In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

70 informing one’s aesthetic competence habituated by field sports goes well beyond that had in wildlife photography. These differences have allowed us to define field sports in a way that includes acquiring animals but does not make killing the only purpose of field sports. Killing is a means in hunting for the acquisition of some goods. The acquisition of virtue is as important as the acquisition of the animal as food for those who participate in field sports. A good of wildlife photography is the photograph obtained. It may be of great beauty and enduring value. The goods of (vegetable) gardening are foods, but they are acquired not from the wild but from the domestic cultivation of the soil. The problem we face in this chapter does not arise from a comparison of hunting and angling to non-lethal competing activities like gardening or wildlife photography, but rather from apparent ethical contrasts within and between various kinds of hunting and fishing. It is common for critics of field sports to contrast subsistence, sport, and commercial hunting and fishing, frequently with no further explanation, and to single out sport hunting and fishing for condemnation. Of course, economic writers discuss the “sport hunting industry” and states pass regulations on “sport fishing.” This way of dividing things up doesn’t do too much harm; we do need some way of categorizing these activities. The critical confusion arises when these economic or legal categories are taken to mark ethical boundaries. The framers of the sportsman thesis were, ironically, initially responsible for this ethical boundary drawing by elevating those who hunt for “sport” above those who hunt for “the pot” or for money. As we’ve seen, sport hunting and fishing were thought to be activities whereby one could hope to gain the virtues necessary to become a gentleman. Excluded from this elite group were women, indigenous peoples, and many other ethnic groups. The original appeal of the sportsman thesis was a hoped for social status recognizing the virtues gained by hunting and fishing for “sport” as opposed to for the more pedestrian needs of food or money. Critics of field sports point to exactly this suspicious ethical elevation of field sports. For example, C. Mallory says this: . . . the point of the ‘good sportsmanship,’ which Leopold advocates is not to convey respect for one’s prey as is commonly ChapterEight:SportHuntingandFishing Sport Hunting and Fishing 71 argued by defenders of hunting, but rather serves to refine one’s skills in a ‘gentlemanly’ fashion. This marks hunting as largely an elite activity practiced mainly by those with privileged cultural and economic status possessed by Leopold as well as the majority of hunters in North America.1 Because of this phony privileged status, some philosophical critics claim that field sports are actually immoral and should be legally banned because they kill animals for “sport,” whereas subsistence hunting is morally sanctioned because such people need to hunt to survive.2 These critics argue, in this neat inversion of values, that the hunting and fishing done “for sport” in field sports is simply unnecessary today.3 These relatively affluent hunters and anglers, so the criticism goes, don’t need the food and thus they are participating in “blood sports” merely for the sake of sport. This explains the often cited survey result that people morally approve “hunting for food” but disapprove “hunting for sport.”4 So, the exclusivity and elitism in the original sportsman thesis as a way of defending hunting and angling has now become the target of those who are critical of these activities. But since it is “sport hunting and angling” that are subject to moral disapproval by critics and moral approval by defenders of the original sportsman thesis, we should try to see what, if anything, sets field sports apart from other varieties.5 HuntingDefined In order to define the role of acquiring animals in field sports, sometimes by killing them, we need a suitable definition of hunting that includes fishing as one kind of hunting. That this is important can be seen by briefly looking at one reductive and ultimately misleading characterization of hunting in general. Some critics simply define hunting and fishing as kinds of killing. For example: “[t]o hunt . . . is to seek, pursue or otherwise locate animals, presumably those that are authentically wild, with the object of taking their lives.”6 According to this, the objective or goal of field sports as kinds of hunting is the killing of wild...

Share