In his Meditations on Hunting, philosopher José Ortega y Gasset expressed the opinion that “there is in the hunt as a sport a supremely free renunciation by man of the supremacy of his humanity. Instead of doing all that he can do as a man, he restrains his excessive endowments and begins to imitate Nature—that is, for pleasure, he returns to Nature and re-enters it.”

In Simon Bronner’s provocative study of hunters and their antagonists, Killing Tradition, the two sides of the controversy, which agree on almost nothing else, both insist, in contradiction to Ortega y Gasset, that it is man’s assertion of supremacy over nature that leads to the continuation of hunting so many generations after it has ceased to be necessary for the procurement of food.

Killing Tradition examines three “blood sports,” only one of which is hunting in the strictest sense of going into a natural setting, finding and stalking an animal, and killing it. That pursuit is in the chapter, “Ritual and Controversy at Deer Camp,” which covers the annual deer-hunt in rural Pennsylvania and describes its many rituals as well the organized opposition to it. Further from this classic type of hunt, well-known over much of rural North America, are two activities perhaps seeming to many readers as both bizarre and unusually cruel. One is the annual Hegins, Pennsylvania, Pigeon Shoot. The other is the now-outlawed English sport of hare-coursing, in particular the annual Waterloo Cup event in Lancashire. More about them later.

All three activities are, for better or worse, examples of folklife. They are part of cultural traditions shared over generations by communities and consciously performed by members of those communities as assertions of their common cultures. Beginning with Bronner’s 1986 work, Grasping Things: Folk Material Culture and Mass Society in America, the author has advanced the notion of praxis as a manifestation of folklife, which he defines in that context as “an activity in which the doing… is paramount, rather than solely the end result.” Bronner asserts that this is a neglected aspect of folklore/folklife studies. His contributions to the study of folklife praxis are valuable first of all for that very reason.

Killing Tradition is based on the author’s own fieldwork with both practitioners of the three pursuits and their opponents, and on reams of published materials, from William Shakespeare to Percy Shelley to Sigmund Freud to John Updike to Hank Williams, Jr.

Killing Tradition is organized into five chapters, including a prologue and an epilogue. In the prologue, “Taking Aim,” the author presents the various abstract concepts, including praxis itself, and the growth of moral revulsion within modern society to the abuse of animals and ultimately to their use for human ends. He uses the “save the whales” movement (which has by now put an end to much of the world’s whale hunting) as one example of the latter and revulsion against hunting itself as another. Touching on the now widespread knowledge of the sentience and intelligence of whale species and of their near extinction in the days of widespread industrial whaling, he begins his argument that this type of activity, although practiced and protested by relatively few, takes on a much larger symbolic meaning for the larger society. It does so as it epitomizes the development of a sense of ethics once concerned principally with compassion for human suffering that has developed into a similar compassion for the suffering of animals. Along the same line, the author notes the examples of revulsion against and near-universal outlawing of dog-fighting and cockfighting in Western societies and the fact that human compassion for animals’ suffering also has a long history.

It is in the prologue that Bronner first raises the notion that the animal rights debate is really a commentary on “the struggle to build a civil society and a consciousness of the changing environment,” on “how human relations can be improved,” and on “whether traditional patriarchy is responsible for either a strong sense of family values extended to society or [for] a social hierarchy that results in the mistreatment of minorities and children.” He also sees the debate as the result of the “shift in socioeconomic emphasis from rural to urban culture.”

Like many folklorists who delve deeply into scholarship as well as field research, Bronner occasionally injects references to material of limited relevance to a particular topic he is discussing if there seems to be the slightest etymological or etiological overlap.

It is in the book’s first ethnographic chapter, “Ritual and Controversy at Deer Camp,” that Bronner begins a repeated venture into Freudian explanations of the various aspects of the hunting controversies. Apart from an individual reader’s own take on the specific controversies that the book explores, it is the author’s repeated use of Freudian references and metaphors that might be most controversial to the objective reader, given the present relatively limited currency of the Freudian approach to human, especially social, behavior. Those familiar with and skeptical of Alan Dundes’ almost “fundamentalist” Freudian interpretations might also flinch a bit at Bronner’s occasional ventures into this intellectual territory. The same could also be said, in a few places, of the author’s use of the patriarchal model which is derived, at least in part, from feminist theory, except for the fact that pro-hunting, pro-“blood sports” statements and propaganda are themselves often frankly patriarchal, especially when they become political.

These minor shortcomings, however, detract only occasionally from the rich offering of ethnographic fieldwork and literary scholarship contained in this valuable book. It is in the three ethnographic chapters about three specific controversies: “Ritual and Controversy at Deer Camp,” “The Pigeon Shoot Controversy,” and “The Hare-Coursing Controversy,” that the folklore and folklife (including praxis) of hunters, shooters, and coursers is carefully described and analyzed, as are both the cultural perspective (especially its moral aspect) and the activities of both the practitioners and their opponents. Despite occasional pedantic sidelines, the material is presented with great gusto. All three chapters are fascinating reading and that includes the ethnography of the hunters, shooters, and coursers themselves and that of their opponents.

“Ritual and Controversy at Deer Camp” describes the annual custom of men and boys, especially fathers and sons (and more recently some women and girls), going into the forests of rural Pennsylvania to stalk and hunt deer during the annual fall hunting season. Probably the strongest case for the virtue of a “blood sport” appears in this chapter. There are many reasons to hunt deer: food, camaraderie, enjoyment and appreciation of nature, control of predator-free (and thus overpopulated) deer populations, and maintenance of close-knit family traditions. On the other hand, the deer hunt’s detractors cite cruelty, anachronism, the ritualization and idealization of killing, and the use of and easy familiarity with firearms that hunting engenders. The most surprising aspect of this chapter may be its depictions of the ceremonial, almost sacramental, rituals that accompany initiation into the deer hunt and the various rites of passage that occur within it. To me the puzzling aspect of this chapter is that hunters I know here in the Pacific Northwest, most of them elk-hunters, to whom I have spoken after reading this book, are totally unfamiliar with such ritual behavior. It would be worth knowing the geographical distribution of the ritual element, but suffice it to say that in Bronner’s observations in Pennsylvania it is of great importance to the praxis—the element of “‘doing’ as paramount.” It is also this ritual that begs for interpretation from Freudian and feminist and other handy psycho-social perspectives, which the author is then compelled to deliver. Despite the opposition to deer hunting from the animal rights movement, the annual deer hunt still flourishes in rural Pennsylvania and elsewhere, although hunting as a sport has declined precipitously nationwide since the 1970s. Furthermore, attempts to banish or curtail this kind of hunting almost anywhere in the United States have caused a backlash of widespread “right to hunt” proclamations and legislation.

“The Pigeon Shoot Controversy” describes a community event held every Labor Day in Hegins, Pennsylvania, which was finally abolished by local decision in 1999 after numerous protests, legal challenges, and negative publicity. In it, large numbers of captive pigeons were released from small cages during the event and people, mostly men and boys, peppered them with shotgun blasts, killing most of the birds, but also wounding many. Children, mostly boys, were then dispatched to wring the necks of the survivors. Bizarre as this activity may seem to many, it has a long history in many places of the English-speaking world, going back at least to early-nineteenth-century England where it was considered a gentleman’s sport. High visibility and negative publicity led to the practice’s demise most places by the late twentieth century, but in the case of Hegins, it had become a community event that drew hundreds of participants, both locals and outsiders, and thousands of spectators. Its importance to Hegins’ community identity since its establishment as a civic event there in 1934, and to small-town Pennsylvania identity in general since the 1890s, maintained for the Pigeon Shoot a cachet of respectability long gone elsewhere. In Hegins, the appearance of outsiders opposing the shoot generated a “circle the wagons” mentality within the community that may have kept it going longer than it might have otherwise. Bronner, who was obviously present during the last shoots, describes these battles, some of which erupted into violence, occurring between the pro-shoot and anti-shoot forces during the event.

The author’s analysis of the Hegins Pigeon Shoot gives him an opportunity to explore not only the event and its opposing forces, but also an interesting yet inconclusive suit against the shoot before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, Clifford Geertz’s theory of the highly symbolic nature of “deep play,” contemporary definitions of cruelty, and the role of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’ (PETA’s) use of feminist and Freudian rhetoric in organizing opposition to the shoot. This rhetoric is epitomized in the photo on page 159 of a woman protester wearing a sign, “Hunters Have Small Ones.” At the Hegins event, tradition itself, as an acknowledged virtue, seemed to have belonged exclusively to the pro-shoot crowd, as it was their primary defense of their activity. Many folklorists, especially those who have done extensive fieldwork in rural North America, have had to wrestle with the question of the moral ambiguity of tradition itself, normally celebrated as a virtue, because some traditional practices counter their moral values.

In the final ethnographic chapter, “The Hare-Coursing Controversy,” Bronner takes us to the Waterloo Cup event in Great Altcar, Lancashire, England, which dates to 1836. Here we witness a controversy that led to the legal prohibition, in 2005 in the United Kingdom, of all hunting with dogs. In modern times, hare-coursing has been the working class English countryman’s alternative to the upper classes’ elaborate scarlet-coated, bugle-tooting, fox hunt (also outlawed by the same Act of Parliament), although it was once a much classier sport. Hare- (or rabbit-) coursing is still practiced elsewhere in Europe and in a few places in the western United States. It was described in Mediterranean Europe as early as the second century A.D., supposedly a favorite sport of Queen Elizabeth I, and occurs in Shakespeare and in many other British literary sources. All these have given it its cachet of traditional respectability. Hare-coursing consists of having a pair of hounds chase a hare over a difficult and constrained course, where the hare’s agility gives it an advantage of maneuverability over the dogs’ (usually greyhounds’) advantages of speed and endurance. The goal for the human participants is to see and judge the hounds’ maneuvering abilities as they chase the hares through the course. Killing of the hare is not necessarily the goal, although it happens as often as not, but the hares also occasionally escape.

Again, as in the other two examples, the modern-day development of compassion for animals, and the resultant organizing of the animal rights movement and organizations, has come down hard on hare-coursing. Also, as in the case of the Pigeon Shoot, the practice’s public visibility and its annual notice by the mass media hastened the pressure to have it abolished. Surprisingly, the ostensible cruelty of hare-coursing has been igniting controversy in the United Kingdom at least as early as the eighteenth century, although it was also touted as an alternative to the supposedly greater cruelty of the hunting and killing of game. Sexual or gender imagery also entered into the protests against coursing, with the hare feminized and dogs and human participants masculinized. This gives the author an opportunity to explore various parallel aspects in popular culture, such as Playboy bunnies and the R&B; song “Hound Dog,” but also an ancient Welsh legend in which a pursued hare turns into a beautiful virgin. Narratives among some of the Waterloo Cup protesters avail the author the opportunity to delve further into the feminist perspective that equates animal-protection with the protection of women and children from patriarchal violence. The coursing controversy is also, even more than those about deer hunting or pigeon shooting, portrayed as a struggle between rural, provincial, and working class values, on the one hand, and urban, cosmopolitan, and élitist values on the other.

In the cleverly titled epilogue, “Future Shot,” Bronner tackles mostly the future of hunting in the United States. The decline in the numbers of hunters has spurred attempts by state legislatures and even Congress to pass laws and resolutions to encourage the sport. The environmental benefits of game management have become part of the popular discourse from the pro-hunting side. Efforts by governmental agencies and private organizations to encourage more youth (especially girls) and women to take up hunting are also part of the mix. Finally, despite the decline of hunting and of rural activity in general, we see a proliferation of outdoorsmen’s chain stories such as Cabela’s and Bass Pro, in which celebration by display of hunting merchandise and stuffed mounted game is a prominent part of both the business plan and marketing.

In conclusion, as fascinating as the book is, regarding these three milieux and the people who pursue or oppose them, it is really about something far deeper, today’s complex values-clashes: rural versus urban, provincial versus cosmopolitan, conservative versus liberal, patriarchal versus gender-egalitarian, traditional versus modern, and whether or not humans subdue nature or allow themselves to be part of it. These same values clashes occur in much of our contemporary political, social, moral, economic, and religious discourse.

--------

[Review length: 2427 words • Review posted on December 1, 2010]