Ethical Hunting Quotes

Our culture has become hooked on the quick-fix, the life hack, efficiency. Everyone is on the hunt for that simple action algorithm that nets maximum profit with the least amount of effort. There’s no denying this attitude may get you some of the trappings of success, if you’re lucky, but it will not lead to a calloused mind or self-mastery. If you want to master the mind and remove your governor, you’ll have to become addicted to hard work. Because passion and obsession, even talent, are only useful tools if you have the work ethic to back them up.

Most of us believe that eating meat is natural because humans have hunted and consumed animals for millennia. And it is true that we have been eating meat as part of an omnivorous diet for at least two million years (though for the majority of this time our diet was still primarily vegetarian). But to be fair, we must acknowledge that infanticide, murder, rape, and cannibalism are at least as old as meat eating, and are therefore arguably as 'natural'--and yet we don't invoke the history of these acts as justification for them. As with other acts of violence, when it comes to eating meat, we must differentiate between natural and justifiable.

Morality—like velocity—is relative. The determination of it depends on what the objects around you are doing. All one can do is measure one's position in relation to them; never can one measure one's velocity or morality in terms of absolutes.

In an earlier stage of our development most human groups held to a tribal ethic. Members of the tribe were protected, but people of other tribes could be robbed or killed as one pleased. Gradually the circle of protection expanded, but as recently as 150 years ago we did not include blacks. So African human beings could be captured, shipped to America, and sold. In Australia white settlers regarded Aborigines as a pest and hunted them down, much as kangaroos are hunted down today. Just as we have progressed beyond the blatantly racist ethic of the era of slavery and colonialism, so we must now progress beyond the speciesist ethic of the era of factory farming, of the use of animals as mere research tools, of whaling, seal hunting, kangaroo slaughter, and the destruction of wilderness. We must take the final step in expanding the circle of ethics. -

The Good of the People was a laudable enough goal, but in denying a man’s soul, an enduring part of his being, Marxism stripped away the foundation of human dignity and individual value. It also cast aside the objective measure of justice and ethics which, he decided, was the principal legacy of religion to civilized life.

Everyone is on the hunt for that simple action algorithm that nets maximum profit with the least amount of effort. There’s no denying this attitude may get you some of the trappings of success, if you’re lucky, but it will not lead to a calloused mind or self-mastery. If you want to master the mind and remove your governor, you’ll have to become addicted to hard work. Because passion and obsession, even talent, are only useful tools if you have the work ethic to back them up.

A lion is born knowing how to hunt, but has to learn how to hunt well.

[At the scene of a murder] The cats' bloodthirst was normal; it was the way God had made them. They were hunters, they killed for food and to train their young--well maybe sometimes for sport. But this violent act by some unknown human had nothing to do with hunting--for a human to brutally maim one of the own kind out of rage or sadism or greed was, to Joe and Dulcie (the cats), a shocking degradation of the human condition. To imagine that vicious abandon in a human deeply distressed Dulcie; she did not like thinking about humans that way.

Many people who think nothing of buying factory-farmed ham or chicken from a supermarket are quick to condemn hunting; yet hunting is more defensible than factory farming.

A philosopher once assured me he had persuaded his cat to become a vegan. Believing he was joking, I asked how he had achieved this feat. Had he supplied the cat with mouse-flavoured vegan titbits? Had he introduced his cat to other cats, already practising vegans, as feline role models? Or had he argued with the cat and persuaded it that eating meat is wrong? My interlocutor was not amused. I realized he actually believed the cat had opted for a meat-free diet. So I ended our exchange with a question: did the cat go out? It did, he told me. That solved the mystery. Plainly, the cat was feeding itself by visiting other homes and hunting. If it brought any carcasses home – a practice to which ethically undeveloped cats are sadly all too prone – the virtuous philosopher had managed not to notice them.

the food movement needs people who can do the dirty work: hunt wild boar, gut deer, eat invasive species, try insects, raise animals the right way, and pay for ethically raised meat. That role falls to us.

the most ethical option is not to stop hunting animals, but to re-enter the food chain and replace the predators that we displaced. To be good stewards of such ecosystems, we have an ethical obligation to become surrogate predators.

During the Great Forgetting, it came to be understood among the people of our culture that life in “the wild” was governed by a single, cruel law known as the Law of the Jungle, or kill or be killed. In recent decades, by the process of looking (instead of merely assuming), ethologists have discovered this “kill or be killed” law is a fiction. In fact, a system of laws-universally observed- preserves the tranquility of the jungle, protects species and even individuals and promotes the well being of the community as a whole. The system has been called, the peacekeeping law, the law of limited competition, and animal ethics. Briefly, the law of limited competition is this: You may compete to the fullest extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down your competitors, or destroy their food source, or deny them access to food. In other words, you can compete but you may not wage war on your competitors.

He imagined the world without men. Cities would be reclaimed by nature and overgrown until, hundreds of years hence, they would look much like the mysterious ruins sticking out of the jungles of Asia and South America. Ruins, relics, no more. He honestly did not believe the entire race would be exterminated, just the lion’s share. What was left would be very little different from Neolithic man—hunters and scavengers. Beasts that would rob from each other, rape, murder, and hunt each other down as prey. Essentially, what men were now, but without anything but the most rudimentary tribal traditions to support them and absolutely no laws to prevent them from acting like the slavering beasts they indeed were. Hunters and killers, apex predators that would abandon their churches to worship in the forest and give praise to the cycles of the moon. Given time, things like ethics and morality and even higher culture itself would be forgotten.

While Lucretia [Mott]'s public life was inspirational, I also want to to discuss her private life: her quiet actions. I agree with Lucretia's ethic that private acts of integrity are the foundation of a more just and more equitable society. She taught us that small moments of love in action can add up to potent agents of change.

their full potential? This is what I’d tell them: Our culture has become hooked on the quick-fix, the life hack, efficiency. Everyone is on the hunt for that simple action algorithm that nets maximum profit with the least amount of effort. There’s no denying this attitude may get you some of the trappings of success, if you’re lucky, but it will not lead to a calloused mind or self-mastery. If you want to master the mind and remove your governor, you’ll have to become addicted to hard work. Because passion and obsession, even talent, are only useful tools if you have the work ethic to back them up.

It was like explaining colour to a blind man, describing the lust of the hunter to someone who was born without it. Duff listened in agonized silence as Sean tried to find the words for the excitement that makes a man's blood sing through his body, that heightens his senses and allows him to lose himself in an emotion as old as the urge to mate. Sean tried to show him how the nobler and more beautiful was the quarry, the stronger was the compulsion to hunt and hill it, that it had no conscious cruelty in it but was rather an expression of love: a fierce possessive love. A devouring love that needed the complete and irrevocable act of death for its consummation. By destroying something, a man could have it always as his own: selfish perhaps, but then instinct knows no ethics. It was all very clear to Sean, so much a part of him that he had never tried to voice it before and now he stumbled over the words, gesticulating in helpless inarticulateness, repeating himself, coming at last to the end and knowing by the look on Duff's face that he had failed to show it to him.

Our culture has become hooked on the quick fix, the life hack, efficiency. Everyone is on the hunt for that simple action algorithm that nets maximum profit with the least amount of effort. There’s no denying this attitude may get you some of the trappings of success, if you’re lucky, but it will not lead to a calloused mind or self-mastery. If you want to master the mind and remove your governor, you’ll have to become addicted to hard work. Because passion and obsession, even talent, are only useful tools if you have the work ethic to back them up.

Aldo Leopold’s land-ethic philosophy to how it manages the land, an ethic that involves living sustainably on the land, coexisting with large predators, and “utilizing resources, such as game, hunting, ranching . . . so the landscape benefits, the wildlife benefits, and humans benefit, and future generations of people benefit as well.

Nonhuman primates have been crowded out of diminishing forests, hunted for food or “medicine,” kidnapped for the lucrative pet/tourist trade, and bred for science. As a result, every primate species on the planet—aside from human beings—is either endangered or threatened.

Cyberattacks on nonmilitary, physical infrastructure, Lee believed, were a class of weapon that ought to be considered, along with cluster bombs and biological weapons, simply too dangerous and uncontrollable for any ethical nation to wield.

If we admire and enjoy the flourishing of human life, we shall naturally delight also in the flourishing of animal life. The prominence of this factor will affect the kind of concern we have for animals. Wild animals suffer pain and inflict pain on one another in the ordinary course of the struggle for survival; we may sympathize with this suffering, but any attempt to interfere is likely to do more harm than good. We can do more about the suffering that human beings cause to wild animals directly, when they hunt them for food or for sport; but even this may well be seen as less important than the suffering they cause indirectly, through pollution. With domesticated animals it is perhaps factory farming that involves the greatest impoverishment of life, but there are many other forms of cruelty, including frivolous 'scientific' tests and experiments.

Despite the insistence of our denial, immoral decisions will always leave us stalking ourselves. And if we are sufficiently foolish to make enough of those kinds of decisions, it will take very little time for the hunt to be successful.

Skywoman’s first people lived by their understanding of the Original Instructions, with ethical prescriptions for respectful hunting, family life, ceremonies that made sense for their world.

The Romans didn’t base their laws on a morality derived from a Judeo-Christian ethic. Roman laws had more to do with what was beneficial for Rome and Romans.

Our culture has become hooked on the quick fix, the life hack, efficiency. Everyone is on the hunt for that simple action algorithm that nets maximum profit with the least amount of effort. There's no denying this attitude may get you some of the trappings of success, if you're lucky, but it will not lead to a calloused mind or self-mastery. If you want to master the mind and remove your governor, you'll have to become addicted to hard work. Because passion and obsession, even talent, are only useful tools if you have the work ethic to back them up. My work ethic is the single most important factor in all of my accomplishments. Everything else is secondary, and when it comes to hard work, whether in the gym or on the job, the 40% Rule applies. p249

Hunting, works for conservation like slavery works for economic growth. A guaranteed but morally awful way to achieve a goal.

Notions of ethics—the right or wrong of things—must logically begin by asking, What kind of animal is the human being? What are we naturally meant to eat? Again, paleo-anthropology tells us that humans have always eaten meat. From Kleiber's Law—which demonstrates that the chief metabolic difference between humans and our primate ancestors is the tradeoff between brain and gut size—to archaeological digs with piles of scavenged bones, to isotope analysis of fossilized teeth: everything points to an evolution where the hunting and eating of nutritionally dense animals was key in human survival and its ultimate success in becoming a nutritional generalist. 

Twentysomething years later, I no longer hunt over bait at all. My reasons for this are not based entirely on ethics. Instead I am not interested in using artificial bait becsuse I am not interested in hunting animals that are doing artificial things. To go out and find a deer by solving the riddle of its natural patterns is far more enticing to me than finding a deer by interrupting those patterns. Baiting is not, in my opinion, a type of hunting that fosters an intelligent understanding of animals. But if you enjoy it, go ahead.

The hunt for more dramatic (as they’re often described) images drives the photographic enterprise, and is part of the normality of a culture in which shock has become a leading stimulus of consumption and source of value. “Beauty will be convulsive, or it will not be,” proclaimed André Breton. He called this aesthetic ideal “surrealist,” but in a culture radically revamped by the ascendancy of mercantile values, to ask the images be jarring, clamorous, eye-opening seems like elementary realism as well as good business sense. How else to get attention for one’s product or one’s art? How else to make a dent when there is incessant exposure to images, and overexposure to a handful of images seen again and again? The image as shock and the image as cliché are two aspects of the same presence.

Men and women were created in pairs and roamed the world searching for their match. Man was made to hunt, to find nourishment not only to feed the hunger in their bellies but the hunger in their souls.

Along came Aldo Leopold. He was a U.S. Forest Service ranger who initially supported Pinchot’s use-oriented management of forests. A seasoned hunter, he had long believed that good game management required killing predators that preyed on deer. Then one afternoon, hunting with a friend on a mountain in New Mexico, he spied a mother wolf and her cubs, took aim, and shot them. “We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes,” Leopold wrote. “There was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch. I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, no wolves would mean a hunter’s paradise. But after seeing the fierce green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.” The wolf’s fierce green fire inspired Leopold to extend ethics beyond the boundaries of the human family to include the larger community of animals, plants, and even soil and water. He enshrined this natural code of conduct in his famous land ethic: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” Carol inscribed Leopold’s land ethic in her journal when she was a teenager and has steadfastly followed it throughout her life. She believes that it changes our role from conqueror of the earth to plain member and citizen of it. Leopold led the effort to create the first federally protected wilderness area: a half million acres of the Gila National Forest in New Mexico was designated as wilderness in 1924. Leopold had laid the groundwork for a national wilderness system, interconnected oases of biodiversity permanently protected from human development.

Experimenting on the blending of human DNA with a multitude of other animal species to develop the perfect fighting chimera… Gee…” Tom said, sarcastically, “it’s hard to imagine why an ethics committee might have a problem with that.

This is why I’ve always insisted, for example, that if you’re going to start talking about “AI ethics,” you had better be talking about how you are going to improve on the current situation using AI, rather than just keeping various things from going wrong. Once you adopt criteria of mere comparison, you start losing track of your ideals—lose sight of wrong and right, and start seeing simply “different” and “same.” I would also argue that this basic psychological difference is one of the reasons why an academic field that stops making active progress tends to turn mean. (At least by the refined standards of science. Reputational assassination is tame by historical standards; most defensive-posture belief systems went for the real thing.) If major shakeups don’t arrive often enough to regularly promote young scientists based on merit rather than conformity, the field stops resisting the standard degeneration into authority. When there’s not many discoveries being made, there’s nothing left to do all day but witch-hunt the heretics.

Hunting is one of the last ways we have to exercise our passion to belong to the earth, to be part of the natural world, to participate in the ecological drama, and to nurture the ember of wildness within ourselves.