“I’m talking about friendship. I’m talking about character…I’m talking about ethics,” Caspar says in that iconic opening scene of Miller’s Crossing. “Now if you can’t trust a fix, what can you trust? Right back in the jungle. On account of the breakdown of ethics. That’s why ethics is important. It’s the grease makes us get along, what separates us from the animals, beasts of burden, beasts of prey. Ethics.”
The firearm is the fix, as it were, in humane hunting. An ethical shot is at a practiced range in decent light and surroundings, aimed at a stationary animal which is presenting the shooter its profile, aimed at the vital organs, in the case of a deer, right behind the upper foreleg. Such a shot will give the animal, in all likelihood, the most humane death it can hope for. Any schlub who can park one eye behind the rear sights to line up the muzzle sight can also deliver a humane death.
Ah, therein lies the rub! Many hunters can quickly deliver humane deaths to many deer in short order, so most jurisdictions, for wildlife management reasons, limit the number of days hunters may use firearms to “harvest” deer. For reasons too vast for my intellect, it turns out that a lengthier firearms season is too disruptive to deer populations. On the other hand, the present season is not disruptive enough, resulting in bad things to habitat and animal. Hence, the archery season was born, and ethics rears its head to ask a few questions.
When we say “archery,” to what, exactly, are we referring? Bows come in every variety, arrows as well, and arrowheads. Arrowheads, in fact, are heavily regulated because some are designed in such a way as to potentially deliver an inhumane death. In any case, the variety of bows and arrows in use range from the technologically simple to the highly sophisticated. There is more technology in my bow and arrows than in any firearm in my ever-increasing arsenal.
The irony here is that the archery season was designed to be a lengthy season to slowly attenuate the deer population with a lot less effectiveness and noise, geared toward something vaguely termed as “fair chase.” I take great pleasure in archery season for precisely those reasons: it is far quieter and safer, there is less competition (or should be), and the chase is far more challenging, skewed entirely to the advantage of the animal. In order to ambush the creature, I have to be within thirty yards for an ethical kill; with a firearm, ambush is not necessary (though helpful), and an ethical kill with a shotgun (rifles are not legal for taking an animal where I hunt) is upwards to two-hundred yards. So many animals have escaped from my bow when they would have been an easy supper during firearm season.
Every time I have killed a deer with a bow, the shot proved to be ethical, thanks to the ultra-space age technology integrated into an ancient weapon. On the other hand, I have shot and missed, now twice in my hunting career, and both could have proved nightmares, both for the deer and for me. The first hit a sapling which was the same color as the deer, deflecting downward enough that the arrow grazed the animal’s belly, shaving some hair, but leaving its flesh untouched. The second was this season, as recorded here:
Journal entry
October 19
Rain today. Damp. I was sharpening my pencil with my buck knife, and I had to smile at myself while I was rummaging for the knife in my pouch on my waistbelt-and-suspenders system (for things I prefer to keep on my person, as opposed to the backpack system which is hanging next to me, for essentials in the woods, but not necessarily for my person), I remembered that had I forgotten my buck knife, I have a nice puukko knife in my backpack. Earlier today I had been browsing the internet for a woodsman’s Victorinox, which includes a saw which would be useful for sawing through cartilage and soft bone.
Mike first thing today handed me his range finder, a gadget to give you exact distances. You see, on Friday (see Part 3, concerning the fox), I shot at an 8-point buck of some majesty. It was a clean miss, so bad a miss that the “thunk” of the arrow between his legs merely startled him; it did not spook him into flight. When Mike and I found the arrow, with no more than a glance we both knew I had taken a shot out of my range. My range is 30-35 yards. The shot I took (give me just one second while I look through this gadget) was exactly 40.6 yards. That’s not quite an unethical shot, but it is definitely in the gray area between ethical and unethical. It was an unpracticed shot, which accounts for it being so low.
I won’t take that shot again.
“Real outdoorsmen use whatever gear is available,” he wrote from the comfort of a tree stand, safely harnessed to a tree with a nylon contraption, nestled in some lightweight, carbon-absorbing, rain-repelling, low-insulation-value, padded camouflage gear, while he watches a hawk hunt for field mice. The lowest-technology thing on me is this notebook and pencil, and I feel utter conviction that I need more gear. Oh, my boots. I forgot about my boots. They are 100% leather uppers, rubber-soled, hand-stitched Siberian hunting moccasins called Ichigi boots. They’re wool-lined, and they’re awesome for stalking.
Like I said: damp today. I’m going to eat an apple and enjoy the rain.
Commentary
Some of us bowhunters stay on the ground with our self-made recurve longbows, shooting wooden arrows and two-edged arrowheads, a most primitive mode for hunting, participating in this primordial activity with our pre-firearm ancestors. How is this ethical? My compound bow shoots an arrow at over 300 feet per second. The arrowhead is three-edged, and a true shot will cause the animal to bleed to death very quickly. A recurve bow shoots an arrow at 225 feet per second, much slower, contributing to more room for error. The compound bow is replete with technological wizardry to help me aim and release a true shot. The primitive recurve bow relies solely on the hunter’s experienced eye.
I admire primitive-style hunters. I intend to adopt that style someday, only after much practice. But it’s a question of ethics, what separates us from the animals. Without ethics, we’re right back in the jungle, and we may as well tear apart our prey as a coyote, bear, or mountain lion might do, eating the entrails of the animal while it’s still alive. This gerrymandering of Ludditism presents quite an ethical problem in hunting. How is it “fair chase” when you have a greater chance of wounding an animal, so that it dies of an infection, or dies of a slow bleed from the gut?
I wonder if these questions extend to those who prefer to live far down the long tail of technology, including myself, preferring many things in daily life which, technologically, set me at a disadvantage. I have my smartphone, but I won’t use it to check email. I have Thinsulate-lined clothing for winter, but I prefer heavier wool clothing. I’ve had X-Rays, CAT scans, and MRIs. I take pharmaceuticals to treat chronic ailments. Only the most-advanced medical technology for yours truly, please and thank you. I live in a city, but I envy the early-retirement homesteaders staking out a claim on some secluded mountainside. I’d go off the grid, but only if I could coax the internet into my cabin somehow. Candlelight is great, but the candlepower in my screen projector brings alive Tom Cruise in his latest Mission Impossible hijinks with the brightest explosions and most fabulous color contrasts when a little blood is spilled on the chassis of a black motorbike.
Not all these are the same, are they? Some are personal preferences; others are culturally-conditioned sensibilities, stemming from that age-old desire to stop the change technological advances bring, even as we read Henry David Thoreau complain about life in town from his nature walks on Walden Pond. Of course, he wore a path into his pristine environs, making him realize he had to go back to town and contend with it all, all the people, all the change, all the unpleasantness that is the human condition.
That brings us back to ethics. I suppose a moral gerrymandering of my personal Ludditism can become disciplined if I filter that jagged line through the lens of the human condition. When my Ludditism leaves me at a disadvantage, have I caused my neighbor to be at a disadvantage? Under what conditions would this technology and the change it brings be better left untapped? What about this other technology? Is this change a good change for me and for my neighbor? I imagine throughout the process, many will help me judge whether less is less, more is more, and, most importantly, whether less is more or more is less. It’s a question of ethics.
