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215 epilogue Future Shot “I’ll tell you why I’m the future of hunting,” eighteen-year-old Meredith Odato said after winning the Pennsylvania Game Commission’s youth essay contest. “Hunting is not only a tradition,” she continued, “but also a remarkable way of life; a lifelong process devoted to the establishment of character and knowledge, unique qualities known exclusively to those who hunt. Indisputably, I am the future of hunting because I acquired so much from predecessors, including one vital responsibility : to prolong the legacy of hunting” (Odato 2005). Game Commission officials beamed because they had promoted the contest as a way to focus attention on “passing along the legacy of hunting from one generation to the next.” This definition of tradition gained importance because they had read the latest statistics from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and knew that the media would report another decline in the number of hunters. Their design of the contest placed much of the blame for this decline on a lack of fidelity to tradition by youngsters and their hunting parents, lured away by mass-mediated culture. An unnamed conspirator in hunting’s woes is the animal rights movement, although by diminishing its adherents as a radical fringe of wacko tree huggers, hunting advocates do not avow the movement’s full impact on cultural norms. But hunters sense their presence; they are the enemy. Worry fills the faces of hunting advocates, and they see a glimmer of hope in the words of a bright-eyed girl who learned her skills from her father. Advocating more concerted initiatives to encourage her youthful cohort, Bud Pidgeon of the U.S. Sportsmen’s Alliance warned, “If we don’t start replenishing hunters now, we could let our heritage slip away” (quoted in “Young Hunters” 2005). The rhetorical emphasis on tradition and heritage lets people know that whether they 216 KILLING TRADITION hunt or not, the values represented by hunting in America are theirs. Hunting is not just for hunters, he intimated; it is a symbol for all people who care about family, community, and nation. To his thinking, as the future of hunting goes, so goes the national culture. Heidi Prescott of the Humane Society of the United States, leader of the “enemy camp,” agrees, but in her mind, if hunting does not decline , society will devolve. Her explanation for the slipping numbers is that hunting is a relic of the past, when people gained their provisions from the wild; it is detestable as a recreational pursuit because its enjoyment depends on killing and abuse. Her message echoes that of a century earlier when the British predecessor of the Humane Society, the Humanitarian League, declared, “In a civilised community, where the services of the hunter are no longer required, blood-sports are simply an anachronism, a relic of savagery which time will gradually remove ” (Salt 1915, vii). Pragmatically and ethically speaking, according to spokesman Henry Salt, “not only the cruelty, but the wastefulness of the practice of breeding and killing animals for mere amusement, should be made clear” (1915, vii). In the twenty-first century, animal rights advocates call for moral strength by comparing their work to nineteenth-century abolitionist movements to eradicate slavery, for a key issue in both is the unconscionable treatment of life as property —abused, dispensable, killed property (see Spiegel 1996). Resentful of the notion that animal rights is a single-issue or fringe movement, some leaders see the campaign against hunting as a broad-based battle against prevailing exploitative social and economic structures. They use the rhetoric of “liberation” to signal that revolutionary change is the goal, going beyond welfare or even rights for animals. Gary Francione (1996) of the Rutgers University School of Law, for instance, trumpeted the view to an American audience: “The plain fact is that this country and other industrial countries are deeply dependent on animal exploitation to sustain their present economic structures. The plain fact is that we are more dependent on animal exploitation than were the states of the southern United States on human slavery. . . . Now is the time to develop a radical—nonviolent but radical—approach to animal rights as part of an overall program of social justice.” Even for those activists who do not go so far and want to mainstream animal rights as part of modern liberal politics, the hunter is a destructive killer, plain and simple, if not a slaveholding tracker. [3.140.185.147] Project MUSE (2024...

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