MEDITATIONS ON HUNTING

foreign because this film begins without the usual main title this leader is provided to enable you to focus the projector and to adjust the sound level before the actual picture begins after doing this if you will shut off the projector when this title Fades out you will be able to start your showing with a sharp picture and the correct sound level without further adjustment whenever the time arrives thank you allow me to introduce myself I'm the American Hunter I'm also a doctor sometimes I'm a truck driver and sometimes I'm a farmer I'm a banker a preacher a telephone lineman but as I said I'm a Hunter the American Hunter I'm more than 20 million of your fellow citizens who go afield each year in search of game ranging from Rabbits to Moose from Quail to geese and just as Americans are a varied lot so too are we Hunters a varied lot we're black we're White we're red we're rich and poor We're Young and old with most of us somewhere in between and sometimes we're female give some of us have been Ernest Hemingway and Zane Gray Daniel Boone Lewis and Clark and some of us have even been president of these United States While others of US helped as best we could to unite them so why is it that today 200 years later some Americans seem possessed by a fanatical urge to discredit both the sport of hunting and those of us who hunt vehemently proclaiming that hunting and Hunters along with their firearms have no place in the 20th century that this is no fit activity for civilized man is there nothing to be said in support of the views of more than 20 million Americans or of the additional millions of European Canadian Latin American African and Asian Hunters are we all the many many millions of us slobs and brutes with our Firearms mainly responsible for the crime and violence in our cities yet this is precisely what the editors of many of our leading newspapers and news magazines as well as most of the executives and commentators of the TV networks would have you believe often running faked and totally dishonest film sequences to prove they're outrageously biased points of view is there no intellectual justification for hunting today other than our own vague need to do so indeed there is perhaps far more than our pseudo-intellectual detractors will ever know about or care to admit this book I was about to read once again as the camera Came Upon me is the recently translated work of Spain's leading philosopher of the 20th century Jose Ortega egasette who occupied the chair of metaphysics at the University of Madrid for over a quarter of a century he was a member of parliament under the Spanish Republican government and is the author of The Revolt of the masses this material first written in 1942 has since been published in Spanish Japanese German and Dutch consider now meditations on hunting and what the great Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega e gassette had to say on this subject just as the leaping stack tempts the hunter the topic of hunting has often tempted me as a writer my intention is to clarify a little this activity in which devoted men engage with such scrupulousness constancy and dedication I say that life is given to us empty in itself life is inhibit because it is a simple being there so for man existing becomes a poetic task like the playwrights of the novelists that of inventing a plot for his existence giving it a character which will make it appealing forceps but the fact is that for almost all men the major part of life consists of obligatory occupations tasks which they would never do out of choice and what torments us about work is that by filling up our time with it it seems to take time from us life used for work does not seem to us to be really ours which it should be but on the country seems to be the annihilation of our real existence this is true to such an extent that the man who works does so with the more or less vague hope of one day winning through this work the liberation of his life of being able in time to stop working to start really living Ortega goes on to point out that while these obligatory occupations have changed radically over the centuries it is astonishing just how little change there's been in man's way of enjoying himself whenever he has a respite from hard work what kind of man has been least oppressed by work and the most easily able to engage in being happy obviously the aristocratic man now this greatly liberated man has always done the same things competed in physical activity raised horses gathered at parties the feature of which is usually dancing and engaged in conversation but before any of these and consistently more important than all of them has been hunting this is what Kings and Nobles and Men of wealth have always preferred to do and choose at random any period in the vast and continuous flow of history and you will also find that both men of the middle class and poor men have usually made hunting their happiest activity so we discover whether we want to or not with satisfaction or anger that the most appreciated enjoyable activity for the normal man has always been hunting so it took a philosopher to make clear to us that for centuries for both Aristocrats and working men alike the number one diversion or relaxation has always been hunting but how very little of a real effort of hunting is suggested in words like diversion relaxation entertainment a good Hunter's Way of hunting is a a hard task which demands much from man he must keep himself fit phase extreme fatigues accept Danger so in my presentation of hunting as what it is as a form of happiness I have avoided calling it pleasure happy activities it is clear are not merely Pleasures they are efforts and real sports are efforts it is not possible to distinguish work from sport by A Plus or a minors in fatigue the difference is that sport is an effort made completely freely for the pure enjoyment of it while work is an obligatory effort made with an eye to the prophet Ortega points out that the true Sportsman always honors his Hunter's code of ethics whether in solitude or under the watchful eye of a game warden unfortunately not all Hunters are true sportsmen but the illegal and unsporting actions of those few who are not still reflects unfavorably upon all of us for most of us hunting is surely far too important a part of our Lives to permit it to be jeopardized by those few who are not even serious Huntsmen now that we have realized that hunting is such a universal and impassioned sport that it belongs in the class of the purest forms of human happiness the realization only serves to increase our appetite for inquiring why this is so let us now work toward a definition of hunting of the essence of haunting you difficulties in defining the act of hunting originates in the fact that we are afraid of confusing the issue even more if we accept the most obvious thing in the world namely that haunting is not an exclusively human activity the cat hunts rats the lion hunts antelope the spider hunts flies the Sharks Prey Upon smaller fish the bird of prey hunts rabbits and doves hunting is therefore nor even peculiar to mammals hunting Is An Occurrence between two animals one of which is the agent and the other the subject one the Hunter and the other The Hunted in the course of hunting a fight may occur as in the case of a wild boar which when cornered turns and attacks the Hunter but this fight has all the incidental significance within the hunt and whatever grave consequences results it is only an anecdote embroidered on the main tapestry of hunting fighting is mutual aggression in hunting however the question is always that of one animal striving to hunt while the other strives not to be hunted the essential inequality between the prey and the hunter does not keep the pursuit animal from being able to surpass the pursuer in one endowment or another he may be faster or stronger or more alert however in the general balance of endowments the hunter will always have the ultimate advantage over The Hunted but vice versa if there is to be a hunt this superiority of the hunter of the prey cannot be absolute at this moment the unnoticed Hunter could easily have shot the rough Grouse on the ground before the preoccupied bird noticed him and took flight but then the bird would not have had its chance or the opportunity to utilize its characteristic defenses against the Hunter so the equation of the hunt would not have been complete if this man had shot the bird on the ground he would not truly have been haunting nor would he be a hunter it is not really essential to the hunt that it be successful on the contrary if the Hunter's efforts were always an inevitably triumphant it would not be hunting it would be something else the fascination of this sport lies in the fact that its conclusion is always problematical As Weapons became more and more effective man imposed more and more limitations on himself as the animal's rival in order to leave it free to practice its wildly defenses man opens this margin to the Beast deliberately all of his own free will he restrains his destructive power limits and regulates it the veto par Excellence is the closed season by which he strives to ensure the life of a species there is then in the hunt as a sport a a supremely free renunciation by a man of the overwhelming supremacy of his powers we seek and accept increased accuracy in our rifles and sights for they help reduce the likelihood of wounded game but we do not use the most fully automatic rifles or excessively large bore shotguns and for some type of game we have restricted our Sporting Arms to three shot capability indeed for sporting as well as aesthetic reasons some Sportsmen prefer single shot rifles and double barrel shotguns others go afield with bow and arrow or with muzzle loading Flintlock in percussion firearms because of the challenge offered by such primitive arms and it has been primarily through the efforts and money provided by hunters that such once endangered species is our pronghorn antelope and wild turkey are once again plentiful it is Hunters who are fighting to protect and improve waterfowl breeding areas and working hard to save the habitat of all Wildlife from the brutal onrush of our industrial civilization from bulldozer factories highways people and pollution of all types misuse of our land plus industrial and chemical poisoning not Hunters are the grave threat to our wildlife a Pity that the enemies of hunting don't back their professed love of wildlife with the same sort of funds that we Hunters do at this point we arrive at the Terminus the goal of hunting itself the hunter does not just come and go working in Valley and on cliffs in the last analysis he kills in utilitarian hunting the true purpose of a hunter while he seeks and values is the death of the animal everything else that he does is merely a means of achieving that end but in hunting as a sport this order of means to end is reversed to the Sportsman the death of the game is not what most interests him that is not his sole purpose what most interests him is everything that he had to do to achieve that death that is the hunt itself death is essential because without it there is no authentic hunting the killing of the animal is The Natural end of the hunt and the goal of hunting itself not necessarily of the Hunter to sum up one does not hunt in order to kill from the country one kills in order to have truly Hunted Ortega goes on to say if one would represent the Sportsman with the death of the animal as a gift he would refuse it consider that thought again if one were to present the Sportsman with the death of the animal as a gift he would refuse it how true that is that fact is what makes it so very difficult to convey the true meaning of the hunt to another person especially a non-hunter to see an elephant or a deer or even some geese being killed during the course of a hunting film invariably offends The Spectator to some extent even one who himself hunts simply because the viewer can never actually enter into the hunting relationship that existed during the reality of the hunt one therefore tends to reject even the filmic gift of the death of an animal hunting can never be a spectator sport for its true Mystic Force can only be experienced by the hunter in the act of hunting in all this the moral problem of hunting has not been resolved strictly speaking the essence of sportif hunting is not raising the animal to the level of man as Walt Disney has done in all of his cartoon and animal films but something much more spiritual than that a conscious and almost religious humbling of men which limits his superiority and lowers him towards the animal as I have already pointed out a fascinating mystery of nature is manifested in the Universal fact of hunting the inexorable hierarchy among living things every animal is in a relationship with regard to every other strict equalities exceedingly improbable and incongruous life is a fierce conflict hunting submergous man deliberately in that formidable mystery and therefore contains something of a religious right and emotion in which home which is paid to what is divine transcendant in the laws of nature the American Indian had this reverence for the game that he Hunted today we modern Americans usually take far too casual an attitude toward our Quarry dressing out a magnificent elk as though it were a mere barnyard animal or dropping a handsome game bird into the back of a pickup truck without even a Second Glance by demeaning the game we hunt we demean our sport and ultimately ourselves as Hunters why should we hesitate to honor a fine adversary which we have bested on the field in order to subsist early man had to dedicate himself wholly to hunting Paleolithic men the oldest that we know and the one who was the Supreme Hunter was a man while still an animal a beast whose intellect glowed from time to time in his intimate Darkness in these conditions he Hunted because early weapons were insufficient for killing most three animals hunting was either forcing game over a cliff or capturing it in traps or with plants and snares once the prey was caught he was beaten and speared to death but reason grows stronger man invents more and more effective weapons and techniques in this direction man grows further away from the animal raising his level further above that of the Beast what a long parallel lines atrophy of his instincts increases also and he grows away from his pristine intimacy with nature from being essentially a hunter he passes to being essentially a herdsman very soon he turns from hertzman to Farmer the use of his legs his lungs his senses of smell of direction of the Winds of the trails all diminish all this reduces his advantage over the animal the man who uses a rifle or shotgun today does not generally live continuously on planes or in forests rather he goes there only for a few days thus progress in Weaponry somewhat compensated for by regression in the capability of the Hunter yet when the moment of any haunt actually arrives reason does not interfere in any greater degree than its little primitive times this suggests that the general lines of the hunt are identical today with those of 5 000 years ago it doesn't take a man-killing tiger to set a modern Hunter's adrenaline to flowing while there's plenty of excitement in The Taking of a white-tailed deer or a black bear a mountain goat or even a Sharp Tailed Grouse and for a boy the bagging of a rabbit or a woodchuck or his first Mallard Drake is a moment to be remembered for the rest of his life thus the principle which inspires hunting for sport is that of artificially perpetuating that early state in which already human man still lived within the orbit of animal existence man submerged in the greater complexity of his present existence normally feels Nostalgia for the past and even more for Humanity's past than for his own individual past but there is no possible evasion man cannot return to any previous age he is assigned like it or not to a future that is always in fact new and different whether or not it is called progress but since it is impossible to completely transfer our life to a previous period of existence why not do so at least partially for a little while in order to rest from the painful situations of the Here and Now this would be the great diversion of today's man let us see what I can do for you where do you want to go do you want to be a good Bourgeois versa one of plutarch's men a 16th century Spanish nobleman a Christian in the style of Saint Augustine but do not bother to choose you cannot be any of these even for a minute any attempt to bring it off will end at best in an unsatisfactory farce a mere masquerade this is the recent Manhunt when you're fed up with a Troublesome presence with being very 20th century you take your gun whistle for your dog and go to the mountain and without further Ado give yourself the happiness during a few hours or a few days of being Paleolithic and man of all errors have been able to do the same without any difference except in the weapon and Floyd natural man is always there under the changeable historical man we can call him and he comes a little sleepy be numbed without all his early instincts but after all still alive when Modern Man sets out to hunt what he does is not a fiction not a farce it is essentially the very same thing that Paleolithic man did the hunter is at one and the same time a man of today and one of ten thousand years ago hunting alone permits us the greatest luxury of all the ability to enjoy a vacation from The Human Condition through an authentic immersion in nature but man cannot re-enter nature except by temporarily rehabilitating that part of himself which is still an animal and this in turn can only be achieved by placing himself in relation to another animal but there is no animal pure animal other than the wild one and the relationship with him is the hunt thus contemplated we can readily understand the fact that hunting has perpetually occupied the highest rank in the scale of man's happiness Ortega has not been the only philosopher with a genuine understanding of what hunting means to civilize man polybius one of the greatest minds of ancient Greece was a hunter so too was Plato Tolstoy and turgenev hunted the composer Verdi was an Ardent duck hunter in our own time the Winston Churchill the man who both made history and wrote about it enjoyed hunting Bernard Baruch advisor and confidante of presidents was a dedicated Quail Hunter no 20th century man need ever feel ashamed of his love for the noble sport of hunting for it has had the support and understanding of men whose intellectual Brilliance far outshines that of any editorial writer or columnist men whose cultural contributions clearly overshadow those of our TV Executives whose specialty is the Mindless violence and brutality that they peddle in the guise of entertainment so why should over 20 million Americans who hunt both for recreation and for food allow their lifestyle to be condemned by men satisfied with the feel of pavement beneath their feet for all the days of the year and to have their Horizons limited by offense of Office Buildings as Ortega said the hunter is the man of today and all the Yesterdays not merely a man for all seasons but a man for all centuries for all ages truly the Universal Man the indestructible man [Music] oh