What to Feel About Cecil

[I've been the laziest of bloggers, getting nothing up for several months now. Recently, though, I happen to have found myself in FB discussions with several friends on the topic of hunting -- whether it has any validity or excuse in these days of ecological disaster and mass extinction. So here goes with something I had about a year ago in The Vocabula Review, a zine that came out every month for most of two decades, before it fell silent last year with the death of its publisher and editor, Robert Fiske. I'm pretty skeptical, as you'll see, of what seem to me rather facile, PC condemnations of hunting by those who haven't thought too much about its traditional place. So "forgive what you cannot approve," and don't troll me, bro.]

What To Feel About Cecil

         “God Save thee, Ancient Mariner!

                        From the fiends that plague thee thus!

            Why lookst thou so?”—“With my crossbow

                        I shot the Albatross.”

                                                —Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner

1

“I Am Cecil,” says one of the signs in the New York Times photograph. “Trophy Hunters Are Cowards,” insists another. One lady’s poster favors the extradition to Zimbabwe of Walter Palmer, who (as you may not know, if you have been hiding at the bottom of a mine this past month), killed the luckless lion illegally and, it seems, somewhat inadvertently, unaware that it was both “a local favorite” and a protected research animal. Another placard suggests we should hunt Walter for sport, in an interesting variation on PETA’s official public proposal that the rich but hapless dentist be first given a fair trial, then hanged.

These people may not know much about lions, Africa, hunting, or wildlife management. But they clearly know how to have a good time. You get together with a few dozen coreligionaries, and all of you march around in the agreeable sunlight, chanting and exclaiming and admiring one another’s signs, feeling, for once in this perplexing life, morally certain about something. As a way to “cheaply purchase a delicious self-approval,” in Melville’s phrase, it is hard to beat. You go home feeling darned good about yourself.

Am I being unfair? Undoubtedly. But the real problem is that I am dragging a pink herring, if not quite a red one. The Cecilians may be enjoying their own indignation far too much, they may have gone to bewildering lengths to find a crusade remote from their own lives, they may put a crotchety old English teacher in mind of Mrs. Pardiggle and Mrs. Jellyby, two characters in Dickens who neglect their own children because they are too busy organizing relief projects for African orphans — but so what?  It doesn’t do to question people’s motives; the arguments themselves still clamor to be addressed. A very good friend who is a firm anti-Walterian, though not quite a Cecilian, put it neatly when she told me, “You’re allowed to choose which of those kinds of things” — oddball news stories, causes du jour, problems not exactly your own — “you care about.” Charity may begin at home, but if it had to stay at home, no one would be allowed to care about anything past the end of his nose.

Getting back on the high road, therefore, I ask: what was Walter Palmer’s essential crime? That’s easy: he chose the wrong lion: one that was wearing a collar and had a name. Disastrous missteps both. The relation of Homo sapiens to other animals is paradoxical and hopelessly conflicted: we eat them, enslave them, abuse them, kill them for fun, experiment upon them, use them as symbols of shame and low status, yet we also love them, individually and collectively, and we especially love the idea of them.

Naming is a magic that tries to impose some order on this moral chaos, resolving, in particular cases, the tension between casual brutality and mushy sentimentalism (those being, it seems, the only options). Naming changes the animal from prey to pet, from pest to friend, from beef into Bessie, from pork into Wilbur. It amounts to a promise from humanity that you are an ally now, a party to the social contract, to be treated with consideration and respect. You have been adopted and no one is allowed to mess with you anymore.

On the human side, the name signals that the animal belongs not in the slot labelled “fair game” or “raw material,” but the one marked “emotional surrogate” or “fantasy object.” It licenses and sets free that part of the imagination that wants to personify everything, turning animals into friends, heroes, even lovers. One of the recurring headline links on the web, these past weeks, has been “Minnesota Dentist Kills Cecil the Lion.” Just say that aloud, and you are aware of a dreamlike passage from the real world of newspapers and TV into the fantasy terrain of children’s books and movies. You can’t kill Cecil because he’s a person! Not “just a lion,” but in some sense all lions rolled into one, and a being like you and me. All the actions and reactions of the Cecilians would seem perfectly proportional coming from characters in, say, Finding Nemo or The Lion King. Such worlds typically refuse to accept routine predation, translating it to villainy and crime instead, requiring outsize motives and complex moral responses. PETA has followed the pattern to a T in their response to Walter’s (admittedly misdirected) act of human predation, remarking that Cecil “wanted only to be left alone,” as if the only imaginably admissible motive for hunting him would have been some prior criminality on his part. (They also seem to imagine that he was a vegan, which would certainly account for the research collar.)

But there goes my unfairness alert, with its annoying buzz, yet again. I do not mean to say that the outcry against the slaying is purely a matter of sentimental codes having been activated, then foolishly transported from fantasy back into reality. There are some good reality-based arguments against Walter’s deed, and against trophy hunting generally. Pre-eminent among these is the ecological one: In this age of global warming and mass extinctions, is it “good for the planet” — good, that is, for the infinite web of biological relationships on which we depend, good for us — to be hunting for sport, or hunting at all? Shouldn’t we be protecting lions, not killing them? Those are practical, sensible questions.

Inconveniently for the Cecilians, however, the answers are respectively “Yes, on the whole,” and “Yes and no.” Make your way through the thickets of online commentary, and you will find hunters, here and there, patiently explaining the first point. They are not attacking nature, the hunters tell you, but merely participating in it, trying to return to it insofar as such a thing is possible. They spend far more time in the wild than you and me, know its ways far more intimately, and by any fair assessment love it better and more wisely. Their licenses and fees contribute directly to conservation efforts, and by “harvesting” or “taking” suitable numbers of designated species, they help game wardens achieve what they have decided is a healthy or desirable ecosystem overall. Their whole craft and code aims in various ways to limit the sufferings of prey, and the deaths they inflict are much more merciful than the overpopulation and starvation that are the only alternatives. It is all a sane accommodation to reality, to the world as it is, not as we dream it in myths and children’s books.

The hunters are perfectly right about all this, and tend to make the anti-hunting sentimentalists look quite idiotic. Go look if you don’t believe me. As it happens, the wildlife management policies of Zimbabwe, where Cecil was taken, seem to be badly flawed, compromised in the direction of economic motives rather than properly ecological ones (a distinction that holds up unless one counts the economy itself as part of the overall ecosystem).  Perhaps Walter Palmer should have known this. But in principle, within the context of a sound wildlife-management program — a plan to treat nature in a way that safeguards our own long-term survival and welfare — there is nothing outrageous in the idea of harvesting an elderly male lion. Doing so may directly benefit the species or the ecosystem, in which case you do it, or it may not, in which case you refrain, but either way, there is no need to have your bearers sweating under excess emotional baggage.

Trophy hunting, though, may be a special case, lacking as it does the usual fig-leaf rationale of hunger. In my experience hunters themselves are often bothered by the idea of killing game that is then not eaten (except by lucky scavengers and bacteria), and by the sense that trophy hunting, overly funded as it is, with its hired guides and gleaming high-powered rifles, is too one-sided to be sporting or manly (or in this age, womanly). But these, again, are emotional concerns. The really pressing question is what impact trophy hunting has on the target species and the ecosystem. Was the harvesting of Cecil good for lion-kind? Answer: probably not. A talking head I heard the other night explained, very excitedly, that trophy hunters remove the best animals from the breeding population — the biggest, the most dominant and successful — so that the whole species devolves.

This is as neat an argument as one could ask for, and seems to checkmate Walter and all his tribe. But does it really? For one thing, as the New York Times has noted, a ban on trophy hunting might mean a collapse of the lion population, since it would bankrupt the game preserves where most of the big cats currently survive. More directly to the point, the problem with terms like “best” and “successful” in discussions of wildlife genetics is the inescapable problem of point of view. If we are controlling lion populations anyway, who is to say what characteristics should be favored in our de facto breeding program? If the Zebra Defense League gets a vote, they will undoubtedly give a ringing endorsement to trophy hunting, since its result will be kinder, gentler, slower, smaller lions — beasts more like Alex, the audience favorite in Madagascar II, and less like the bully Makunga. You could argue that humanity, and the sentimentalists themselves in particular, already implicitly endorse the culling of alphas.

But all these are hairs the Cecilians have obviously not cared to split. For them the matter is simpler: the violence against Cecil was an act of violence against the species itself, semicolon, and against nature, period. The whole episode has been seized upon as an irresistible symbol of the damage humans are doing to nature, of everything that must stop, very soon, if we are to avoid destroying the planet and ourselves. So the sentimental passion for animals is joined by an even more powerful current of conservationism, et voila, there you are in the street, holding a sign that calls for the lynching of Walter Palmer, hardly knowing how you got there.

To an English teacher it can all seem like a mainly semiotic crack-up: a matter of tropes gone bad, in the way that tropes most typically do, by growing too literal. A basic rule for the care and feeding of metaphors is this: when a figure of speech stops presenting itself as one way of looking at a blackbird and starts claiming to be the only and right way — when it pretends to be reality itself, and not just one formulation — get rid of it.  Henceforth it can only mislead you into naivete and profitless fundamentalism. In this case, it is first of all the naming of Cecil that has been taken too literally (as if it were a legal grant of personhood), then personification, and finally synecdoche, when the killing of one lion is taken to mean the killing of lion-kind, or even of all nature. The figures of speech have escaped their proper bounds and are rioting through the countryside. Round them back up, return them to the preserve, and all will be well.

2

But now let me get to my real beef with the Cecilians: they are making it too hard to read Hemingway, and Faulkner, and even Field and Stream.

Full disclosure, or perhaps a belated attempt to hedge my bets: I do not hunt. Nor do I fish, though I own a one-acre pond teeming with healthy bluegill, bass, cats, and sunfish, and I cheerfully allow the neighbor kids and a few friends to ply their hobby there. But while they are reeling the fish in and throwing them back, I secretly root for the critters. I seem to be a closet Cecilian.

But many decades ago, growing up in New Mexico, I was a hunter of sorts. Friends and I would take bows we had found in our fathers’ garages, and a number of target arrows in makeshift quivers, and we would hike out to the mesa to chase jackrabbits. It is completely impossible to approach a New Mexico jackrabbit even if you are not accompanied by a small dog that ranges two hundred yards ahead, yapping hysterically, and we never came close to shooting one. One day, though, we came upon what must have been someone’s escaped pet rabbit. It had been wounded somehow and couldn’t seem to run away. So, persuading ourselves that we should “put it out of its misery,” we clustered around and took turns shooting it. It took many shots, with our blunt target arrows, before the thing would finally die, and that was the last time we hunted rabbits on the mesa.

But sometime after this, my father bought me a BB gun for Christmas, then seemed to forget he had done so; or perhaps he thought it was just a toy. My friends and I ended up roaming the neighborhood with the thing, shooting sparrows out of trees. I think at one point we persuaded ourselves that we were going to cook up a pot of them. But the real motivator was the challenge of hitting such a tiny target at an appreciable distance. That really did bring a little thrill of accomplishment, even as the sight of the tiny still-warm body brought nausea and regret. But the thrill, the challenge, was inescapably tied to what had been so vividly apparent half a minute before, the sparrow’s eager will to live. This phase ended much as the other one had. One day we found not a sparrow but a robin, a much rarer bird in Albuquerque, and a much larger one. One shot was enough to knock it off its branch, but then we had to take six more shots, none of them challenging, the last at point-blank range. I don’t know what finally happened to that gun, but I quit shooting it after that.  

My point? Hunting may or may not be a way of putting food on your table, but it is deeply and strangely motivated, and not so easily relinquished as moralists might suppose. In The Naked Ape, the zoologist Desmond Morris explains that all predators have to be intrinsically motivated to hunt, because the pleasure of eating itself is too remote to sustain them through the long sequence of roaming, browsing, stalking, and finally killing their prey. They have to like hunting for its own sake, and as a consequence will, yes, hunt for pleasure and to excess, notwithstanding cliché moralisms that assert just the opposite. No one who has owned a cat can seriously doubt this principle. And anyone who has ever been a boy or raised one will at least suspect that it applies to humans, too. Whether we should allow the hunting drive to be directly satisfied or channel it elsewhere (video games?) is a separate question.

Here in Illinois, the main game species is deer, which make good eating and are also grave nuisances, destroying gardens and trees and automobiles. All this is very convenient for the hunters; still, to regard deer hunting as a way of getting food or controlling pests is like viewing marathon running as a means of transportation. What hunting is instead, like it or not, is something that answers to an instinctual and spiritual need of the hunter: a need to feel fearless and dominant, yes, but also to come to terms, in an admittedly mysterious way, with death and suffering, through an act that affirms life and death at once. Less sport than ritual, all hunting is trophy hunting to a degree.

All this probably sounds like nonsense coming from me; but such paradoxes are beautifully set forth in works like Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River,” “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” and The Old Man and the Sea, Faulkner’s The Bear, and, for that matter, in Moby Dick, which among other things is the world’s greatest fishing story. In such tales the spilling of blood is regulated and structured by ancient ritual, and the hunters, far from hating or scorning their prey, revere and even love it. The point of hunting Old Ben, the bear in Faulkner’s novella, is not to be rid of him, but to engage in a contest that somehow ennobles both him and Ike, the boy who becomes a man (as the study guides tell you) through the passionate struggle, ritualistically finding his place in nature and in human society. 

In their affection for their quarry, such literary hunters remind one of pre-industrial cultures which make deities of the very species they hunt for food. The killing must be done reverently, even lovingly, and in strict accordance with precedent, or it does indeed decline to butchery. Ahab, it’s true, has the revenge motive for pursuing Moby Dick, but the point of that is precisely that, in personalizing and sentimentalizing the hunt in this way, he violates an ancient order of things: arguably the reason the Pequod goes down in the end.

Back in reality, the idea that the hunter “proves his manhood” has been laughed nearly to death by feminists and others who point out that the dangers and difficulties of the hunt are actually quite trivial, in these days of bass-finding sonar and satellite-assisted safaris. The fellow with the sign that says “Trophy Hunters are Cowards,” trying to turn the tradition its head, shows bad form in not offering this insult to Walter Palmer’s face, without his crowd of seconds and eggers-on. Still, he has an argument. If it is your courage you are trying to cultivate and prove, why not choose sky-diving or rock climbing?

But hunting’s peculiar value lies in the way it lets the hunter experience and think through the reality of violence and his own capacity for it. Anthropologists tell us that even in hunting-and-gathering societies, the best models for our evolutionary history, the male hunters contribute fewer calories to the cookpot than the canny, overworked females who gather and garden. Again, getting food is not really the point. But hunting gains its traditional prestige by the way it supports its ugly big brother, war. We moderns too readily forget that (as Jared Diamond and others explain), tribal life is lived on the brink of annihilation, with each village menacing and menaced by its neighbors on every side, and constant battle accounting for a huge share of total mortality. (Mel Gibson’s film Apocalypto gives an accurate picture of the terrain, parting centuries of Rousseauvian mist in order to do so.) In such an existence, war-cursed and war-dominated, hunting is crucial for the way it gives men skill and practice with weapons. But probably more important is psychological preparation: the way early, limited exposure to death and gore can give the apprentice warrior the fortitude he will so desperately need later.

The military psychologist Dave Grossman writes beautifully about such things in his tremendous study, On Killing. In every age, it seems, soldiers have no worse enemy than their own humanity, the pity and fear that threaten to paralyze them when the hell of battle commences. If they are to live, they require toughening. Like the surgeon, the warrior learns that compassion and disgust — those delicate moral emotions — can be the enemy of the mission and right conduct.

That I think was the lesson we were after when we shot the robin. We were getting to the end of childhood. On the inside we boys were all still mostly as tender and temperamental as our little sisters, but something (please don’t call it “society”) had started to warn us that the inner softness that had served us well till then was going to be a problem if we didn’t learn to control it. We needed a dose of what worried moralists now call desensitization, though our fathers and coaches would have called it toughening up or conditioning or some other honorific term. We weren’t trying to be daredevils, but to show that we could be tough and pitiless. If the whole experience went somehow awry, leaving a memory that troubles me still, I chalk that up to the lack of adult supervision and the absence of a controlling, validating ritual, not to a premise that was really faulty in itself.

We no longer live in scattered, war-cursed villages, and perhaps the world no longer needs either a warrior ethic or a hunting ethic. (It clearly needs a conservation ethic, but one founded in the sober chemistry and physics of habitat defense, not sentimental theatrics on behalf of particular, cuddly species.) Then again, maybe it does, because the globe has not grown noticeably more peaceful of late, and anyway we are all still mortal. The need to rein in one’s tender side on occasion is not just a warrior’s truth but a life lesson, because unrestrained sentimentality, as the protests show well enough, has a way of turning both foolish and cruel. When you have driven a perfectly good dentist into hiding with your protests and indignation, your death threats and snotty emails, you need to back off a bit, considering other ways of looking at the blackbird.