According to recent publications, Ducks Unlimited is about to embark upon a program of hunting ethics advocacy. The initial blurb suggests that DU will preach adherence to hunting laws, hunter safety, respect for the rights of other hunters and landowners, introducing youth to the sport and matters of that ilk as the essence of hunting ethics.

DU’s positive involvement in issues purely related to hunters is welcome – particularly given the rarity of such orientation in recent times (if one puts aside efforts to obtain money). Nor are the matters identified as objects of the “ethics” initiative of small concern. The enumerated issues, however, are superficial symptoms that may mark the conduct of the ethical hunter but certainly don’t define or even shed much light on the core attributes of hunting ethics.

Obeying the game laws, hunter safety, respecting the rights of other humans involved in or affected by hunting activities are matters that deal with the relationship between hunters and others as they engage in the hunt. True hunting ethics finds its root in the relationship between the hunter and the game – and the natural environment in which the hunter seeks his quarry.

Ethical beliefs, as applied to the activity of hunting, owe their origins to our far distant past when man struggled to survive, a time when only successful hunters could feed their families and pass on their genealogy to succeeding generations.

Primitive hunters deeply felt that more was at stake than the success or failure of the hunt. They revered the game animals and birds as gifts from the Great Spirit. They defined their relationship with the earth and universe in terms of their relationship with the various species on which their lives and those of their families depended. Often, they endowed the creatures of the wild with supernatural powers that inspired cave paintings depicting fanciful creatures combining man and beast in a spiritual hybrid, totems, costumes in which their shamans dressed up as birds and animals to lead the most important rituals.1 Members of primitive tribes interpreted animal behavior, the sounds of birds as portents of the future. In their minds and hearts, the creatures of the earth and sky – including humankind – were all brothers, of the same essence, fundamentally related.

And thus it is that at the higher levels of skill, hunting takes on a spiritual aspect, a carry-over from the successful survivors of our distant ancestors. The concept central to these beliefs is the relationship of the hunter to his quarry and not the relationship of one hunter to others.

The issue of crippling provides the good example of this fundamental distinction. The ethical hunter, whether hunting alone or with others, goes to great lengths to avoid crippling in the first place (passing up high or difficult shots or shots over dense cover, for example) and to great effort to find those few birds he does manage to bring down incompletely dispatched. He follows these practices out of respect for the birds, a sense of responsibility and the recognition that his sport involves the taking of life. It is a matter of conscience, not something done to impress others, part of the pact between hunter and prey, part of the discipline, self-restraint and skill that define sportsmanship.2

The ethical hunter follows through on this core principle by sincere concern for the welfare of the birds as a living population of profound beauty and fascination. All ethical thought begins with this concern.

We who hunt today, the descendants of the successful primitive hunters, are hard-wired to engage in the activity and find great joy in it, even though the primeval urge has long outlived its purpose. Very few currently depend on hunting to feed themselves or their families. The urge is not uniform in modern man, diluted as it has been by millennia of developed society in which the skill no longer spelled the difference between life and death. Yet in those who have it, those who retain a larger dose of genetic residue from those times, the urge remains compelling.

At the same time, those of us dedicated to the recreational hunting of waterfowl today must recognize that our pursuit has only the most tenuous tie to those primeval roots. Most of those who have contributed the money and political will to preserve the birds and the sport, hunt more as a social activity than as an experience motivated by the urge to interact with the wild. Most traditional duck clubs, for example, were founded, and have been maintained over the years, as estrogen-free zones, to which a man could repair to share a few cocktails and off-color jokes with like-minded men, free from exacting standards of cleanliness, decorum and aesthetics to which he must adhere at home, free from the lash of spousal disapproval that would be applied in response to conduct acceptable, if not downright entertaining at the club. Among the more serious, hunting remains the most important object of these gatherings and institutions – but far from the only one.

And yet, when you try to isolate the ingredients that differentiate waterfowl hunting from other outdoor recreational activities strongly tinged with social aspects – such as golf, to pick an obvious example – two significant distinctions emerge. First and foremost, there are the birds, a natural phenomenon only marginally controllable by human activity, despite our best efforts.

Second, human competition is not the natural object of the hunt. Sure enough, competitive humanity can import a contest into almost any activity – but that’s not the reason why the ethical hunter goes into the marsh. The birds he takes are not the equivalent of points on a scoreboard or notches on a gunstock. They have a higher meaning, as part of an even more compelling experience.

Dedicated and ethical waterfowl hunters hunt to enjoy the magic of the winter marsh, to participate in the sights and sounds of a prolific migration. They are people for whom the sight of a sky filled with moving waterfowl can be its own reward. This feeling we share with our distant forebears, as their artifacts attest. So the ethical waterfowler thinks of the birds as part of the pyramid of life, even though he no longer needs the birds as essential sustenance. And he understands that the birds do not exist alone or as a separate entity, but as a product of interconnected forces – the climate, the changing seasons, the prairie grasses, the floods and droughts, the pulse of earth, water and sky -- all of those elements of which human society is also a part but that the noise inherent in modern human society tends to obscure. Primitive humanity lived close to these realities, always conscious of being part of the essential pulse. Modern society has transcended these things and we have tended to lose touch with them, to our detriment.

Leopold wrote passionately on this subject in philosophical and abstract terms3. But some practical examples better illustrate the point. Take these.

Case 1: Desiring to see and experience Glacier Bay in Southeastern Alaska, Charlie books a tour on a cruise ship that holds 2500 passengers, some of whom, he hopes, will be willing and unattached females of not indifferent charms. Arriving at their destination, the ship’s loudspeaker summons the passengers from the buffet line, the cocktail lounge, the dance floor or the card tables when a humpbacked whale surfaces in the surrounding water or when a grizzly bear shows himself on one of the beaches. In six days and nights, the ship visits all the sights with opportunities to go ashore at Ketchikan for those who wish to charter a flight to the Mendenhall Glacier or the Mount St. Elias Ice Field. Charlie takes advantage of these 45-minute flight opportunities over the breathtaking sights, returning to the ship in time for cocktails, dinner and dancing.

Also desiring to see and experience Glacier Bay, Sam books a sea kayaking tour with five others and a guide. They spend six days exploring the dramatic shoreline, six nights sleeping out on gravelly beaches under a sky carpeted with stars, seen through the film of a pulsing aurora, while listening to the splash of salmon at the mouths of the streams that enter the Sound near their campsites. They eat simple, freeze-dried foods prepared over campfires and pride themselves on leaving no sign of their presence when they depart in the morning. Silence provides the most compelling and consistent element of the experience, a damp, chilly silence of sea and land that takes on a palpable, physical quality.

Case 2: Desiring to see and experience Yellowstone, Jerry and Hilda rent a motorhome and park it in the lot at the Slough Creek Campground in the northeast quadrant of the Park, along with roughly 100 other motorhomes and their wilderness seeking occupants. They enjoy the cookouts every evening, the lovely couple from Des Moines in the neighboring parking place, the impromptu Bluegrass concerts and the party atmosphere – all set against the background of the dramatic and forbidding peaks that form the heart of Absaroaka/Beartooth Wilderness.

Also desiring to see and experience the northeast corner of Yellowstone, Bill and Laura park a few miles west of the Slough Creek Campground, don backpacks and trek up the Lamar River Valley, deep into the rolling fastness of wild country where herds of bison roam. They also enjoy the background that the Absaroaka/Beartooth provides, as the full moon rises from behind the jagged escarpment, celebrated by the mournful chorus of a wolf family on a distant ridge. They subsist on minimal foods and pride themselves on leaving no sign of their sojourn when they depart their campsite in the morning.

With those cases, the question is: who has been to Alaska, Charlie or Sam? Who to Yellowstone Jerry and Hilda or Bill and Laura? The answer, of course, is all, in each case – in physical, temporal terms. But the quality of the experience differed dramatically. Charlie, Jerry and Hilda participated in a human happening, with the wilderness as the setting but held at arm’s length, not an immediate, all-encompassing part of the event, an occasion for human relaxation and merriment with the setting having little value beyond that – except as a distant aesthetic, a picture on the wall. Whereas Sam, Bill and Laura immersed themselves in the wild, far closer to the experience of primitive humanity, far closer to hard-edged reality of the universe where human contact is subordinate, indeed irrelevant except for minimal convenience, where skill and resourcefulness are at a premium in dealing with wild forces more powerful than any man or woman.

This is an observation – not a judgment. I do not condemn or criticize those who enjoy cruises or the camaraderie of an RV park, nor do I trivialize the feeling that many people who engage in these activities have for the settings they visit. The heart of the matter, however, is the nature of the experience – its cultural value, to use Leopold’s term.

To bring the matter closer to home, let’s take a hunting example.

Desiring a massive elk head to adorn his office wall, Alan books a hunt at a ranch in New Mexico in the Chamas region with 20,000 fenced acres and a large herd noted for the massive racks of the bulls. He is housed in sumptuous quarters and enjoys gourmet meals in the company of six other men who have purchased the hunt. His guide drives him around in a jeep on ranch roads, pulling out at various observation pads carefully chosen for their command of the country where they scan the meadows, aspen groves and ridges with high-powered spotting scopes mounted on the jeep. In due course, they spot an animal that meets Alan’s requirements. Alan kills it at 700 yards, using a sniper style rifle equipped with a 10x scope. He fires the fatal shot from a bench rest affixed to the hood of the jeep. Using a radio, the guide calls in a crew on four-wheel drive ATVs to gut and retrieve the animal, to skin it and cape out the head for mounting. Aside from having his grinning picture taken astride it, Alan has no contact with the corpse. When he leaves, he takes only a small sampling of the meat, leaving the ranch to dispose of it appropriately. The ranch makes all of the taxidermy arrangements.

Desiring a massive elk head to adorn his office wall, Jake books a hunt with a guide to take him into the national forests of the San Juan Range in northwestern New Mexico, not far from Chamas. They take packhorses high into the Range and set up a spike camp. Jake hunts hard on foot for three days, from dark to dark, covering many miles each day over difficult terrain. On the afternoon of the fourth day, he kills a good bull with a black powder rifle after stalking it for three hours to get within 100 yards. While the guide returns to camp to get the horses, Jake begins the process of gutting the animal. He and the guide skin it and cut it into quarters to transport it back to camp. When he leaves, Jake takes all the usable meat that he has carefully cut and wrapped. He, his family and his friends will consume all of it – considering it a delicacy.4

Without pronouncing judgment as to the relative merit of the two experiences, it is clear to me that in the foregoing examples, Jake has been hunting and Alan has been celebrating the technical superiority of modern man over the beast of the wild. Without suggesting that such activities should be looked upon with disfavor, they are not hunting.

To my mind, following Leopold, the ethical hunter treats hunting as an experience that connects us with our cultural roots. It is a wilderness experience, not a human happening, not a tailgate party, not a celebration of highly developed technology. Approached in this fashion, concern for the welfare of the birds and animals, and sensitive appreciation of the environment on which they depend, become the paramount, guiding considerations. The ethical hunter goes light, uses restraint, takes pride in skill – and kills sparingly. The game laws do not define ethics for such a person. After all, the law in most states still allows the use of obscene, mechanical and electrical decoying devices in the waterfowl marsh, devices that threaten to turn our sport into an arcade game, interjecting gadgetry between the hunter and the experience – a pernicious variation on the cruise ship as a “wilderness adventure,” (to quote the ridiculous advertisements that one occasionally sees for such floating parties).

I do not mean to suggest that the social aspect of the duck club has no value. But the ethical hunter leaves that aspect of the occasion totally behind in the pre-dawn dark when the true experience begins, recognizing the true experience for what it is. He does not belong to the club or enjoy it for social reasons.

And he doesn’t care how many birds he takes as long as he can revel in the spectacle of a turbulent sky, pulsing with life.

* * * * *

The Madduck posting of Aug. 9, 2004, included a story entitled “ A Waterfowl Hunter’s Quest ,” by Brig. Gen, Jim Daniel (Ret). We were proud to have Gen. Daniel offer us the opportunity to post such a fine article – but that’s not why I mention it here. It would be difficult to find a more fitting example of the feelings that comprise hunting ethics than that article. Which is not to say that one must spend days staked out in a fake muskrat house with a camera and notepad to qualify – but those sorts of concerns, feelings and interest provide essential ingredients.

Someone will surely contend that only old men, who have killed a lot of ducks in their time, achieve such feelings. I disagree. The primitives who attained spiritual reverence for the game that sustained them, and the skill to hunt effectively with primitive weapons, developed those feelings as young men, because their elders made it part of their initiation. Even today, show me a father who has those feelings and I will show you a son who shares them. It is a matter of education and leadership. Therein lies our seminal and continuing failure.

And also therein lies my disappointment with the approach that DU has taken. Where we stand today, as waterfowl populations decline and hunters respond with insistent demands for expanded “opportunity” to kill ever more of our remnant flocks, leadership is as scarce as it is desperately needed. Requiring gut level guidance, we are told instead to focus on superficialities that lie well off the mark.

Unfortunately, one can also make a good case for the proposition that we have no time left for such complacent strolls through the land of the irrelevant while the crisis besetting our sport and our birds deepens. It is long past time to focus on the heart of the matter. On most days, I fear that time has already run out.

1 Similar amalgamations of man and beast as godlike forms can be found in almost all primitive mythology, including that of the Greeks, Romans and Egyptians – the mythologies that form the very foundations of Western civilization.

2 Leopold’s criteria.

3 Among other things, he deplored the fact that civilization has “cluttered the man-earth relationship with gadgets.” “Sportsmanship,” he wrote, is a voluntary limitation on the use of these armaments [modern gadgetry]. It is aimed to augment the role of skill and shrink the role of gadgets in the pursuit of wild things.”

4 These are not made up cases. Although I have changed the names, Alan and Jake are acquaintances of mine.