Hunting

• 1. Introduction

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  Hunting is older than our species. The oldest undisputed evidence dates to the Early Pleistocene, consistent with the emergence of Homo erectus about 1.7 million years ago. Long before that, the behaviour may have already existed. Chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, hunt in troops where bands of beta males follow an alpha, a habit that may reach back to a common ancestor 5 million years ago. So when did the chase stop being mere survival and start becoming something else. A sport of kings. A point of class division. A tool of conservation that critics call cruelty. The practice of seeking, pursuing, capturing, and killing wild animals has fed families, decorated palace walls, and pushed species toward extinction. It has also, in a few corners of the world, brought some of them back. The word itself has wandered far from the forest, surfacing in phrases like treasure hunting and bargain hunting and hunting down corruption.

• 2. From Scavengers To Spears

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  Louis Binford argued in 1986 that early hominids were not hunters at all. Studying the skeletal remains of consumed animals, he concluded they were mostly scavengers. Blumenschine, the same year, proposed confrontational scavenging, where early humans challenged and scared off other predators from a kill to seize protein-rich meat. The early hominid ancestors of humans were probably frugivores or omnivores, eating flesh gathered from carcasses rather than caught.

  Stone spearheads dated as early as 500,000 years ago were found in South Africa, but wood rarely survives the centuries. The earliest surviving wooden hunting spears, the Schoningen spears found in 1976 in Germany, date to about 300,000 years ago and are linked to Homo heidelbergensis. The first spears were toughened by burning their tips in fire.

  By 15,000 BC, hunters used wooden and bone spear-launchers to add force and distance, devices often adorned with carvings of animals. The atlatl, a spear-thrower, appeared before 30,000 years ago, and the bow around 18,000 years ago. The dog was domesticated about 15,000 years ago, sharpening the hunt further. At the Andean site of Wilamaya Patjxa in the Puno District of Peru, 9,000-year-old remains of a female hunter were found beside projectile points and animal-processing tools.

• 3. The Sport Of Kings

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  On ancient reliefs from Mesopotamia, sculptors carved kings hunting lions from war chariots, royalty staging the chase as a kind of theatre. The cultural weight of hunting in early societies shows in its gods: the horned Cernunnos, the Greek Artemis, the Roman Diana, goddess of the hunt. Euripides told of Artemis and Actaeon, a tale that reads as a warning against disrespecting prey or boasting too loudly.

  When hunting shifted from subsistence to selection, two roles emerged: the trained specialist hunter, and hunting as a pastime for an upper class. Dangerous quarry like lions and wild boars, often pursued on horseback or from a chariot, served a purpose much like tournaments, letting the aristocracy rehearse the skills of war in peacetime.

  In most of medieval Europe, the upper class held sole rights to hunt within a feudal territory. The Robin Hood legends turn on this: one of the chief charges against the outlaws is that they hunt the King's deer. Settlers in Anglophone colonies broke from that, glorying democratically in hunting open to all. The medieval thinker Johannes Scotus Eriugena counted hunting among the seven mechanical arts.

• 4. Hunters With Four Legs

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  The dog became the hunter's most important companion, used to find, chase, retrieve, and sometimes kill game. Domestication created a symbiotic bond: though dogs can and do survive ferally, when raised by humans they tend to defer to human control in exchange for shelter, food, and support. They let people pursue prey that would otherwise be too difficult or dangerous to take.

  Breeds were shaped for precise tasks, a history written into names like pointer and setter. Waterfowl are hunted with retrievers such as the Labrador Retriever, the Golden Retriever, the Chesapeake Bay Retriever, and the Brittany Spaniel. Game birds are flushed by spaniels like the English Springer Spaniel and the various Cocker Spaniels.

  Ferrets and birds of prey joined the dog in animal-aided hunting, giving rise to venery, coursing, falconry, and ferreting. In England and Wales, the Hunting Act 2004 banned the hunting of wild mammals with dogs, including fox, hare, deer, and mink. The act carries exceptions, and activists have made numerous attempts to revoke it over the two decades since.

• 5. Faith And The Hunt

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  Shiva carries the name Mrigavyadha, the deer-slayer, the one who destroys animal instincts in human beings. Hindu scriptures describe hunting as both an occupation and a sport of the kingly, and even divine figures take part. In the Ramayana, Dasharatha accidentally kills Shravana, mistaking him for game. In the Mahabharat, Pandu kills the sage Kindama and his wife with an arrow, mistaking them for a deer.

  Jainism makes prohibitions on hunting and meat eating fundamental to being a Jain. Buddhism's first precept is respect for all sentient life, and the Buddha taught that all fear death, so one should neither kill nor cause to kill. In Sikhism, only meat from hunting or slaughtered by Jhatka is permitted, and gurus such as Hargobind and Gobind Singh were ardent hunters, though the practice has since faded among modern Sikhs.

  From early Christian times, Roman Catholic clerics were forbidden to hunt. The Fourth Council of the Lateran, under Pope Innocent III, declared that hunting and hawking were interdicted to all clerics. Canonists later split lawful from unlawful hunting, calling noisy hunting unlawful but quiet hunting permissible in moderation. Jewish law does not forbid hunting but holds an aversion to it; the 18th-century Rabbi Yechezkel Landau found in it an unseemly element, namely cruelty. Islamic Sharia permits hunting lawful animals for food when they cannot easily be caught, but not for trophies.

• 6. Traditions Across Borders

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  The word safari comes from Swahili, meaning journey or expedition, and describes a journey to see or kill animals in their natural setting, most often in East Africa. The form was popularized by the US author Ernest Hemingway and President Theodore Roosevelt. A safari can stretch days or weeks, with camping in the bush while pursuing big game, and the solo-safari leaves all licensing, stalking, and outfitting to the hunter alone.

  In British India, hunting or shikar was a regal sport across the princely states, with maharajas, nawabs, and British officers keeping whole corps of native shikaris led by a mir-shikar. Bengal tigers might be hunted from the back of an Indian elephant. The British soldiers' practice in the 1770s of hunting snipe, a wary and erratic shorebird, is believed to be the origin of the word sniper, common usage by the First World War.

  In the United Kingdom, hunting without qualification means fox hunting, unarmed and on horseback with hounds, with roles defined by wealth and status. What others call hunting is here called shooting for birds or stalking for deer. Game birds like pheasants and red grouse are shot with shotguns, and around thirty-five million birds are released onto shooting estates every year. The grouse season opens on the 12th of August, the Glorious Twelfth.

  North American hunting predates the United States by thousands of years and was central to many pre-Columbian cultures. A 2006 poll showed seventy-eight per cent of Americans supported legal hunting, though at the start of the 21st century just six per cent actually hunted. The principle of fair chase, central for over a hundred years, was popularized by Theodore Roosevelt and his Boone and Crockett Club. When Internet hunting arrived in 2005, letting people fire remotely controlled guns through a computer, hunters themselves condemned it as a violation of fair chase.

• 7. Killing To Conserve

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  Trophy hunting is the selective killing of wild game to take trophies for a collection, bragging rights, or status. In the 19th century, southern and central European sport hunters often pursued game only for the head or pelt, discarding the rest, a waste that Nordic countries frowned upon then and still do.

  The legalization of white rhinoceros hunting in South Africa pushed private landowners to reintroduce the species, lifting their numbers from fewer than one hundred individuals to more than 11,000. Namibia holds 1,750 of the roughly 5,000 black rhinos surviving in the wild because it allows trophy hunting; its mountain zebra population climbed to 27,000 from 1,000 in 1982, and its elephants rose to 20,000 from 15,000 in 1995. A study in Biological Conservation found that financial incentives from trophy hunting more than double the land area used for wildlife conservation compared with national parks alone.

  The counterargument is sharp. One study found that less than 3% of a trophy hunter's spending reaches the local level, and local communities usually derive no more than 18 cents per hectare. The Centre for Responsible Tourism and the IUCN report that ecotourism generates twice the revenue per acre and 39 times more permanent employment. In 2012, Botswana banned trophy hunting after a steep wildlife decline, then reopened it on public lands in 2020. The Victorian dramatist W. S. Gilbert remarked that deer-stalking would be a very fine sport if only the deer had guns.

• 8. Paying For The Wild

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  In 1937, American hunters lobbied Congress to pass the Pittman-Robertson Wildlife Restoration Act, placing an eleven per cent tax on hunting equipment. That self-imposed tax now generates over $700 million a year, spent exclusively to establish, restore, and protect wildlife habitats. It is named for Nevada Senator Key Pittman and Virginia Congressman Absalom Willis Robertson.

  On the 16th of March 1934, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Migratory Bird Hunting Stamp Act, requiring an annual stamp from every hunter over sixteen. Ninety-eight per cent of the funds go directly toward buying or leasing wetland habitat in the National Wildlife Refuge System. Since 1934, Federal Duck Stamp sales have raised $670 million and helped purchase or lease 5,200,000 acres of habitat, with hunters contributing eighty-seven per cent of sales.

  The money matters because the hunters are vanishing. A national survey by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, conducted every five years, shows only about 5 per cent of Americans aged sixteen and older hunt, half the figure of 50 years earlier. The decline is expected to accelerate over the next decade, raising a hard question the source leaves open: who will pay for conservation when the hunters are gone.