Dear HCN,
The last time I heard a
spiel like Marc Gaede’s letter, a male forester was telling me that
women shouldn’t be foresters because the cave MAN went out and
clubbed the mammoths (HCN, 3/1/99). Give me a
break.
Gaede chooses to define “hunting” only as
the tracking and killing of large animals by groups of males. But
the search for high-quality protein has never been limited to
males. In many so-called primitive societies, women did gather most
of the plant foods that actually fed the group, while men followed
large game animals around until one or the other of them dropped
dead; hard to do while lugging a baby around. It’s more efficient
to dig for roots and grab the odd monitor lizard for lunch. And I
would remind him that the hunter-gatherer societies of New Guinea,
for instance, are not, in fact, “uncluttered” by “complexities.”
They are incredibly complex, much more so than the generic
societies of the modern West.
Gaede asserts that
if an adolescent female is “coerced” into hunting, “it doesn’t work
in the long term.” What does that mean? That the adult female
ceases to hunt? That hunting females do not pass on this behavior
to their female offspring? I’m acquainted with lots of examples
that fly in the face of this sweeping statement. But, of course,
“For a female to hunt for the joy of killing, like a male, would
suggest a significant abnormality to the behavioral constant.”
Letting that “joy of killing” bit go by for a second, what he’s
saying is that women who hunt aren’t normal.
Are
men who dislike hunting (like Gaede, apparently) abnormal? Yet
hunting is part of a complex set of behaviors, called culture, and
not inherited. Young chimpanzees learn to stick a twig down a hole
and snare termites, or to rip a baby antelope apart, from other
chimpanzees. What they – and we – inherit is a tendency to develop
cultures and pass them on to our offspring.
After
spending six paragraphs telling us that hunting is a males-only
activity that developed to help humans survive, he predicts that
hunting will soon be regarded unfavorably because of a purported
association with violence. But if group hunting by males evolved as
a way to deflect intraspecies violence, why is it now
counterproductive? Is something else replacing it? Is he saying
that aboriginal Eskimo, or African pygmy, or Bushmen societies are
more violent than, say, the non-hunting populations of the Los
Angeles Basin? And which is more infused with the “joy of killing,”
a native Alaskan shooting a moose, or a rumble in the
Bronx?
Speaking of people who think they are
thinking, but aren’t, I’m reminded of the (male) archaeologist who
decided that the reindeer skulls in a group of Paleolithic burials
couldn’t possibly be hunting trophies because – guess what? – one
of the graves belonged to a woman. Presented with a letter from a
woman who hunts, Gaede discusses female hunters as “abnormal” and
reaffirms that hunting is the “realm of the male.” And women can’t
be priests because Jesus had testicles.
Pu-leeze.
Human cultures are highly valuable, and
guess what? They evolve, too. The herding and culling of domestic
livestock is a modified form of hunting. The herding dogs that help
manage flocks of sheep are direct descendants of the hunting dogs
who drove wild prey toward the hunters.
Now if
you’ll excuse me, I have to go out into the brisk winter wind with
a .22 rifle and a very sharp knife, to butcher a mutton. It’s
abnormal, I know, but it’s hard to eat them until they are dead and
skinned. My First World male companion does not want to be with me.
He will want to eat the leg roast we will have three days from now,
however.
Louise
Wagenknecht
Leadore,
Idaho
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline An abnormal hunter responds.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
