HUNTING

From the moment their feet touched land, early seventeenth-century European immigrants to America hunted wild game out of necessity for their survival. However, the motives, means, and opportunities to engage in recreational hunting in America only emerged in the early nineteenth-century. Why this delay in the birth of an activity ardently pursued by millions of Americans?

Colonial Hunting and Its Economic and Social Meanings

European colonists stepped ashore in a wildlife wonderland, teeming with seemingly limitless numbers of edible creatures and no laws restricting access, unprecedented in the homelands they left behind. In contrast, the wildlife in their lands of origin existed solely for the sporting pleasures of the sociopolitical elites. Europe's feudal system denied the agricultural masses the right to weapons, hunting dogs, and other tools useful in bringing wild protein to the tables of peasants. As late as the nineteenth century, only .01 percent of Englishmen were legally eligible to hunt. Not until 1880 did the right to hunt even rabbits arrive at the doorsteps of English commoners (Herman, pp. 247–248).

America's European colonists eagerly added wild flora and fauna to their resource base and survived their precarious toehold on the North American continent because of those food sources. They hunted at first while establishing their farms, but reduced their dependence on hunting as soon as possible as a marker of achieving agricultural self-sufficiency. A colonist who continued to devote much time to hunting risked descending to the status of social pariah.

Some colonists opted to become commercial hunters, pursuing the lucrative trade in deerskins and other pelts and furs. Demand for such asset stripping seemed insatiable. For example, in the two decades before the American Revolution, the port of Savannah, Georgia, alone shipped 600,000 deer hides (Koller, p.18). The American farmer, however, achieved status by overcoming and controlling nature by making her agriculturally fruitful. Hunters lived off the land and did not aid in conquest of the wilderness. They rose to top ranks of social personages only when they used their hunting skills while answering the call to arms in defense of the nation.

The Development of Elite Hunting

The frontier riflemen who rallied to fight the British during the Revolution attained national heroic status after participating in celebrated battles, such as King's Mountain. Daniel Boone, while contributing only modest military service in the Revolution, demonstrated a heroic capacity to enter the wilderness on successful hunts and expand the nation's geographic knowledge as a spin-off of his wanderings. The national image of wilderness hunters began to turn the corner in the early nineteenth century, as exploration and natural history study became expressions of the quest for progress.

The Lewis and Clark expedition to explore the Louisiana Purchase and document its natural history generated a national cast of heroic hunter-naturalists. James Audubon expanded the hunter-naturalist role, creating a fashion of natural history study by recreational hunters who justified their trophy rooms as displays of scientific knowledge. Hunting and taxidermy walked hand in hand, and private and public museums flourished, transforming recreational hunting into productive leisure. Because the nascent industrialism of the United States in the early nineteenth century deprived urban males of extensive contact with wilderness, the newly formed legitimacy of recreational hunting led them to seek respite from the toils of commerce by traveling to rural environs with guns, dogs, and fishing rods.

American recreational hunters gained a voice through the writings of Henry William Herbert (Frank Forester), who articulated the gentleman's sporting code of the English upper classes. For two decades his magazine articles and books fostered the infancy of outdoor journalism in America. Herbert conveyed the English elite's version of true sportsmanship: self-restraint in the hunting field, skilled use of arms to ensure humane kills, thorough knowledge of and respect for the game animals one attempted to harvest, and harvesting no more than could be put to immediate use.

The American recreational hunter constructed his self-image from an amalgam of English elite sporting values, along with the evolving image of the American hunter-hero as naturalist and self-reliant individualist who successfully entered the wilderness and mastered its animal resources. The best of two worlds resulted: reproducing the status-enhancing activities of the British elite and achieving personal renewal through submersion in the wilderness as a self-renewal experience.

By 1850, middle-class urban hunters began forming hunting clubs, staging dinners, and lobbying legislatures to establish and enforce game laws that controlled numbers harvested, open seasons, and methods of hunting. A form of class warfare emerged between middle-class recreational hunters and lower- and working-class subsistence and market hunters.

Market hunting became increasingly lucrative as westward-moving railroads provided rapid transport to eastern urban game markets. Throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century, the middle-class recreational hunters never relented in their campaign to save game for current and future generations of recreational hunters. Teddy Roosevelt stands out among those raising their voices in sporting journals and in legislative halls, warning of game species' declines because of unrestricted market hunting.

The turn of the century witnessed a triumph of recreational hunting interests when the federal Lacey Act passed, sounding the death knell of market hunting by ending the interstate shipment of wild game that was harvested in violation of state laws. During his presidency, Teddy Roosevelt continued to create game land refuges, first initiated with the founding of Yellowstone National Park in 1872.

The year 1900 also marked the trough of decline in game animal numbers in America, especially the whitetail deer. International treaties with Mexico and Canada in the twentieth century established critical protections for migrating waterfowl in the form of refuges for nesting and migration pathways. Wise wildlife-management practices throughout the twentieth century restored many American wildlife species to presettlement numbers. A little-contested claim insists that whitetail deer are more numerous in 2004 than when the Pilgrims stepped ashore on Plymouth Rock. In sum, America's political leaders saved recreational hunting for the common man as well as the well-heeled elite sportsman.

While recreational hunting flourished among the middle-class elite during the nineteenth century because of hunting's dual associations with the English social elites and American frontier hunter heroes, the twentieth century witnessed a dramatic surge of hunting's popularity among the rural and working classes. The burgeoning popularity resulted from significant price declines in sporting arms, automobile transportation, and highway construction that provided access to productive game lands. The urban industrial labor force in states such as Michigan negotiated labor contracts with flexible vacation times and other clauses that recognized the importance of hunting and fishing seasons to factory workers.

Perpetuation of Hunting Traditions in Rural and Small-Town America

Hunting traditions grow out of group experiences, which gratify group members and motivate them to intentionally replicate those experiences in the future. In the mid-nineteenth century, middle-class elite recreational hunters formed hunting clubs and bought or leased private hunting grounds for exclusive use of members, thus providing themselves access to desirable hunting environments. Most of those organizations no longer survive. On the other hand, rural and small-town America often exists in the midst of wildlife habitats found in farm-field edge rows and woodlots in which all interested community members are welcome to hunt.

Hunting seasons generally open after the harvest, when crop stubble and residues provide prime hunting for quail, pheasants, deer, and other game animals. Opening of the season for locally abundant species generates school closings as well as attenuated hours for some businesses. Some churches offer up prayers for divine protection of hunters in the forests and fields during the season. In deer-hunting areas, some towns erect "meat poles," where each day's harvest can be publicly displayed. Communities still stage "game dinners" as fund-raisers for local church and school projects.

The economic impact matters in communities where the hunting seasons lure hunting tourists to avail themselves of local guides, hotels, restaurants, and sporting goods stores. Small towns offering nearby access to deer, ducks, geese, pheasants, quail, elk, or other popular species are specially blessed financially. In short, hunting traditions flourish, whether for local consumption or external exploitation, in towns or rural areas with abundant hunting opportunities, past and present.

The Culture of the Vacation Hunting Trip

Courier and Ives' sporting prints of the mid-nineteenth century portrayed middle-class recreational hunters afield, in forests, on lakes and streams, harvesting nature's wild bounty under the watchful, approving eyes of their wilderness guides. Hunting and fishing in the nineteenth century became the most popular participatory outdoor sports; vacations from urban occupations provided the necessary venue. Nineteenth-century hunting "vacations," as described in William Faulkner's The Bear, involved a small army of friends, relatives, hired camp cooks, and other miscellaneous helpers invading a hunting area and inhabiting the camp for the duration. A weekend, a week, two weeks, a month could be dedicated to pursuing the yearly hunting experience.

In the twentieth century, factors such as industrial paid vacations and plants closed for maintenance, repairs, or inventory reduction contributed to America's creation of a vacation mentality. Industrial working-class males often split vacations between a week with the family at the lake during the summer and a week with the boys in the deer woods in the fall. While the numbers of women joining men in the hunting field slowly inch up, recreational hunting remains overwhelmingly an adult male interest.

The Mostly Male Rituals of the Hunting Season

Rituals of the hunt occur everywhere recreational hunting exists. European hunting rituals include carefully organized group hunts with ancient hunting horn signals choreographing the stages of the pursuit from open to close. Post-hunt rituals focus on proper respect shown slain game by means of artful display of the bag and group moments of silence while the hunting horn announces appreciation to St. Hubertus, patron saint of hunters.

American hunters have not reproduced those rituals left behind on long-ago European shores. American hunting rituals, most commonly found in the behaviors of those pursuing America's most important game animal, the whitetail deer, include such hunting folkways as preferences for trophies of larger and older male deer to earn hunter bragging rights. The mostly male hunting rituals are legendary, humorous at times, scandalous by repute, and contribute many of the fondest memories retained by their practitioners. One ritual is equality: sharing the hunt harvest with members of the groups on a roughly equal basis. Members of the hunting camp/community adopt equalitarian roles, leaving behind their civilian statuses. Tasks in a hunting camp are assigned by age and experience. If the members are roughly equal in age and experience, they distribute camp chores in random rotation, unless unusually able specialists negotiate access to tasks at which they clearly excel.

In group hunts, the group leader randomly rotates posts or stands so that all have chances at the more productive stands, as well as those offering lesser probabilities of success. Missed shots often provide occasions for hilarity in the form of shirttails being pruned or some other mild degradation ceremony. Young and first-time hunters who succeed in harvesting their quarry may receive congratulations in the form of blood from the downed animal being smeared on their faces during the cleaning stage. Every experienced hunter likely remembers his own moment of being "blooded."

Trophy displays of antlered heads of deer or bearskin rugs also qualify as a mostly male ritual, with trophy rooms often being relegated to basements, attics, or garage workshops. Among the more disreputable rituals are hunting camps devoid of razors and regular bathing, the promiscuous consumption of alcohol and tobacco products, and meals fit only for carnivores requiring the constant attendance of antacids. Men sitting about playing card games, overeating, and engaging in a generally politically incorrect atmosphere of conversation and conduct compose the image of hunting camps envisioned by those not present.

Opposition to Hunting

As early as the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods some voices insisted hunting for sport exacerbated the development of cruelty in men's characters. The cruelty theme motivated much of the subsequent opposition to recreational hunting, from the formation of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in England (1824) to its American counterpart (1866). The tremendous popularity of recreational hunting in the nineteenth century overpowered these voices. During the last quarter of the twentieth century, the animal rights movement dramatically turned up the volume of protest against hunting for sport. Organizations such at PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) and CASH (Committee to Abolish Sport Hunting) insist such activities must be extinguished. Animals have rights, the anti-hunters proclaim, and interfering in the natural life courses of animals is immoral. Walt Disney's classic animated film Bambi illustrates the ease with which sport hunting can be put on the defensive.

Hunting opponents also argue that wildlife agencies serve as a tool for hunters to ensure them adequate wildlife targets. Therefore the agencies refuse to enact adequate measures to control wildlife populations without having to resort to hunting as a management tool. In fact, antihunting voices advance the counterintuitive argument that removing deer from a herd actually stimulates multiple births and net gains in herd numbers. Opponents also support more restrictive firearms controls, asserting that hunters manifest masculinity anxieties, that is, they claim that hunters use firearms to prove their capacities to dominate other beings with the use of deadly force. These strategies, as well as other public relations tactics, all add up to a vigorous culture war delineating apparently irreconcilable differences. Human population growth and real estate development unwittingly reduce habitat essential for wildlife. Game species such as deer and geese readily adapt to close contact with humans and compete for space. Hunters and hunting opponents clash about appropriate control measures.

Political and Cultural Power of the Hunting Lobby and Culture

Recreational hunting topped the list of most popular participatory outdoor pastimes in the nineteenth century. This popularity continued into the twentieth century, perhaps reaching its zenith in 1945 when 25 percent of all adult American males engaged in recreational hunting (Herman, p. 271). Recreational hunters strongly supported the 1937 enactment of the Pittman-Robertson Act, which collects excise taxes on new sales of hunting equipment. As of 2003, this law contributed roughly $155 million per year to wildlife management services. Those monies, plus $420 million per year from license sales, funded three-quarters of the budgets of most state wildlife agencies.

On the other hand, percentages and numbers of recreational hunters sagged in the last half of the twentieth century. In 2001, 13 to 14 million Americans sixteen years and older, roughly 6 percent of this age cohort, participated in recreational hunting. This total represents a dramatic decline from the roughly 19 million licensed hunters after World War II. Between 1991 and 2001, the number of all hunters declined by 7 percent. Such reductions, in both absolute numbers and percentages, may be due to challenges facing the carrying capacity of recreational hunting: population growth and loss of wildlife habitat. Perhaps a more powerful explanation for decreased participation in recreational hunting resides with the increasingly dominant urban lifestyles and world-views, which exist across a cultural divide from the rural and small town culture, which still nourish recreational hunting.

Opposition to hunting has energized the hunting community to successfully seek passage of "anti-hunter-harassment" laws in all fifty states. Thousands of chapters of wildlife species-specific organizations promote habitat protection, restoration, and acquisition for ducks, deer, quail, wild turkey, elk, and various game fishes. SCI (Safari Club International) promotes a positive image of recreational hunting with its "Sportsmen Against Hunger" program that recruits hunter donations of thousands of pounds of game meat to charitable organizations. Hunter safety programs required of new hunters claim to have steadily reduced hunting season accidents to record low levels. In sum, the hunting community recognizes its controversial public face and strives continuously to massage its image.

Will recreational hunting survive in the twenty-first century? Hunting opponents trumpet the message that their constituency is ever younger while hunters grow ever older. Hunters face an uphill battle to recruit the next generation of hunting enthusiasts. The culture war will continue.

See also: Blood Sports; Colonial-Era Leisure and Recreation; Fishing, Freshwater; Fishing, Saltwater/Deep Sea; Men's Leisure Lifestyles; Southern America Leisure Lifestyles; Target Shooting

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Richard Hummel