Killing Tradition: Inside Hunting and Animal Rights Controversies

1. Ritual and Controversy at Deer Camp

27 chapter 1 Ritual and Controversy at Deer Camp Many places in America are both venerated and vilified as hunting havens —Pennsylvania, Texas, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Missouri among them. They rise to the top of national surveys recording the number of hunters licensed. In terms of the percentage of total population participating in hunting, other places with hardy backcountry reputations figure prominently in the picture of hunting in America. In the Wild West badlands of Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota, for instance, between 15 and 19 percent of the residents hunt. Arkansas, Maine, and West Virginia claim 14 percent—a sharp contrast to the urbanized locales of California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Jersey, where only 1 percent hunt. In short, hunters are located in every state but are culturally concentrated in several regions that conjure the image of a frontier rich in flora and fauna. From the Rockies to the Appalachians, if publicity is to be believed, going out hunting liberates folks from their routines and lets them get back to nature; it is hailed or cursed as a vitalizing force in modern society, particularly for men. It is associated with an untethered spirit of ruggedness, a hardy mettle required for venturing into the wilderness. Beyond the statistics are places where hunting as the pursuit of game is etched into the notion of national heritage. Kentucky and Tennessee do not have the largest numbers of hunters, but their backwoods figure in the popular imagination as home to frontier bear-shooters and pathbreakers. These states have promoted the heroic legendry of the likes of Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett as hunter-frontiersmen in 28 KILLING TRADITION historic sites and literature. The names of Boone and Crockett epitomize a hunter-frontiersman spirit that supposedly is basic to a founding American character, as evidenced by the reverence given to the Boone and Crockett Club formed by Theodore Roosevelt in 1887. Alarmed by the accelerating pace of mass industrialization, Roosevelt and others such as George Bird Grinnell, folklorist and editor of Forest and Stream magazine, worried that America’s wild hunting grounds were endangered along with the country’s pioneer culture. The conservationist organization is known today for maintaining big-game records, and as its Web site declares, it works on the one hand at “preserving our hunting heritage” and on the other at combating the threat “that someday we might lose our hunting privileges and our wildlife populations for future generations.” Pennsylvania shares in this pioneer boosterism by drawing tourists to the rough-hewn Daniel Boone Homestead near Reading. The story it tells portrays Boone as a trailblazer, and modern-day visitors can appreciate the life of eighteenth-century pioneers by walking through the site’s sylvan environment. One can go fishing in Daniel Boone Lake and see demonstrations of the Pennsylvania or Kentucky hunting rifles that distinguished the American frontiersmen and supposedly tamed the wilderness. In the modern age, Pennsylvania can also boast that it issues more hunting and fishing licenses than any other state in the nation. It has been home since 2003 to Cabela’s in Hamburg, the largest outdoor goods and hunting supply store in the country, with over a quarter million square feet of space. In popular culture, the forested landscape of Pennsylvania was noticeable as the backdrop for The Deer Hunter (1978), which won the Academy Award for best picture. At the same time, Pennsylvania is depicted in song and story as a symbol of mass industrialization—its rise and fall—from the steel mills of Pittsburgh to the anthracite coalfields south of Scranton. It thus raises sometimes conflicting images of American resources and their claim on national heritage. If it is a prominent hunting haven, Pennsylvania also commands attention in any study of human-animal relations because it is tucked among headquarters for the largest animal protection organizations in the world: the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) in New York City, the Fund for Animals in neighboring Maryland, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) in Ritual and Controversy at Deer Camp 29 Virginia. The Fund for Animals has a lobbyist devoted to animal rights issues in Pennsylvania, countered time and again by representatives of the Pennsylvania Federation of Sportsmen’s Clubs (PFSC), who announce , via the organization’s Web site, that they work to ensure that hunters’ “rights and interests are protected.” Thus Pennsylvania has...