The briefest history of hunting
Encounters of Humans and the Animal Kingdom
INTRODUCTION
I am preparing for my upcoming Section: HUNTER HEROES. I want to introduce hunters who served their communities and wildlife exceptionally. I will address today’s hunters to find good examples from the past, but my primary target audience will be the non-hunting public. I want to educate them about encounters between humans and game animals over tens of thousands of years up to our times.
I will show that hunting was the FIRST profession to elevate humankind from the animal kingdom. Hunting has undoubtedly been a pastime for the rich and noble for many centuries. Today, hunting organizations and individuals are conservationists and avid champions of wildlife management.
Many non-hunting readers affectionately love their pets, caressed at home, or raised their livestock on farms. The experiences they acquired may be immense, practical, and emotional, but they are not necessarily applicable directly to animals living in the wild.
If you love or admire Game animals, the first rule is to love them from a distance. They are at home in the forest, fields, and mountaintops. While you can intrude into their habitat, do so with extreme caution. Behave there like a guest of them.
Livestock is the property of farmers who farm it. Game animals are natural resources, and foresters and hunters manage them. Human intervention is inevitable in habitats influenced by centuries of civilization and often shrunk by it. It has to be based on science, considering the game-holding capacity and other constraints required by the complex cohabitation of games and humans.
Civilization and population growth make the lives of predator animals exceptionally difficult, leading to their extinction in many cases. While the number of human-predator conflicts has decreased, the number may increase as soon as specific predator conservation targets are met. The lack of predators leads to the overpopulation of herbivore species and increased pressure on agriculture and forestry.
A complex solution is needed to mitigate these controversies and ensure the desired biodiversity and sustainability goals. Multidisciplinary science teams are continually trying to find and quantify balanced targets. Legislators should better oblige them. Cooperating foresters, farmers, and conservation-minded hunters will implement this solution, supporting each other.
Hunting is not a harmful pastime but the most effective and sustainable conservation tool for managing our wild and beautiful natural treasure: the game animals.
HUNTING HISTORY 1.
From ancestry to EUROPE until recent times.
The Animal Kingdom populated our planet well before humans arrived. The atmosphere, moderate temperatures, and sweet water helped develop the biosphere. From microorganisms to the Tyrannosaurus, millions of species came to life, multiplied, and became extinct due to sometimes extreme climatic forces or collapsing habitats.
Homo Sapiens appeared on the scene and had to share the globe with the animals. Peaceful co-existence didn’t have a chance. Carnivore and omnivore animals hunted other species, including humans. Our ancestors managed to get some food as gatherers of berries and wild fruits but needed more protein to build strong muscles and survive harsh conditions. Even the gathering berries was not necessarily peaceful, though. If a man tries to eat some berries on a hillside, it is better to check if a Bear is not competing for the same berries, as the encounter can even be deadly.
Our primary source of protein was wild animal meat, such as venison. Our teeth evolved to process plant-based and meat diets, indicating our omnivorous nature. (This may be hard for strict vegans to swallow, but facts are stubborn.)
Our ancestors elevated themselves above the other species by making the first tools: spears, arrows, and daggers. These hunting weapons were made of stones, animal bones, or horns. They had to fight large-bodied adversaries like Bison, Deer, Wolves, and even Mammoths. Hunting was the first profession, and success required coordinated teamwork, made possible by their fast-developing brains.
In this ancient world on Earth, every species was hunted by other species, playing the role of the prey and hunting for survival as a predator. Being the smartest, humans have become the best hunters and multiplied to 8 billion on Earth in our time now.
Mammoths migrated around Eurasia twice in 30 thousand years, and our ancestors followed them in that supermigration.
Fast-forwarding and hunting are considered royal privileges in our written history. Read Jose Ortega y Gasset’s Meditations on Hunting. One of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century and an equally great storyteller was not a hunter himself. At the request of a close friend (and an avid hunter), he wrote his Meditations as an introduction to his friend’s hunting book.
Ortega’s style is elegant and well to read, but you cannot escape his persuasion. I read the small book three times, as it is super dense, like a Black hole in astronomy.
Ortega submerged in Alexander the Great’s youth. The heir to the Greek throne was sent to Macedonia by his father to prepare to rule Greece. He spent his time hunting, but in addition to leisure and sport, he has learned about what we would call wildlife management today.
Ortega points out that game animals, especially dominant trophies, have always been scarce. Only the hunters who reported on them exaggerated, creating the story of plentiful herds. For him, this justified the royal status of the noble game. The following centuries upheld this view, becoming the facto rule.
The painting by 19th-century Hungarian painter Antal Ligeti shows the great Hungarian Renaissance King Matthias (1458-1490) returning from a hunt, where a gorgeous Red Stag was harvested. The Vajda-Hunyad Castle is in Central Transylvania, Romania, today.
In feudalistic times, Kings donated parts of their country to princes, counts, and barons to rule them on behalf of the monarch. Hunting rights in their county were attached and practiced by the count and his guests. The hunting calendar was repeated year by year, reflecting the preferred seasons of different game animals pursued. Harvested trophies were proudly hung on the walls of the castle of the Count, showing the results of earlier hunts.
Hunts were exceptional, well-organized events followed by ample food and drink. The participants wore more and more specific hunting attire.
High-quality firearms were used from the 15th century onwards, developing a dedicated industry with premium brand names. Many are still in business: Beretta in Italy, Tula in Russia, Ferlach in Austria, Holland & Holland, and Purdey in England, to name just a few.
Well-trained dogs were also introduced to the hunts in different roles, like trackers and retrievers.
The very first human profession, which started with our unknown ancestors chasing the Mammoths, became organized and continued as a pastime of the privileged into the twentieth century.
My own experience.
In the summer of 1999, I was sitting on the large terrace of the Victoria Falls Hotel in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, on my way to my first Cape Buffalo hunt. I just checked Nelly into the nearby Elephant Hills Hotel for her upcoming medical conference.
You could glimpse the bridge over the massive Zambezi River from the terrace. I was excited about the Buffalo I hoped to harvest in the coming days (it turned out to be a success) and looked at a company of about eight persons. They were sitting down nearby, speaking French aloud. I couldn’t help but recognize Valery Giscard Estaing, the former president of France, and Theo Waigel, the former minister of finance of then-West Germany. Every one of them wore typical beige safari hunting dresses. They must have returned from the hunt joyful, relaxed, and satisfied. It would have been nice to take a picture with them, but asking for it would have been an intrusion into their privacy, so the memory remains in my mind only. On that terrace, hunters from all walks of life, from all countries, speaking different languages, meet and remember those encounters.
Both former politicians led right-wing parties in their home countries before. Today, in Europe and the USA, right-leaning and explicitly conservative-leaning people and parties are seen as staunch supporters of hunting. Liberal-leaning politics tends to be identified with anti-hunting. It is a rough tendency, not a rule.
At the same time, in the Soviet Union and its allies before the changes in 1989-90, almost all the leaders of the Communist parties did hunt. Towards the end of the Cold War, the Détante in China started with ping-pong diplomacy, while in Eastern Europe, with Red Stag diplomacy. We had Franz Josef Strauss, then staunch conservative Christian Socialist prime minister of Bavaria, as a returning hunting guest in Hungary.
Hunting goes international.
Game animals don’t know borders, and hunting has become international as travel and tourism