The Fair Chase

Introduction

The Nature of the Beast

IT ALL BEGAN, AS THEY SAY, LONG AGO. IN THE MID-EIGHTEENTH century, Scottish economist Adam Smith put forward a historical perspective known as the four stages theory. Humanity, he said, had advanced initially through an age of hunting, followed by an age of herding and then one of agriculture, before entering the age of commerce. Smith’s theory was purely conjectural; but in 1925, Australian anatomist Raymond Dart informed the world that the fossil skull of a child with a combination of apish and human features, found in a cave in Taung, South Africa, belonged to an extinct species of hominid that “had walked upright, with its hands free for the manipulation of tools and weapons.” Dart, who named the species Australopithecus africanus, noted that South Africa’s open veldt country, where the Taung Child had been found, was inhabited by “dangerous beasts” and quite far from the forested areas that were usually the home of apes and chimpanzees. The challenges of survival in this semiarid plain had led Australopithecus, who had lived 2.5 million years ago, to develop bipedalism, a larger brain, and an active interest in new sources of food, the result a struggle involving “swiftness and stealth… a fierce and bitter mammalian competition” and a “laboratory… essential to this penultimate phase of human evolution.”¹

Dart’s claims about this missing link between man and ape, which he described in the February 7, 1925, issue of the British journal Nature, were not immediately accepted, but the idea that Australopithecus africanus had hunted and killed other animals would gain considerable credence and scientific consensus over time. Some of the baboon skulls he examined from the site had been bludgeoned, suggesting the animals were killed by a club—most likely, Dart speculated, the large leg bone of an antelope—and then butchered with other sharpened animal bones. “Man’s predecessors differed from living apes in being confirmed killers,” Dart wrote in a later series of papers (The Predatory Transition from Ape to Man [1953]). “Carnivorous creatures, [they] seized living quarries by violence, battered them to death, tore apart their broken bodies, dismembered them limb from limb, slaking their ravenous thirst with the hot blood of victims and greedily devouring livid writhing flesh.”²

Unpleasant stuff. Yet Dart’s imaginative theories proved a starting point for an extensive conversation among anthropologists over what has become known as the hunting hypothesis, the belief that early man’s long experience as a hunter, said to have occupied at least 99 percent of his prehistory in contrast to his 1 percent as an agriculturalist, explains his physiological development as well as his social organization. The pursuit of ever-larger game would have necessitated not only greater individual physical and mental powers, but the ability to coordinate with others to manage the hunt itself as well as the eventual sharing and preservation of meat. The adaptation to hunting, “in its total social, biological, technical, and psychological dimensions, has dominated the course of human evolution for hundreds of thousands of years,” anthropologists Sherwood Washburn and Chet Lancaster concluded in 1968. “In a very real sense our intellect, interests, emotions, and basic social life—all are evolutionary products of [this] success.” Hunting not only developed civilization, Washburn and Lancaster posited, but its uniformity, for “the selection pressures of the hunting and gathering way of life were so similar and the result so successful that populations of Homo sapiens are still fundamentally the same everywhere.”³

Both the hunting hypothesis and the suggestion that, on account of this heritage, modern man is hard-wired as a killer, found full articulation in the aftermath of the Second World War and the beginnings of the atomic age. Playwright, screenwriter, and amateur anthropologist Robert Ardrey produced a series of articles on the topic for Life magazine, as well as several books, beginning with the influential African Genesis in 1961. Ardrey argued that violence had been so great a part of man’s makeup through the eons that it remained his key behavioral constant, a proposition that seemed justified by the upheavals of the 1960s—protests, assassinations, a genocidal war—connections made explicit in Why Are We in Vietnam (1967), Norman Mailer’s short, hallucinatory novel about sport hunting and American machismo. The subject of the human capacity for violence—its origins and too frequent casual commission in the modern world—would also be plumed in Truman Capote’s best-selling In Cold Blood (1966) and on-screen in such films as Bonnie and Clyde (1967), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Easy Rider (1969), Straw Dogs (1971), and Badlands (1973). “Millions of moviegoers in 1968 absorbed Dart’s whole theory in one stunning image from Stanley Kubrick’s film ‘2001,’” notes anthropologist Matt Cartmill, “in which an australopithecine who has just used a zebra femur to commit the world’s first murder hurls the bone gleefully into the air—and it turns into an orbiting spacecraft.”⁴

The hunting hypothesis has subsequently been challenged by those unwilling to ascribe modern man’s violent tendencies wholly to hunting genetics while ignoring other possible explanations—social inequality, and desperation borne of injustice, hunger, or displacement. Some researchers have also rejected as overly simplistic that part of the hunting hypothesis that suggests man hunted, developing superior athletic and spatial reasoning skills, while woman cooked, gathered, and nurtured the young. If, as many believe, a large share of early man’s diet was vegetable, then gathering, not hunting, was the primary activity and a major developmental aspect of our species, one in which women likely played a significant role. The same biological and intellectual changes attributed to hunting, such as bipedalism, cooperation, and the crafting of better tools, would have also been required for the success of primitive gathering societies. Indeed, agriculture, some argue, is a greater challenge and likely a stronger civilizing force than seminomadic hunting. “It is the farmer, not the hunter,” notes scholar Mary Zeiss Stange, “who approaches the world of nature as something over which he must seize control.”⁵

Yet the sense that hunting is something we are meant for remains an article of faith. Hunters characterize what they do as deeply instinctual—a way of being in and with nature that offers a connection to a life force so profound it defies articulation, a feeling of renewal found nowhere else, the “bliss that passes all understanding.” For the liberal Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, one of hunting’s patron thinkers, man’s longing to return to the hunt stems from the fact that it was as a hunter that he initially awakened to his potential mastery of the world. Every subsequent civilizing process has taken him away from that awakening, which the modern hunter reenters “by temporarily rehabilitating that part of himself which is still an animal.” This can be experienced “only by placing himself in relation to another animal… If we want to enjoy that intense and pure happiness, we have to seek the company of the surly beast, descend to his level, feel emulation toward him, pursue him. This subtle rite is the hunt.”⁶

IT APPEARS THAT HUMANS VERY EARLY ON ISOLATED FROM THEIR need to hunt the intense thrill of pursuing live game; from antiquity through the Middle Ages, hunting evolved as sport. In seventeenth-and eighteenth-century America, outside of a few Virginia gentlemen (such as George Washington) who rode to hounds, there was little sport hunting per se. Most was based on subsistence or profits. With the growth of cities and industry, however, the sporting impulse awoke. Promoted as a means of restoring virility and verve to urban men stuck in the doldrums of office, shop, or mill, and reflecting a new courage and curiosity about nature, American sport hunting drew on diverse influences—the “true sportsmanship” ethos of the British hunt, the deadeye heroics of frontiersmen Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, and the forest knowledge and stealth of the Native American. Literary heroes, such as Natty Bumppo, inspired it as well, as did, eventually, such mountain men as Jim Bridger and the legendary buffalo hunter William “Buffalo Bill” Cody. Poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, who took his first crack at a deer in the Adirondacks in 1858, termed the nation’s new love of the invigorating outdoors “the joyous change.”

One notable feature of the sport was its adherence to an evolving code of ethics that would eventually be known as fair chase, the idea that hunted animals must have a chance to evade or flee their pursuers, and that they were to be taken only under certain sporting rules and conditions. By the 1870s, the call of the gentlemanly hunt was something of a worldview, a faith endorsed by magazines, newspapers, and hundreds of new sportsmen’s groups, and even preached from the nation’s pulpits. Newly armed and outfitted Americans took to the woods.

Such editorial enthusiasm was matched by commerce. Along with sporting clubs and shooting societies came Pendleton, Abercrombie & Fitch, Remington, Smith & Wesson, and a bounty of sports-related items—from heavy boots and jackets (with deep pockets for shotgun shells) to canoes, drinking flasks, and wooden duck decoys. Also for sale were hunting excursions by rail or steamboat and the services of innkeepers, guides, and taxidermists. A robust literature of hunting stories, memoirs, and humorous tales appeared, accompanied by what would become known as “the hook and bullet press,” sports-related periodicals whose news and advice covered everything from fishing lures to the kinds of retrievers best suited for grouse hunting.

Remarkably, even from the sport’s earliest days in America, voices urged the need to respect and protect wildlife’s seasons of procreation, and cautioned against the decimation of hunted species. In the 1880s, organized efforts coalesced through sportsmen’s clubs and the advocacy of influential periodicals, most notably Forest and Stream, to safeguard wildlife and natural places, from which grew a broader application of restraint and stewardship—the conservation movement—as well as the political will to place limits on hunting and create America’s first wildlife preserves and national parks.

The growth of the sport’s popularity, its emergence as a subject in the arts—in literature, painting, and commercial applications, such as furniture carvings and wallpaper design—and the channeling of hunting’s energies into a more genial “capturing” of the West through photography, paleontology, and conservation, belong to an eventful historical process. Yet hunting has largely been neglected as a topic of historical inquiry in America. This may reflect the reduced participation in the sport over the last half-century and its abandonment by elites, as well as evolving views of nature and people’s changing values regarding diet, animal ethics, the use of firearms, and what constitutes recreation. Such cultural shifts allow what I call “the Age of Fair Chase,” the decades between the post–Civil War era and the Eisenhower 1950s, in which sport hunting was a widely accepted pastime and family tradition, to more readily come into focus.

This book introduces many of that story’s leading protagonists and relates how they and the animals they pursued came to influence American society and imagination. It asks why the sport was promoted so assiduously and taken up by so many people; why it clicked so readily with journalists, artists, scientists, and clergy. It explores the ways hunting informed advances in weapons design and the natural sciences, and tells the parallel story of the growth of animal protection societies and changing public attitudes regarding extinction, evolution, and what historian William Cronon calls “the autonomy of nonhuman nature.” Finally, it examines hunting’s links to notions of manhood and self-reliance, while also weighing present-day cultural battles regarding guns and animal rights.⁷

America’s love affair with sport hunting led to enhanced appreciation of the great outdoors, and to public acceptance of the need for management of wildlife populations and wilderness; but it also contributed to the wholesale slaughter of birds and animal species, and nourished the myth that the hunters’ dominance over living prey prepared them uniquely to be also conquerors of other men. “We are a nation of hunters and frequenters of the forest, plains, and waters,” President Theodore Roosevelt once declared. “No form of labor is harder than the chase, and none is so fascinating or so excellent a training-school for war.” Some hunter-conservationists, most notoriously Boone and Crockett Club member Madison Grant, extended their nature stewardship to irresponsible pseudo-scientific speculation about the alleged inferiority of racial and ethnic categories of humans.

My approach has been to not only look back, but to see where this historically beloved form of recreation has brought us. Does the legacy of hunting have anything to say about current wildlife management issues, such as the government-funded eradication of animal pests, efforts to control deer populations, the designation of endangered species, or the controversial reintroduction of large animal predators? Can the moral compass of fair chase, forged in America’s rustic past, offer any direction now for environmental crises global in scale? What of the hunter himself? Has his sport been made an anachronism, replaced by newer forms of outdoor recreation? How did the respected weekend sportsman of a half-century ago become the reviled trophy hunter of today? And if hunting has moved from mainstream to marginal, what can be said of its devotees—the approximately 4 to 6 percent of Americans who are licensed hunters, as well as the upward of 70 percent of nonhunters who say they approve of it as a legitimate sport?⁸

Ultimately, can we ever fully understand our nation’s character if we do not begin to recognize the indelible mark left upon it by our love of the hunt? The Fair Chase will explore possible answers as it relates the story of the country’s most enduring romance.