On The Wild Edge
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David Petersen, of Durango, is a lifelong traditional bowhunter, an outspoken hunting ethicist and conservationist, and author or editor of 15 thoughtful books on wildlife, wild places, wild people, and wild ideas, including Heartsblood: Hunting, Spirituality, and Wildness in America. (www.davidpetersenbooks.com)
by David Petersen
Blog Last Updated; 4/13/2009
Increasingly and rightly so, hunting in recent years has become embroiled in philosophical issues and arguments that
fall within the umbrella term ethics. Indeed, the E word contains multitudes of issues that I, for one, hold strong
feelings about. And so do most other hunters.
A complicating factor in this arena is that no one ethical size will ever fit all sportsmen and women across a broad
spectrum of issues. For some, the clich?If it's legal, it's ethical!" does the trick. And certainly, if all hunters
would abide even by that minimal dictum of dignity, we'd have far fewer problems afield and a far better public
image. Yet I propose that while legality provides a necessary bottom line for ethical outdoor behavior, it's merely a
starting point for thoughtfully examining the moral aspects of an action or belief.
To begin, "legal equals ethical" implies that those who make and interpret our laws always know best and it isn't our
place to question authority. Really? In America, questioning authority is a historic tradition celebrated as both an
essential freedom and a necessary underpinning of a functional democracy. On this point, we are reminded of the
Philosophy 101 concept of "necessary vs. sufficient," which instructs that legality is a necessary but not a
sufficient basis for ethical behavior.
To suggest an example directly from hunting: Who among us will openly argue that the "rules" of fair chase, as
posited by B&C and other credible hunting groups, do not provide a valid yardstick for measuring sportsman
conduct afield? Yet those unwritten ethical rules often rule out actions that are legal in some places and openly
celebrated by some hunting subcultures ? like canned high fence "hunts," baiting and plenty more. So which in this
example is the higher ? that is, more appropriate -- authority: local written law and culture, or an unwritten and
self-imposed universal code of higher conduct?
Let's say that Joe, a Colorado hunter who normally abides by the rules of fair chase as mandated by this state,
travels with friend to, let's say Texas, where local laws allow hunting practices that are both illegal and broadly
considered unethical back home. What is Joe to do?
In obvious point of fact, the legality of specific hunting practices varies so widely from place to place as to
"prove," in a philosophical sense, nothing more than what a particular region and culture will or won't allow us to
get away with. Given this regional variance, who can say with certainty just which regions and cultures have it
"right" in the "if it's legal it's moral picture? Clearly, under such a "local rules rule" system, local ethics are
determined by local culture.
In academic philosophy-speak, this trail of ethical thought is called "cultural relativism," which declares
that all values are (a) human constructed, and (b) relative to time, place, and cultural mores. Accordingly,
outsiders can't validly judge a foreign culture's ethics because "It takes one to know one."
Taking the opposite philosophical view from the relativists are the "absolutists" ? so called because they insist
there are basic universal rights and wrongs that apply to all human endeavors in all times and places, and which
override any locally constructed rules, laws and beliefs that fall obviously short of basic decency. To bolster their
argument, the absolutists trot out a litany of examples, including women's, children's, and minority rights from
oppression; freedom of religion; freedom from slavery and torture and countless more e.g.'s that most civilized
nations view as basic human rights and have gone to war to defend, even though these same "self-evident rights" are
sneered at by the laws of "outlaw" cultures worldwide.
And so it is that the ethical fix our well-meaning but conflicted friend Joe is faced with when visiting a state with
lower ethical hunting standards than his own becomes one of relativism versus absolutism. If Joe declines to play
down to local ethics because they offend the rules he's accustomed to and holds in his heart, he risks being rebuffed
as an elitist by both locals and the friends who talked him into coming. Meanwhile, if Joe does "as the natives do,"
he'll be considered by his absolutist friends back home and as well as by himself to have compromised his ethics for
social convenience.
There is no simplistic clarity here, no easy way out. In fact, as the existentialists would have it, we make
ourselves up as we go along. We are, day to day, as ethical and dignified ? or the opposite ? as we choose to be.
by David Petersen
Blog Last Updated; 4/13/2009
The San Juan Mountains of southwest Colorado
comprise some of the richest potential grizzly habitat in all of North American. Appropriately, in prehistoric times,
the largest omnivore our continent has ever known, and the largest predator to have survived the final faunal
meltdown of the icy Pleistocene, was abundant throughout the region. To the San Juan's resident Southern Ute natives,
the grizzly was the mother of all creation, a powerful and benevolent spirit that's honored still today in the annual
Bear Dance ceremony, which is both a celebration of spring renewal and a matchmaking occasion for young Ute women and
men. Perhaps because the Indians lacked firearms with which to dominate nature, they learned to get along, even with
the grizzly.
White explorers and settlers felt no such spiritual
connections to nature, and they did have the firepower. Consequently, by early in the 20th century, ranchers, hunters
and federal trappers had reduced Colorado's grizzlies to a few shy survivors, more like black bears than Grizz in
behavior. In a majority of local and bureaucratic minds, the grizzly was dead and gone; the wilderness had been
rendered safe for human occupation and commercial exploitation. Then, in September of 1951, a federal trapper used a
cyanide set-gun to end the brief career of a sheep-killing young male grizzly north of Pagosa Springs, up along the
Continental Divide within today's Weminuche Wilderness, in a grassy subalpine park called Starvation Gulch. The
trapper was a local character named Ernie Wilkinson, today in his eightties. Recalling the event for me, Wilkinson
said he had been as surprised as everyone else to learn that his victim was a grizzly.
One bright July morning nearly half a century
since he last had been there, Ernie guided me to the place where the drama had played out. Evidencing no guilt, this
soft-spoken, gentle-mannered man explained that "Back then, nobody even thought about there still being grizzlies
around. America was busy recovering from World War II and the livestock industry was important. It was my job to help
protect that industry."
In an irony of synchronicity, just a month before
Ernie killed his accidental Grizz, a near-twin had been shot by a sheepherder near Blue Lake, eighty miles to the
south of Starvation Gulch, within what today is the South San Juan Wilderness Area. Tragedies seem to come in threes
and precisely one year later, in September of 1952, in the same general vicinity, yet a third sheep-killing
grizzly ? this time an adult female with two subadult cubs ? was eliminated by another federal trapper. Even though
both big cubs got away clean, Colorado wildlife officials inexplicably chose that moment to declare the grizzly
extinct statewide . . . even as they quietly hired a researcher to comb the San Juans for evidence of more survivors.
Across the next 28 years, many credible grizzly sightings were reported, in both the San Juans and the adjacent South
San Juans. Yet the official word remained: gone.
And so it went, until September 23, 1979, when the latest in the litany of so-called
"last" Colorado grizzlies turned up ? again in the South San Juans, and again good and dead. But not, this time,
without a fight.
On that star-crossed autumn day, a local hunting outfitter named Ed Wiseman was
guiding a Kansas bowhunter, seeking elk, when the two men became separated and Wiseman surprised a bear along the rim
of the headwaters canyon of the upper Navajo River. The bear attacked. Wiseman was knocked to the ground and
severely mauled but managed to stab and kill the bear with a hand-held arrow from his quiver. Although federal
investigators suspected the man had shot the bear first, thus provoking the attack, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service dropped the case after Wiseman passed a lie-detector test and no credible evidence could be mounted against
him. The bear, an old female with broken and worn-down teeth, massive abscesses and extensive arthritis, was
estimated to weigh 350 to 400 pounds, not large by grizzly standards, but hardly stunted either. As I had done with
Ernie Wilkinson, I cajoled Ed Wiseman to lead me to the remote setting where his fight had taken place. And there, in
what for him remains a spooky spot, while I sat on the log where his bear had died, Ed recalled for me his story.
As an upshot of the Wiseman incident, through the summers of 1981 and '82, the Colorado Division of Wildlife assigned
black bear biologist Tom Beck to conduct an extensive baiting and leg-snaring study in hopes of capturing, radio
collaring, releasing and radio-tracking any remaining San Juan grizzlies. To compensate for his lack of grizzly
experience, Beck "high-graded" four expert field hands from the Montana and Wyoming grizzly research teams of Charles
Jonkel and Richard Knight. While the searchers failed to catch a grizzly, they did turn up several bits of intriguing
evidence ? including a confirmed grizzly den that had likely been dug by the Wiseman bear, along with
several confirmed grizzly digs of indeterminate ages ? suggesting but not confirming the possibility of
more survivors. Accordingly, Tom Beck stated in his final report that "Failure to catch a grizzly does not mean a
definite absence of bears." Beck concluded that the wisest official stance would be to assume that a few bears remain
and thus to reduce their primary threats ? sheep grazing and black bear hunting ? in a
relatively small area of likely core habitat. Ignoring its own expert's advice, the state reverted again to its
traditional "extinct" public stance, though this time with the prefix "probably" and advisories to trigger-happy bear
hunters and predator-phobic ranchers that killing a grizzly in Colorado is a federal felony.
And so it is that still today, 30 years since the last confirmed Colorado grizzly died, the question remains
frustratingly unanswered: Are there, or are there not a last few grizzlies left in southwest Colorado? Believers
maintain that the existence of a remnant population has been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt, citing hair
samples collected by an independent team of searchers and identified by an independent forensics laboratory in
Wyoming as grizzly (doubters point out that the hairs could have been planted); several finds of huge, grizzly-like
tracks (though none have been cast or convincingly photographed); and two seemingly credible first-person sightings,
including a female with three subadult cubs observed for half an hour from just eighty yards with binoculars by a
highly respected local ranchman, back in 1990. "I've seen hundreds of bears," Dennis Schutz told me when we revisited
the scene, "and these were definitely grizzlies." Then, in the summer of 1995, a large adult bear bluff-charged an
experienced and wholly credible bear photographer near where the Wiseman bear had died. He swore it was a grizzly, no
holes appeared in his story after intense investigation, and the location was perfect.
In my travels and presentations on all the above, a question often asked is this: Even if a handful of native
Colorado grizzlies were proven to exist, what about inbreeding? Aren't the survivors so few as to be genetically
doomed?
Eventually, yes, though perhaps not just yet.
No one really knows at what point an island population of grizzlies will genetically collapse from inbreeding, though
observable evidence in Europe and Asia suggests that the big carnivores are remarkably, perhaps uniquely, resistant
to genetic starvation. This belief is reinforced by the fact that there had been so few grizzlies in Colorado for so
long, the Wiseman bear must have been the product of multiple generations of increasingly narrow inbreeding. Yet her
physical remains are normal in every way, save the skeletal ravages of age.
And here's the closing kicker: The Wiseman sow had nursed cubs, offspring which, if they lived to adulthood, hiding
as successfully as had their mother, could have produced yet another generation of cubs that could still be around
today.
So, next time you head into our beloved San Juans for a few days of wilderness hiking and camping, give this all some
thought and see if you don't agree that even the remote possibility that a ghostly grizzly or two could be
lurking around makes the nights darker, the stars brighter, your campfire more reassuring and the whole outdoor
experience infinitely richer. As Aldo Leopold pointed out, a mountain without a grizzly on it ? well,
it's just a mountain.
The recently released third edition of David Petersen's now-classic
Ghost Grizzlies: Does the Great Bear Still
Haunt Colorado? (
www.davidpetersenbooks.com) sports a new cover, 12 new pages of
inside photos, and revisions throughout.
by David Petersen
Blog Last Updated; 4/6/2009
In my long and shaggy life, I've known no better teacher than hunting. Nor are the
lessons hunting has taught me limited merely to woodsmanship. While I don't expect my nonhunting friends and
readers to fully understand this, my fellow traditional-values hunters surely will, to wit: In the big picture and
long view, much of what I've learned about the nature of human nature, including my own, I've come to by examining
differing attitudes about hunting.
As hunters, much is revealed about us - as an uber group (all hunters), as
diverse subgroups (rifle hunters, bowhunters, traditionalists, etc.), and as individuals -- through the ways
we hunt and kill, what we will and will not do to attain that end goal, and how we talk about it all.
Today, tragically, uber hunting-the big, amorphous "If you've seen one
hunter, you've seen ?em all" mob of slob-clones that most nonhunters view us to be -- has been co-opted and
transmogrified into just another sucker market to peddle stuff to. After all, as the Hunting Industry so
well recognizes, most hunters are just a subculture of the greater American culture, with all the same
vulnerabilities: busy, distracted people willing to buy anything that will make us feel good about ourselves without
investing significant physical or mental effort. The fact that few Americans, or hunters, today have any
well-thought, independent guiding philosophy in life, much less in hunting, makes us easy meat for predacious
marketers fronted by a grinning army of industry-sponsored Good Ole Boy Hunting Heroes who cajole us affably to
scurry to the slop-trough and pig-out on an endless feast of "sporting aids" guaranteed to dumb hunting down to the
lowest legal denominator.
The growing list of manufactured toys for Wannabee hunters who don't wannabee quite
badly enough to spend the necessary time and energy to do it traditionally and right, includes motorized decoys,
electronic game calls, solar-powered automatic "feeders" that spray out a load of bait at preset times each day so
that animals are conditioned to appear promptly at, say, 8 a.m. and 4 p.m., and their impatient executioners don't
have to exert any uncomfortable effort or unfamiliar patience to get the job done
fast.
And then we have the Mechanized Hunters, whose legs, lungs and spirits have been so
radically atrophied by easy motorized mobility that they can't bear to leave the familiar and comforting noise, fumes
and padded seats behind for anything, ever, anywhere, no matter how inappropriate, self-defeating, and
hurtful to the resource and other hunters ? not tragedy, this, but pathos.
I mean ? what's the point in setting out to do a thing half-assed? Why even bother when your only
goal is pretense?
But let's not get overly sympathetic here. Karma is a force in life only insofar as
we ourselves are the enforcers. Clearly, most "hunters" today don't give a hoot about any such "old
fashioned and obsolete" values as those embraced by a minority of "elitist" traditionalists. In fact they
laugh at us because we do care!
True hunting, by nature, is a back-to-basics, "doing more with less" exercise of
process over product; a joyful reconnect to our innate and intrinsic human/animal wildness, tempered by
respect for all living things, our prey and ourselves, as expressed by self-imposed limits and willing
self-restraint (that's the "sport" part).
No one grows stronger by hobbling around on crutches. No one grows wiser by ditching
school.
by David Petersen
Blog Last Updated; 4/6/2009
"Why," my wife Caroline asks more often than I find necessary, "Why do you persist
in working so hard to build wooden longbows that mostly break even before you finish them, or blow up within the
first few hundred shots? And even when you do get one to hold together, you shoot it for awhile, then swap it off,
give it away, or sell it at a loss. How can you justify that?"
"Justify"?
Ah, our beloved spousal units ? those lovely live-in consciences!
But Caroline is right of course, at least from a literalistic, bean-counter point of
view. Were I ever to tally all my incremental and ongoing investments in bow-building ? the raw materials (Osage
staves and boards, bamboo backing, glue, epoxy, stain, finish, take-down sleeves ?), plus all the specialty hand
tools I've "had" to buy (drawknives, scrapers, C-clamps, rasps, round and triangular files, coping saw ?), and all
the power tools (table saw, band saw, belt sander ?), not to mention a small library of instructional and
motivational bow-making books ? add all that up and divide by the small number of successful bows I have at hand to
show for it ? and yes, both materially and "logically," my bow-building passion is unjustifiable; a losing
proposition.
Obviously, there's something not so obvious going on here that stretches
well beyond the merely practical and stands as a metaphor for countless other financially and logically unjustifiable
hobby-passions held so dear by literally millions of fools like me everywhere: hunting, fishing, skiing, climbing,
bicycling, ? not to mention art and myriad other forms of collecting. Why do we persist in hobbies that become
passions that cost rather than save or earn us money; ventures that dominate weeks of our time annually and which
result, in my case, in mediocre product ? when I/we could be fishing, exploring new hunting territory, or even just
reading a good book instead?
Why, indeed?
As old friend Abbey would respond to such intimate questions of quirky personal
choice ? Well, why the hell not?
I mean, how many of our primary passions in life can we really justify materially,
financially, or by any other "rational" means?
Hunting? I don't dare attempt to tally here the poor-man's fortune I've spent on my
"back to basics" passions for traditional archery and bowhunting across half a century of indulgence, for fear my
wife might read it.
Fishing? As a kid in mid-century Oklahoma, adequately equipped with cane pole and
can of worms, and with fish-filled creeks, rivers, lakes, and ponds readily abundant within bicycle or
parent-chauffeuring range, my angling was at least modestly profitable at the dinner table. But alas, there is no
such meaty profit in the gear-laden, Cabelas-clad, confused way most of us have been brainwashed by industry and
media to attack angling today.
The point is, not everything we do can or even should be measured
financially much less "logically." Contrarily, it's precisely the illogic of our woodsy passions that lead
them to account for many of life's best moments and memories. Hobbies of passion are the things we do in order to
endure the crushing boredom we suffer in the workaday world of doing things we insist on being paid to do in order to
earn the money we need to do the things we really want to do, and round and round she goes. What it boils
down to is that we were designed by nature to be an active and functional part of nature, and a few of us
still know it.
So yeah, why not "waste" some time and money building bows I don't really
need and which rarely if ever will approach the functionality, beauty, or reliability of their professionally crafted
counterparts?
Recently, fellow bowyer George "Jawg" Tsoukalas brought it down to this:"You may
find, as I have, that sometimes the journey is enough. More bows I do not need. More bow-making I do need."
By George! That's it!
The journey is the trip!
In fact, Jawg's "unjustifiable" line of reasoning might even explain, at least to
fellow veteran hunters if not to our doubting spouses and other critics, why it was, this past elk season, that I
hunted 30 days and got in close amongst ?em almost every day, passed up gift-quality shots more times than I can
recall ? and ended the season, by conscious choice, without ever loosing an arrow.
by David Petersen
Blog Last Updated; 2/23/2009
As expected, not everyone was delighted with my
bile-filled rant against the canned killing of pen-raised "wild" game on commercial game farms, which formed the
topic of my previous rant, I mean blog in these virtual pages. So let's have at it again, summarizing and responding
to some of the most common, and in many cases at least superficially reasonable, criticisms to my criticism of canned
shooting operations and participants:
Criticism: According to some defenders of
the practice, because I condemn canned killing on the grounds of both its immorality and its hurtful impacts to the
image of true hunting in the nonhunting public mind, I am an "elitist snob."
Response: Happily, that puts me in such
good company as almost all legitimate hunter's organization (specifically excluding Safari Club International, a
collection of fat-cat losers who give one another awards for killing captive game and are the primary supporters of
canned killing operations), as well as (according to surveys) an overwhelming majority of hunters and hunters'
organizations today.
Criticism: Live and let live. One man's
trash is another man's treasure. If it's legal, it's ethical. In this busy world, we don't all have time to enjoy a
traditional backcountry fair-chase hunt.
Response: Across my years of working to
uphold the highest hunting ethics and get sportsmen to understand that the future of hunting lies in the conservation
of public wildlife habitat, I've heard these words ? "If it's legal, it's ethical" -- hundreds of times. Yet these
aren't arguments at all. Rather, they are intellectual and moral blindfolds. Market hunting once was legal in
America, and so was slavery. To proclaim that manmade laws are the highest standard of morality is to say that no
higher human values exist ? no Golden Rule, no karma, no innate desire to
better ourselves. Anything goes so long as you won't get arrested for it.
So far as the assertion that a person being too busy to hunt fair-chase morally permits him to buy his "trophy" ?
well, forgive me for being candid, but in other realms of life we'd call it prostitution.
And so on. Overall, I'm disappointed that no one is yet put up a stimulating and informed argument against the substantive assertions of my rant, such as
the opening paragraph: "Any way we choose to cut or elaborate the term ?fair chase,' in order to have any
logical or moral meaningfulness whatsoever, the definition must include ?the pursuit of wild,
free-ranging game animals.'"
Nor is commercial killing the only dark side to
elk ranching. Consider these outtakes from a conversation I had with Dr. Valerius Geist, the world's leading
authority on elk and other deer species (as printed in Traditional Bowhunter magazine)?
Dave: What are your feelings regarding game
farming and CWD [chronic wasting disease] as threats to wild elk and democratic hunting in North
America?
Dr. Geist: We still don't have
the ability to identify the presence of CWD in carrier animals. Given this weakness, the only logical way to assure
that CWD will not be further spread to wild populations is to get rid of all artificial routes. And the primary
artificial route for spreading CWD is game farming, which involves the constant shipment of animals hither and
yon.
Dave: Aside from its role in the spread of
diseases, what are your views on the game farming industry?
Dr. Geist: Game farming is
utterly incompatible with the maintenance of free-roaming wildlife on this continent, standing in direct opposition
to all four basic tenets of the North American Model of wildlife conservation and democratic hunting: (1)
Wildlife "ownership" must be held exclusively in the public domain. The corollary is that wildlife must never become
private property. (2) In order to save North American wildlife from extinction, we long ago outlawed market
hunting and commercial trafficking in dead wildlife. But game farming depends utterly on developing a huge and
growing legal market in dead wildlife, throwing the doors open to illegal marketing of wild animals as well.
(3) The allocation of the public wildlife resource among private citizens must be regulated by due process of
law. It's the American way. It's a way that works for all. And what does game farming give us? Wildlife allocation by
financial privilege. Canned hunts make a mockery of ethical democratic hunting. (4) Fair chase! Neither
the U.S. nor Canada allows the frivolous killing of wildlife. But what restraints against
frivolous killing exist in the private sector? None. A canned shooter may buy as many animals as he or she wants and
kill them for whatever reason, in whatever fashion, no matter how frivolous, immoral and
disgusting.
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