The Hunting Ape

Few subjects in modern nature-discourse are as contentious, in human history as omnipresent, as that of hunting. What is most rarely discussed whether the topic be the ethics of foxhunting or the history of fur-trapping, is just how odd the very fact is that we hunt. Alone among our hominid relatives, Homo sapiens is a habitual predator. In this essay, I will consider both the evolutionary background for this development, as well as its knock-on consequences, both for the broader environment and human culture. Necessarily, this will require broad strokes—here is not an academic analysis, nor a scientific article, but a reflection. As with any topic, an exploration of the semantics of “hunting” may be a good place to start. Indeed, it is not so simple as may seem. The Cambridge Dictionary defines hunting as “The activity or sport of chasing or searching for wild animals or birds with the intention of killing or catching them.” This may, at first glance, seem apt enough—hunting is what people do when they go out with a rifle looking for deer, or a shotgun seeking grouse. And yet, there are issues. What, for instance, do we make of the trapper, who catches prey not through chase or search but by way of hidden implements? What of the fishermen with his rod or harpoon? Naturally, common semantics would have it that fishing is the pursuit of fish, hunting of other game. We might wish to ascribe this to differences of method—the fishing-rod for the fisherman, the bow for the hunter—but it is not so. Flounder or whale, both are caught by the harpoon, yet one is a hunt, the other not. All this is to say that the distinction as commonly used is essentially taxonomic, a matter of the targeted animal’s evolutionary affinities, not of the pursuer’s motive, nor the method by which it is fulfilled. This is all well and good when we are discussing leisure-activities and sports. When exploring the evolution of predation in Man, however—the leap from herbivory to omnivory, the advent of the spear—it is less useful. There is not, ecologically or behaviourally, a great difference between spearing a trout or a beaver. Our herbivorous cousins do neither, and the evolutionary changes that produced the one led also to the other. I will therefore base this essay on another definition, one also common, but not universal: Hunting, as defined here, is the deliberate and pre-meditated killing, for whatever reason, by whatever means, of a non-human animal.

This essay is not an apologia for hunting, nor is it an attack against it, though it may at times appear to be either. Both such notions seem to me about as meaningful as an apologia for sneezing. Man hunts, or rather, man is a hunting animal. He will hunt and has always done so. Recall that by our definitions, even the targeted regulation of vole-populations, a behaviour in which buffalo and swans do not engage, constitutes “hunting”. We may discuss the best ways for folk to do so, as we may discuss the ways to manage and regulate everything from sex to disagreements, but it is not the sort of issue about which the question “should we do it” can meaningfully be asked. Phrased most simply, hunting, as I will be considering it here, is a matter not of ethics but of ecology.

Figure 1. A hunting scene from the Algerian desert.

Terms of use: This image is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license. It is credited to Gruban, and the original can be found here. The image is unedited.

The origins of hunting among humans is indistinguishable from the origins of humanity itself. In a certain sense, the advent of hunting-behaviour among our earliest Homo ancestors seems to have been an something of an evolutionary accident. As the great forests of the early Cenozoic thinned and retreated, our ancestors were those anthropoids who, unwilling or unable to compete with the strong and successful apes that ruled the trees, stayed behind. Bipedality has often been proposed to have its origins in the need for vigilance over the tall grass of the savanna. This new gait carried other requirements—a lighter weight, stable knee-joints. Our earliest ancestors became runners and long-distance migrators. Primitive tool-use was likely already conceived before we left the trees, as evidenced by its widespread occurrence amongst our still-arboreal kin. It was the confluence of these factors, of speed, tool-use, small size and a sparse environment, that together laid the groundworks for a change just as revolutionary if not more so: the shift to predation and true omnivory. This transformation was not overnight. Our earliest hominid ancestors were small and inelegant, unlikely competitors with the hyena and the sabretooth. Yet by the dawn of the Early Pleistocene, roughly two million years ago, something had changed. The bodies of the genus Homo had become longer, their teeth shorter, their legs even more adapted for running. At the same time, their brains had grown. Our brains. The Early Pleistocene was the definitive mark when our ancestors entered the guild of apex predators, and just as definitively, the mark when they began truly to resemble us.

This change was not without wider consequences. In East Africa between the Pliocene and today, Werdelin, L. & Lewis, M. E. (2013) discuss a <99% decline in functional predator richness. This does not correlate clearly with any climatic developments in the region but does track startlingly well with the rise of proto-human hunting. Not, perhaps, a promising start as regards our co-existence with the surrounding world. It was about this time, 1,5 million years ago, that sabertoothed cats suddenly vanished from Africa, ending fifteen million years of ecological dominance. Let us be cautious here—the data of one study may be overruled—yet the general picture finds repeated validation: For more than a million years, the members of genus Homo have been killers. Yet though our ancestors and relatives in our genus may have exerted an influence, even an exclusionary one, from the very onset, it clearly was not equivalent to that of our own species. Insofar as evidence points to a human cause behind certain Pleistocene extinctions, it is probable that hunting was both the means and the motive. What of this, then? Are we to attribute blanketly to hunting the various casualties of human settlement and expansion? We would be overeager.

Figure 2. A mammoth-hunt in the Pleistocene.

Terms of use: This image is licensed under the Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. It is uncredited, and the original can be found here. The image is unedited.

Not all humans hunt, but all humans belong to a hunting species. They belong also to a diverse one. There are as many ways and practices of hunting as there are human cultures—likely there are as many philosophies regarding it as there are individuals. It is a curious paradox that that form of hunting which engenders among many the most distaste—namely hunting as leisure, hunting-for-hunting’s-sake—is also by nearly all metrics the one practice with the clearest ecological alibi. Indeed, hunting for sport seems not to have been responsible for very many major declines, let alone extinctions, throughout mankind’s history. Accordingly, as much as some conservationists may bemoan the practices of canned hunting and trophy-hunting, even they will most often acknowledge that this issue is ethical, rather than ecological. It is when an element of economy enters into the hunt—be it for food, furs or supposed medicines—that the practice develops towards existential risk. This is not, perhaps, too surprising. Economy is, in hunting as in other matters, something of an unlimited ratchet; once such a motive has been attached, it is only likely to increase. Should a given species have become a key food-source for a culture, the almost unvarying trend of human populations over the last several millennia has been one of increase, such that the need for food, and correlated pressure on animal populations, will only rise. By the same token, once an animal has become prized as a commodity, say as a source of folk medicine, hunting becomes locked to market-demand. This, both on account of growing populations and of enterprising sellers, is likely only ever to grow. 

All this stated and considered, it would nevertheless be inaccurate to describe all hunting as an intrinsically destructive and ecocidal act. The idea of the Noble Savage, living in Edenic bliss with his fellow living creatures, is more hackneyed archetype than historical or ecological reality. Though debate still rages, it seems fair to say that from the earliest colonists of the Americas to the first Men on the mammoth steppe, there were no songs of kumbaya between man and mammoth. And yet, we must not overstate this. The first Māori wiped out the moa and the adzebill, yet not the weka or the kakapo. The decline, broadly, had been stabilised by the time Europeans restarted it, and indeed, the notion of Kaitiakitanga, prevalent in Kiwi conservation-discourse, is the product of a developing ecological awareness among the natives. The earliest Amerindians did in the long-horned bison (Bison latifrons) upon their arrival, but their descendants fifteen-thousand years later maintained and managed the plains bison (Bison bison bison). This they did, not in spite of hunting them, but precisely because they wished to maintain populations of their beloved and culturally all-important game. Had not the kings of Poland so jealously guarded the rights to hunt the declining aurochs, it is likely the species would have vanished centuries before it finally did. Indeed, we come here to a great complexity in the discussion of hunting—the import of that other all-transforming practice of our species: agriculture.

Many environmental tragedies have resulted from humanity’s desire to harvest and exploit the lands we inhabit. Nevertheless, the hunter, from the primitive tracker to the fur-trader, has at least a motive (if rarely acted upon) to preserve the stocks of his game. The farmer has no such motivation. He who hunts the lion for its furs, or its teeth, or even just the thrill of it, is likely to desire a continued ability to do so. He who hunts the lion because it eats his cattle is likely to desire a thousand plagues upon it. Though poaching, particularly in the name of folk-medicines, is a great issue for conservation today, it pales in comparison to the consequences of habitat-destruction. A population of antelopes may survive a certain number of animals being extracted every year. It will not survive the conversion of its savanna into cattle-stations and croplands. The wild dog may escape the huntsman, yet the plough and tractor it cannot elude. That said, we must not overstate this dichotomy: We have, essentially, the distinction between a system in which man seeks out and depends upon wild creatures, and one in which man sticks mostly to his acres and his livestock, encountering and eradicating only wild animals insofar as they present obstacles. When all the land is put to plough and pasture, the consequence here is obvious. In other lands, at other times, however, the balance may be different. More than once it has happened that the needs of agriculture kept Men upon the fertile plains, whilst the uplands, untillable and now mostly unhunted, were left sanctuaries for wildlife. The farmer today is a greater danger for the lion and rhino than is the huntsman, but that does not mean it has always been so.

Figure 3. A hunting-scene from Greek mythology portrayed.

Terms of use: This image is licensed under the CC0 1.0 Universal license.

Nevertheless, when Man ceased living among the wild animals, and took instead to living above them, in cities or on farms, he began to forget a very basic thing, one he would not rediscover until the science of biology many millennia later: he forgot taxonomy. Man-the-animal became man-the-herder, man-the-rider, man-the-forester. The advent of hunting bred a sense of competition between man and fellow predator, but it bred also a sort of comradery, of kinship. Man as hunter is Lord of the Totem. He is the son of the wolf and the bear, the brother of the leopard. It is a striking trend that when tribes across the world traced their relations back to the animal kingdom, though ancestral herbivores were not unknown, the children of the bear and the eagle certainly outnumbered those of the deer and the hog. From the bear cult of the Ainu and the wolf-ancestors of the Turks to the lupine ulfhednar and ursine berserkers of the Norse, the pattern sprawls out. For most of history, whenever Man has sought to establish his or her connection to the animal world, it has been in his capacity as a predator. Among the hunter-gatherers, the world of the numinous and the world of the bestial were two and the same. The spirits were animal-headed, if not animalic in their entirety, and man was little different. It is with the advent of agriculture that we see also the rise of anthropomorphism—Not its advent, for there are idols and effigies in human shapes before, but its ubiquity.

Some of these points may seem a degression into anthropology from our stated intent of an ecological approach to hunting. Nevertheless, as Weston La Barre argues in The Ghost Dance, cultures are the sum of individual behaviours and neuroses, individual behaviours and neuroses of our ecological and evolutionary background. Whether such a reductive explanation is fully exhaustive—it is certainly materialist—it seems undeniable that there exists between our cultural concepts of nature and nature itself an intrinsically ecological connection. We are products of our environment, just as much as our environments are products of us. Furthermore, we are products of how we engage with our surroundings. The totemic notion of man-as-animal, man-as-predator, is not distinguishable from his nature as the Hunting Ape.