The White Horse Press

Full citation: Scruton, Roger, "From a View to a Death: Culture,

Nature and the Huntsman's Art." Environmental Values
6, no. 4, (1997): 471-481.
http://www.environmentandsociety.org/node/5735

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From a View to a Death: Culture, Nature and the
Huntsman’s Art

ROGER SCRUTON

Sunday Hill Farm

Brinkworth
Wilts, SN15 5AS, UK

ABSTRACT: The division between the natural and the artificial is itself
artificial. But we continue to yearn for a ‘homecoming’ to our natural state –
which means, to the identity with our environment which was the condition of
the hunter-gatherer. Totemism is the thought-process whereby the prey can be
simultaneously consecrated as a species, and pursued to the death as an
individual. This thought-process has an evident ecological function. The moral-
ity of hunting resides in the maintenance of this dual attitude. An anthropological
explanation is offered of the perceived rituals of hunting, and of ‘guiltless
killing’.

KEYWORDS: aesthetics, culture, field sports, myths, nature, totemism

Nature and culture used to be seen as contrasting elements in our human

constitution. But nature is now a product of culture. Not only does human society
shape the environment; it is human choice that marks off what is ‘natural’, and
which elevates the distinction between the natural and the artificial to its
sovereign place in the moral order. The natural world now depends on our efforts
to conserve it, and therefore on our judgement as to what belongs to it. Moreover,
our very perception of this world as ‘natural’ is an artefact, formed and nurtured
by religion, literature, art and the modern media. When we seek our consolation
in nature we are looking in a mirror that we created for this purpose. Nature
smiles back at us with human features, since we have carefully ensured that it has
no other. All that is truly threatening, alien and mysterious has been cut from the
picture: what remains is a work of art. We strive to preserve it from that other and
un-natural world – the world of machinery, of industry, of spoliation, production,
consumption and waste. But both worlds are our creation, and we can fight only
for the boundary between them, hoping that the part which consoles us does not
dwindle to the point where consolation becomes a memory.
Nature, as we have invented it, is a source of the beautiful; but it has ceased
to be a source of the sublime. For we meet the sublime only when we are
confronted with our own littleness, and are troubled by forces that we cannot

Environmental Values 6 (1997): 471-81

© 1997 The White Horse Press, Cambridge, UK.
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ROGER SCRUTON

control. The experience of the sublime vanished at the moment when Burke and
Kant defined it: their descriptions were a kind of valediction, inspired by the
premonition of a world entirely subject to human mismanagement.
None of that alters the fact that the contrast between the natural and the
artificial is an immovable part of our worldview, and one of the cultural values
to which we cling. We need this contrast, because we need to see our actions in
terms of it. We need to distinguish those impulses which belong to mother nature,
from those which involve bids for freedom. And we need to relate to other
creatures for whom there is no such contrast: creatures whose behaviour stems
from nature alone. It matters to us that we should be in constant relation to
animals – and wild animals especially. For we seek an image of innocence, of the
world before our own depredations, the world without man, into which man
comes as an intruder. The burden of self-consciousness is lightened by this
image: it shows us that we walk on firm ground, where the burden may from time
to time be set down, and upon which we may rest from our guilt. All this is
beautifully captured in the opening pages of Genesis, and the vision of Paradise
– absurd though it may be from the Darwinian perspective – is the perfect symbol
of the natural world as it would be, had we been able to produce it unaided, and
without relying on the raw material of evolution.
The desire for a natural order is perhaps unknown to those who are truly part
of it. But it is an immovable given in the lives of all civilised beings, and even
if it cannot be satisfied, it will exert its power over our thinking, and make itself
known both in the life of the mind and in the life of the body. It burst upon us in
the writings of Rousseau, and his egregiously sentimental vision of the state of
nature has exerted its charm over many subsequent writers. But it appeared in a
more moderate and intriguing form in the writings of the German romantics,
three of whom – Schelling, Hegel and Hölderlin – helped to forge the picture of
our condition which has since proved most persuasive, and to which I pay tribute
in this article.
According to this picture, human history shares the structure of human
consciousness, and the individual life is a microcosm of the species, which is in
turn, for Hegel, a microcosm of the universal Geist. The human soul and human
society are both founded in a condition of innocence or ‘immediacy’, in which
they are at one with the world and with themselves. And each grows away from
this one-ness through a process of sundering and alienation, as it comes to
recognise the otherness by which it is surrounded and upon which it depends.
Finally each attains its redemption, as it is restored to the wholeness from which
it began, but at a higher plane – the plane of understanding. Just as the individual
self is realised by transcending its self-alienation and becoming fully and
completely known to itself, so is society fulfilled, when the primitive unity with
others is rediscovered, but in the form of a self-conscious and law-guided order.
The picture is dressed up by Hegel in the clothes of the dialectic; it is
transformed by Feuerbach into a kind of negative theology, and by Marx into a
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theory of history. It survives into our century in many forms, and has some of the
Uralte resonance that it also tries to explain. You will find it in works as diverse
as Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. You
will find it buried in the obscure prose of Husserl and Heidegger, distorted in the
writings of the psychoanalysts or lifted into a brash light by Scheler. It would not
be an exaggeration to say that it is now the most important image of our condition,
and has a peculiar power to endure precisely in those people who have rejected
the religious vision – the vision of Paradise, the Fall and Redemption – from
which it originally sprang. Wherever we look in the modern world, we find this
image actively colonising people’s plans and projects. Almost everything that is
believed in, almost everything for which a real sacrifice is made, has the
character of a Heimkehr – a return from alienation, destruction and despair, to an
image of home. But not home in its innocence. Rather home transfigured,
become conscious of itself, and emancipated from the taint of bondage.
It is this image which dominates the thinking of the environmental move-
ments of our time, and also of the campaigners for animal rights who are so often
in conflict with them. Both are haunted by the idea of a primitive unity between
man and nature, in which other species have an equal weight to our own. Both
are appalled by the accelerating presumption which has alienated man from
nature, and set him at odds with the order upon which he nevertheless depends.
And both look forward to a restored unity with the natural world – a unity
achieved not by innocence but by understanding, and by the self-knowledge and
self-discipline which come from accepting our limitations.
Myths are necessary to human life, and part of the price that we pay for
consciousness. Moreover, even if they give a distorted view of history, they
frequently give insight into the human psyche. Deep down in all of us there are
psychic residues, inherited from our hunter-gatherer ancestors, which speak to
us of another and simpler world. It was a world in which we were at home, since
we were adapted to it by evolution. Our instincts, our spontaneous perceptions,
movements and social feelings, bear witness to that distant and
never-to-be-recovered condition in which the separation of man from nature had
yet to come about. And the strain of modern life would be unbearable, if we did
not rehearse the spontaneous psychic movements that were implanted in us by
the species, and which are as important for our proper functioning as it is
important to a dog that it should bark from time to time, or to a chicken that it
should lay an egg. This is the truth, I believe, in those myths of Paradise and Fall,
which have brought so much consolation to our species, and also – in their
secularised versions – so much needless destruction. Planted in us, too deep for
memory, and beneath the layers of civilisation, are the instincts of the hunter-
gatherer, who differs from his civilised descendants not only in making no
distinction between the natural and the artificial order, but also in relating to his
own and other species in a herd-like way. The hunter-gatherer is acutely aware
of the distinction between men and women; he quickly unites with his fellows
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in a common enterprise, and is focused by nothing so much as the chase. He is

a spontaneously cooperative being, who cooperates not only with his own
species, but also with those that are most readily adapted to join in his hunting:
with horse, hound, falcon and ferret. Towards his prey he takes a quasi-religious
attitude. The hunted animal is hunted as an individual – and the instinct to hunt
in this way has an obvious ecological function. (Buffalo Bill was the very
antithesis of the hunter-gatherer, a degenerate by-product of the civilising
process.) But the hunted species is elevated to divine status as the totem, and a
kind of mystical union of the tribe with its totem seals the pact between them. At
the universal level, the hunter-gatherer is the tribe, which is the deer or antelope,
conceived as a species. This mystical thought (an instance of Hegel’s ‘concrete
universal’) guides the hunter in the field. But the individual hunter is distinct
from and opposed to the individual deer or antelope, which he must hunt to death.
The experience of the hunter involves a union of opposites – absolute antagonism
between individuals resolved through a mystical identity of species. By pursuing
the individual, and worshipping the species, the hunter guarantees the eternal
recurrence of his prey. Totemism is part of the natural ecology of the tribe, and
its ubiquity is far better explained by its ecological function than by the
far-fetched ideas of Freud and Malinowski.1
We relate to one another as individuals, and the soul is the animating principle
which makes a person who he is. In the case of human beings, therefore, the soul
is the self. (In Arabic there is one word – nafs – for soul and self.) In the case of
wild animals, to which we relate as interchangeable member of their species, the
soul-idea becomes attached to the species. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses the stories
are told of the halcyon, the nightingale, and so on. These creatures embody in
their species-being a soul which, in human shape, had been the soul of an
individual. The thought is metaphysically incoherent. But it is part of the normal
repertoire of the hunter-gatherer to think in some such way. And the idea of the
species-soul is still with us. For the fisherman the individual trout on his line is
also The Trout, the universal whose soul he knows in many instances, and which
he loves with the greater passion in the moment when he pits himself against the
mere individual who is its passing instance. This attitude is exalted by Totemism
into a religious idea: the universal species becomes a sacred object, to which the
particular quarry is a sacrifice. The quarry dies on behalf of the species, and
thereby re-consecrates the sacred identity between species and tribe.
This way of relating to animals is less familiar to those who know only pets.
For domestic animals have a kind of personality bestowed by our daily dealings.
We treat them as individuals and they learn to respond as such. The hunter-gatherer,
in his original condition, has little room for such an attitude. In time, however,
he learns to enhance his powers by cooperating with other species – and in
particular with hound and horse. The history of this process has been recorded
only in its later stages – by Xenophon, for example, in his Kynergetica, which
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remains one of the most penetrating works on the art of hunting with hounds.
Nevertheless, it is the beginning of a new relation to the natural world: the
relation which stems from our role as a dominant species, able to conscript other
species to our purposes, and to exploit their instincts.
The hunter now works side by side with animals whom he treats as
individuals, in hot pursuit of the prey whose individuality is lent to it only
temporarily, as it were, and because it has been singled out by the chase. The
horse beneath him is Sam or George, whose habits he knows, and with whom he
communicates directly; the hounds to whom he calls are Saviour, Sanguine and
Sawdust, and he addresses them by name, aware of their individual virtues and
vices, for which he makes constant allowance. But the fox – Charlie, the generic
being who appears equally in Aesop and Surtees, in La Fontaine and Stravinsky
– is merely incarnate in the hunted animal and will survive its death. For the brief
moment of the chase, Charlie is an individual, to be understood through the
beliefs and strategies, the vulpine strengths and weaknesses that distinguish this
particular instance. Once killed, however, Charlie returns to his archetypal
condition, reassuming his nature as The Fox, whom the huntsman knows and
loves, and whose eternal recurrence is his deep desire.
Thus it is that the huntsman who has shot the cunning little vixen in Janácek’s
beautiful opera also rejoices to rediscover her in her daughter. And, as the music
makes lucidly apparent, this rediscovery is not of the individual vixen, but of the
universal Vixen, and of the natural context which provides her life.
Although this return to a previous relation with the natural world is now rare,
it helps us to understand some of the longings and frustrations of those who seek
for it. In the civilised world, where food is not hunted or gathered but produced,
hunting and gathering become forms of recreation. But they awaken the old
instincts and desires, the old pieties and the old relations with our own and other
species. If your purpose in angling is to catch a fish, then how simply this could
be achieved with an electrode, which stuns the population of the river bank, and
brings it, afloat and unconscious, to the surface. But what angler would look on
this method with other than disgust? To catch fish in this way is to cross the
barrier between the natural and the artificial – it is to conquer another portion of
nature for the world of machinery. Yet the point of angling was to return, in
however well-protected a guise, to the natural world, the world unblemished by
our footsteps. And that is the experience so lyrically evoked by the great tradition
of writers, from Isaac Walton to Richard Jefferies, who have celebrated the sport
as a therapy for the anxious soul.
More important, however, is the fact that industrial fishing, of the kind
deprecated by the angler, is an offence to the totem. It aims indiscriminately at
the collective, and instead of sacrificing the individual trout for the sake of the
universal Trout, throws the universal itself onto the river bank. Like trawling and
drift-netting, it constitutes a threat to the hunted species – and the threat, as we
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know, is real. The intentionality of angling is of another kind. It involves a contest

between the individual person and the individual animal – a contest which may
be lost, and which is experienced when successful as a victory and a tribute to
the totem.
Perhaps I have not found the best words to express this point. However, it
seems to me go to the heart not only of hunting in modern conditions, but of the
longing which hunting expresses: the longing for another kind of relation with
the natural world, than those provided on the scrubby perimeter of cities. In the
contest between Captain Ahab and the white whale we see the growth of an
obsessive emotion; but we also see something vast and primordial, a return of
feelings which are lost to the ordinary trawler-man, and which make of whaling
the noblest form of hunting that the sea still offers us: the only form in which the
species, hunted in the form of an individual, is saved through the individual’s
death. For the single-minded pursuit of the individual is also a way of sparing the
remainder – a fact known to all those for whom angling and hunting are not
necessities but sports.
Why should people wish for this primordial relation with other species, and
are they justified in pursuing it? To answer this question it is not enough merely
to trace the evolutionary sediment which is stirred by hunting. Nor is it enough
to re-cast the myth from which I began – the myth of man’s fall and redemption,
and of the homeward journey out of alienation. However suggestive this myth
has been to philosophers, artists and writers in the romantic tradition, the fact
remains that there is no way back, and that the only homecoming that we are
offered is the religious one, which promises an Aufhebung not here and now but
in the unknowable beyond.
As I see the matter, hunting (by which I mean the pursuit of individual
animals to the death, as exemplified in angling, feretting or hunting with hounds)
brings into focus the real differences between humans and other animals, and at
the same time lifts some of the burden which those differences create. To
summarise an argument that requires far more space than I can here afford to it,
human beings differ from animals systematically. Unlike the other animals with
which we come into regular contact, we are self-conscious, our thoughts involve
‘I’-thoughts, ‘you’-thoughts and ‘he, she, we and they’-thoughts. Because of
language, and the intellectual structure which language makes available, we do
not live, like the animals, in a ‘world of perception’, to use Schopenhauer’s
phrase. Our thoughts and feelings range over the actual and the possible, the
probable and the necessary, the past and the future, what is and what might have
been, what will be and what ought to be. Upon these very basic facts – which can
be summarised in the traditional philosophical way, by saying that we are
rational animals – other and more remarkable facts depend. Unlike the animals,
we have moral, aesthetic and religious experience; we pray to things visible and
invisible; we laugh and grieve; are indignant, approving and dismayed. And we
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relate to each other in a special way, through the give and take of practical reason,
and its associated concepts of justice, duty and right. Human beings are actual
or potential members of a moral community, in which each member enjoys
sovereignty over his own affairs, so long as he accords an equal sovereignty to
others. The concepts of right and duty regulate such a community, and ensure that
disputes are settled in the first instance by negotiation and not by force. And with
all this comes an immense burden of guilt. Morality and self-consciousness set
us in judgement over ourselves, so that we see our actions and characters
constantly from outside, judged by ourselves as we are by others. (It is part of the
function of moral dialogue, and the concepts of duty, right and justice, to
generate this external point of view.) We become cut off from our instincts, and
even the spontaneous joy of fellowship is diminished by the screen of judgement
through which it first must pass.
Animals rescue us from this predicament. Their lack of self-consciousness
neutralises our own, and their mute unembarrasability makes it possible to pour
out on them the pent up store of fellow feeling, without fear of judgement or
reproach. At the same time, we are acutely aware of their moral incompetence.
Their affection is too easily won, and based on nothing. However much a man
may be loved by his dog, this love brings warmth and security, but no release
from guilt. It is a love that implies no moral approval, and which leaves the
character of its object unassessed and unendorsed. For many people in the
conditions of civilised life, the relation with a pet is the best that can be achieved,
by way of satisfying the sedimented needs of the hunter-gatherer. But it is a
relation that is essentially one-sided, with one party speaking and acting for both.
The master smiles into the eyes of his dog as into a mirror, and finds there no
independent confirmation of his doubts and certainties.
The hunter-gatherer faces and overcomes the guilt of his condition more
easily than we do. Although Freud’s explanation of totemism, as the re-enactment
of an Oedipal murder, cannot be accepted, implying as it does that hunter-
gatherers are caught in the emotional web of fin-de-siècle Vienna, it contains a
profound truth. The willed identity between the hunter and his tribe, and between
the tribe and the universal prey, affirms, for the hunter, his primal innocence. Just
as there is no guilt attached to killing when lion kills goat, so are we released from
guilt when acting from the imperatives of the species. At the same time,
considered as species, the prey is identical with the tribe. Hence this guiltless
killing is also a purging of guilt – of the guilt that attaches to the murder of one’s
kind. The prey becomes a sacrificial victim: the individual who pays with his life
for the continuity of the tribe, by attracting the accumulated aggression between
the hunters which is the price of their mutual dependence. This pattern of thought
becomes explicit in the Jewish ritual of the scapegoat – a ritual, however, which
treats the victim far more harshly than the prey is treated by the hunter. In the
prey, therefore, a collective soul resides and the hunter confronts as he kills the
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mystery of incarnation. In that critical moment a solitary individual embodies the

moving spirit of the world, a spirit which becomes incarnate in death. (The
comparison between Christ and the scapegoat comes to mind: but this is only one
of many theological offshoots of these primal feelings.)
Although the conditions no longer obtain, in which totemism could be a real
moral force, the desire for guiltless killing endures, and attracts to itself a
powerful residue of social emotion. Hunting, shooting and fishing are forms of
social life. Even when conducted alone – as shooting and fishing might be
conducted – they are the focus of clubs, outings, parties, and festivals. For many
people the true companion is the one with whom they can go fishing or shooting,
the one with whom they can feel comfortably ‘side by side’, and with whom they
can talk over the day’s events with the calm enjoyment of a common enterprise.
And those who are familiar with the English countryside will know that hunting
is not merely the occasional sport of the wealthy, but an elaborate social artefact,
in which all country people from all walks of life participate, and which spills
over into horse trials, point-to-points, the pony club, the hunt ball, hunt break-
fasts and fun-rides, charity events, puppy shows and farmers’ lunches – in short,
every available form of social communion. Hunting is also a rehearsal of social
instincts, and a reaffirmation of our mutual dependence.
It is this, I believe, which explains the extraordinary hold of ‘field sports’, as
they are euphemistically called, over the lives of those who participate in them.
There is, in the contest between man and his prey, an inherent social meaning,
a summoning into consciousness of the misremembered life of the tribe. Even in
angling this is so, and if angling also has its solitary aspect, this is in part because
the crucial transition, in which the species becomes incarnate in the individual,
can occur only at the end of a single line. It is nevertheless the case that ordinary
coarse fishing is a social affair. Much of the joy of angling resides in the
concentrated silence of people working side by side along the bank, confident in
their neighbours, and bound by a common enterprise.
There is another aspect to hunting, however, which also bears on its
significance for us, in our attempts to conserve the boundary between the natural
and the artificial worlds. Hunting is a territorial activity, and to hunt land and
waterways is to exert a claim of ownership. The hunter-gatherer is at no time
more attached to his world than when hunting, since hunting is also a ‘taking into
possession’. (The expression is the one used by the common law, to describe
what happens when a wild animal is hunted and killed by the owner of land.) For
this reason, hunting rights and game laws have underpinned the structure of
ownership and tenancy in our societies, and have been vivid subjects of political
dispute. It is hardly necessary to mention the significance of the royal forests, the
eighteenth century game laws, the decree by the French Revolutionaries that
henceforth the people could hunt where they choose, or the monopoly over
hunting exerted by the communist Nomenklatura in Eastern Europe. The
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transcending of the hunter-gatherer economy into the producer economy re-

quired that hunting and fishing rights be legally specified and defended.
Thereafter you could hunt in a place only if you had the right to do so, or were
the guest of another whose right it was.
This obvious fact is of some significance. For it has made hunting, shooting
and fishing into elaborate forms of hospitality. In all societies hospitality is a
necessary part of ownership, since it is the price paid for the social acceptance
of private wealth. Ownership of land is particularly sensitive, since it places
tangible obstacles in the way of those who do not enjoy it, and restricts the supply
of every raw material. English law has been lenient and subtle in the distribution
of land – granting rights of way and easements, enforcing covenants and
prescriptive rights, and producing a unique combination of overcrowding and
public access in a landscape which retains its domestic appearance. Neverthe-
less, even in England, the private ownership of land provokes resentment among
those whom it excludes, and the Ramblers’ Association, for example, has taken
an increasingly belligerent line towards farmers who forbid people to cross their
property.
The farmer who forbids the rambler is very likely to permit the hunt,
regardless of whether he is plagued by foxes, and notwithstanding the fact that
the hunt does far more damage than a quiet walker in an anorak. The reason is
simple. The rambler is an outsider, someone who does not ‘belong’. The farmer
needs to justify his ownership to his neighbours, to those with whom he lives as
one possessor among others. Hospitality extends to them, since they enjoy the
same ancestral title to the territory from which his portion has been carved.
Hence, when the hunt meets on his land, the farmer will usually offer additional
hospitality, in order to confirm that the land is open to his guests. In Vale of White
Horse country, where I live, it is normal for a farmer to offer port, sausages and
cake to followers on horseback, and to make special provision for the huntsman,
whose partiality for whisky is well-known. Towards ramblers, however, farmers
feel no hospitable urges, regarding them as alien intruders who should stick to
public rights of way (not of all of which are recognised by the farmers
themselves).
Ceremonial hospitality of this kind should be distinguished from ordinary
giving. It is an attempt to raise the relations among neighbours to a higher level:
to confer legitimacy and permanence on the current patterns of ownership. It is
partly in acknowledgement of this that mounted followers wear a uniform, and
obey a strict dress-code that extends to horse as well as rider. The hunt arrives
on the farmer’s land not as an ordinary visitor, but as a ceremonial presence,
endorsing his ownership in the act of exploiting it.
In the hunt, therefore, are revived, in transfigured form, some of the long-
buried emotions of our forebears. The reverence for a species, expressed through
the pursuit of its ‘incarnate’ instance; the side-by-sideness of the tribal hunts-
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man; the claim to territory and the animals who live in it; and the therapy for guilt
involved in guiltless killing.
But is it guiltless? Hunting, shooting and to a lesser extent angling have been
repeatedly condemned as immoral: not immoral per se, since they may well be
necessary if people are to feed themselves. But immoral in circumstances like
ours, when hunting is a recreation rather than a means to food and clothing. The
arguments here are involved and various, and there is no short answer to them.
Nevertheless, it is not a sufficient justification for recreational hunting that it puts
us in touch with needed emotions, or that it maintains the boundaries which fence
off the ‘natural’ world. Even if it could be shown that hunting (in one or other of
its many forms) is the best that we over-civilised beings can hope for, by way of
a homecoming to our natural state, and the best proof against the tribal
aggressions which otherwise beset us, this would carry little weight in modern
times. It may or may not be significant that the first politician to ban hunting
(Adolf Hitler) also created a society remorselessly bent on hunting down the
‘enemy within’. But people believe that all such examples belong to the
irretrievable (and mercifully irretrievable) past. Many people are also sceptical
of the romantic Heimkehr. The best hope for our future, they believe, is to live
with our alienation, to cease to look for some simulacrum, however sublimated
and self-conscious, of the old tribal emotions and to look on the world as a vast
suburban garden, an artificial and third-rate paradise, which we must maintain
as kindly and responsibly as we can. This means taking the interests of all
creatures into account, and refraining from pursuits which cause needless
suffering, lest the spectacle of suffering should cease to trouble us. The
comparative toleration of modern people towards angling stems from the fact
that fish are so very different from us, in their appearance, habitat and behaviour,
that it is no sign of a hard heart to look on their sufferings unmoved. The hare,
the stag and the fox, by contrast, are near to us. Whatever the difference between
our thoughts and theirs, we share the circumstances of our pains, our terrors and
our death, and to inflict these things on such an animal is to act with a callous
disregard.
There is something right in that argument. But it also overlooks the crucial
fact from which I began this paper, and which is now at the back of all our minds,
including the minds of those opposed to hunting. The natural world can no longer
look after itself. We are guardians and keepers of the natural order, which owes
its character to us. We could turn our backs on it, and cease to interfere. But the
result would not be better, either for the animals who live in it, or for us, who
depend on the natural world for our sense of what we are. If deer were never
culled, Exmoor would contain nothing else, besides suburban houses, and the
highlands of Scotland would be treeless crags. If foxes were never killed, lambs,
ducks and chickens would be reared indoors, in conditions that no decent person
should tolerate. If angling ceased, our waterways would never be maintained,
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and mink, coot and moorhen would drive all their rivals to extinction. In so far
as ‘bio-diversity’ is a wished-for part of our third-rate paradise, culling and
pest-control will remain incumbent on us. And it seems to me that the truly
callous way of doing these things, is the way that merely attacks the species – as
when poisoned bait is laid for rats and foxes, or electric shocks are used to free
some waterway of pike. Such practices involve a failure to achieve the ‘incarna-
tion’ of the species in the individual, and so to renew our respect for it. The true
graciousness of hunting occurs when the species is controlled through the
arduous pursuit of its individual members, and so impresses upon us its real and
eternal claim to our respect and sympathy. This does not mean that hunting can
be pursued in any way we choose. A rifle, in the hands of a well-trained stalker,
may be a permissible way to bring death to a stag; but it does not follow that the
very same stag might as well be killed by a grenade, a noose or a handgun. An
animal like the fox, which can be cleanly killed only in the open, and which is
never more quickly despatched than by a pack of hounds, requires great labour
and the cooperation of three species if he is to be hunted in this way. If he is to
be hunted at all, however, this is how it should be done.
The example is controversial, and those who believe in the rights of animals
will dismiss what I have said as quite irrelevant. On the other hand, I believe not
only that the concept of animal rights is based on a confusion, but that a true
understanding of the nature of moral judgement will find no conclusive argu-
ment against properly conducted hunting.2 Indeed, I incline to Plato’s view,
defended in The Laws,3 that hunting with hounds is the noblest form of hunting.
And this because it is the form in which our kindred nature with the animals is
most vividly present to our feelings. The pleasure that we feel in this kind of
hunting is borrowed from the animals who are really doing it – the hounds who
pursue, and the horses who excitedly follow them. The residual moral doubts are
ours, not theirs, and they must be answered by us – by ensuring that the fox or
stag has the best chance of saving himself, and the quickest death should he be
caught.

NOTES

1
S. Freud, Totem and Taboo, tr. J. Strachey, London 1950. There is another function
performed by totemism, which parallels the one to which I refer. By worshipping his prey,
the hunter also identifies with its spirit, learns to incarnate its spirit in himself, and so sees
the world as the prey sees it. In this way he learns to understand the motives and behaviour
of his quarry, and is able to track it more effectively. Totemism, on this view, is a kind of
inverse anthropomorphism, and has a similar function. The theory is elevated into a
functional explanation by Steve Mithen, in The Prehistory of the Mind, London 1996.
2
See Roger Scruton, Animal Rights and Wrongs, Demos 1996.
3
Book 7, concluding pages.