy is the key to teaching and learning. My early religious training
left me with the impression that the life you’re after is the important matter,
that earthly life is corrupt, and that this existence is essentially a trivial
burdensome weight for eternity. I backslid in college, seized waiting to die
and started searching for meaning in life. I engaged in philosophy studies
which were interesting and evidently meaningful for some but I failed to
recognize their relevance to my life.
I became an English teacher in 1975 for the first three years
of my career; I knew I wasn’t doing my students much good. Then one day an
excellent textbook from one of my required continuing education classes revealed
to me the importance of philosophy in all humanity studies, particularly in
language arts. I was inspired! I developed a basic writing assignment. My
students composed essays explaining their personal philosophies by selecting and
defending their choice of at least three important life principles. In our
classroom discussions though, students challenge me as students will do. They
hounded me about my life principles. They wanted me to show them the way. I
had manoeuvred myself into a position, where I was forced to formulate and
publicly defend my own personal philosophy. I didn’t really have much to offer
by way of example. I didn’t have answers. I was over thirty years old and all
I could do was tell them the story of my search for meaning and my struggles
with principles.
I drew a compromise. I asked my students to use the basic
assignment a starting point and then tell me about their own struggles. I’m
retired from teaching now and I run into former students often, including
startling numbers of those I have written off as my greatest failures and almost
to a person, they thank me for dragging them through that ordeal of writing a
philosophy essay. I don’t deserve their gratitude. I never fully understood
what was happening in my classroom. I simply thought I was giving the kids an
authentic life task, primarily to exercise and sharpen their expression skills.
We all need help in our quests for meaning in life.
And we benefit in a deeply personal way when we learn to think about our lives
from a philosophical perspective. In this era of pervasive, perverted,
passionate bombast and downright meanness, lead at times by violent and self
justified radio talk show hosts. Some of us simply crave the nurturing music of
decent conversations. All of us need the content of your radio show in some
profound way.
Jack: Thank you Gene! As we can see
there’s a direct connection between this essay and the conversation we had with
Larry before it. Or we did judge student work or teachers’ work for that matter
based solely on grades and diplomas, we could never understand the incredible
powerful relationship Gene had with his students and the intimate relationship
all of them had with their own writing. The process of examining personal
philosophies is what makes the students seek Gene out after all these years and
speak so meaningfully about their experience in class. Gene and I suspect the
Bismarck Schools were worst for your retirement. It is worth mentioning that
not only did Gene write the essay, he recorded it himself on his home computer
and emailed it to the show saying most of our listeners can easily do as well.
I can’t tell you how happy I am to have an essay from someone I’ve never met;
I’ve never spoken to, just sent the essay on in. I’m happy to read all of your
submissions in advanced suggesting revisions when they might be helpful. I did
this with Gene and as an English Teacher, I don’t think he’ll mind me telling
you that and I’d be pleased to work with anybody who wants to contribute to the
show. If you’d like to submit an essay or just comment on Gene’s you can do so
via our email address at whyradioshow@und.edu and of
course, if you’re interested in hosting a listening party for next months’
episode. Send us information about that as well. We’ll be back to wrap up the
show right after this.
[Music Playing 51:28 – 51:41]
The Institute for Philosophy and
Public Life bridges the gap between academic philosophy and the general public.
Its mission is to translate between academics and non-academics, cultivating
discussions between philosophy professionals and others who have an interest in
the subject regardless of experience or credentials. The Institute is conceived
on the premise that anyone can do philosophy and that the subject relates to
everyone’s daily lives.
Visit us on the web at
philosophyinpubliclife.org.
The Institute for Philosophy and
Public Life – because there is no ivory tower
[Music
Playing 52:20 – 52: 27]
Jack: We’re back and our show is coming
to and end, thank you Larry Cahoone for talking to us, Gene Wohlsdorf for
offering your thoughts and audience members who’s contributed questions and
comments.
WHY will return on April 12th,
Easter Sunday at 5PM central, when our guest, Charles L. Griswold, Jr. will talk
about forgiveness, once again using philosophy to examine our day to day lives.
If you’re interested in hosting a listening party, let us
know we’ll help you advertise. If you’d like to join our mail list, write to us
at whyradioshow@und.edu and join
us for HAIR, the musical at the Fire Hall Theatre on March 25th
at seven in Grand Forks and of course to see our complete schedule, learn more
about the show at whyradioshow.org. Skip Wood is our Producer, Rochelle
Schnapps is our Intern. WHY’s theme song
[Inaudible 53:12] is the first track of
the album Lua e Sol by Mark Weinstein. More of his music can be found at jazzfluteweinstein.com and
myspace.com\markweinstein. I realize I’m his son but he’s a remarkable musician
anyway and you should listen to it and buy his music. It’s available at the
usual places on CD’s and MP3’s.
Come participate in the
WHY community and learn more about us in whyradioshow.org. Visit the
Institute for Philosophy and Public Life at philosophyinpubliclife.org and
consider reading, writing, talking or thinking about philosophy, it will make
your life better. WHY is broadcast on the second Sunday of every month.
It is funded by the Institute for Philosophy and Public Life, Prairie Public
Broadcasting, The North Dakota Humanities Council and the University of North
Dakota, College of Arts and Sciences. UND is a good place to do Philosophy,
visit us on the web but philosophy is everywhere you make it and I hope that we
have inspired you with some of our thoughts today.
