06/05© Ronald L. Moody (2005)
All rights reserved.
Reprinted here with permission.

Choosing Your Hero Shapes What Kind of Hunter You Will Be

A hunter’s choice of a hero reveals who the hunter really wants to be.

So who are American hunters, really?

Let’s start with a pop quiz. What was the name of Davy Crockett’s rifle? What state was carved out of the wilderness hunting ground explored by Daniel Boone? What was the name of Paul Bunyan’s ox?

What kind of people view Paul, Davy and Dan’l as heroes? What do modern day loggers, for example, say about themselves when they tell the old stories and sing songs of Paul Bunyan’s heroic exploits?

Just as a flag identifies a country, the personal hero identifies the person as a member of a group of people who share a common identity as admirers of the human qualities portrayed by that hero. The personal hero can be a sports star worshipped by a youth, or certainly a cinematic myth battling galactic invaders, the variety is endless - every tribe and tradition has its own.

The crucial duty of a hero, myth or real, is to represent the ideal human being as understood by the people who share a common way of life. Our hero, therefore, is the person we would be if we could just manage it.

Conversely, the selection of a hero establishes the qualities we want to attain in our lives. Thus, selecting our hero provides an external blueprint of praiseworthy goals and behaviors. Following the blueprint will change the values and behavior of a person who would have become somebody different if they had chosen a different champion to admire and imitate.

Each one of us shapes our life experience, as much as possible, to resemble some idea of “the best, greatest and most successful.” Yet, the whole hero factor is an invisible mold that shapes us with unrecognized influences. Like old cat tracks, the hero factor only becomes visible when we learn to watch for subtle effects. Once you start looking for it, the hero effect becomes visible throughout our culture - from women’s hair styles to the size of a man’s SUV, to what a child wants to be when they grow up.

The hero effect is conspicuous in the way and reasons hunters hunt.

Nimrods follow a number of different heroes. Some were actual people. Others are a new creature in the heroic pantheon: the artificial advertising myth.

The first great hunting hero of western civilization was probably Europe’s St. Hubert. He reflected the ideals of hunters in the middle ages and renaissance era. American hunters first displayed true hero worship for Daniel Boone. When American men started becoming urban worker-bees in the first half of the 19th Century they needed a model for strong masculinity they could imitate to provide positive self image in an artificial, new self-subordinating life style.

‘Ol Dan’l’ going out alone in the (Kentucky) wilderness with rifle, knife and buckskins was the perfect role model, one which had historic impact on a generation of ‘Cult of Boone’ initiates like Teddy Roosevelt. Davy Crockett’s boast of shooting the eye out of a snapping turtle a hundred yards out with ‘Ol Betsy’ brought guns and marksmanship back into the value system of urban Americans who had moved away from their rural hunting roots.

The evolution of these early heroes into the modern, ethical sportsman is probably epitomized in the writings of Spanish Philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset, along with his contemporary Aldo Leopold. Gasset and Leopold formed an identity of a natural, honorable hunter who performed the hunt according to a heroic code instead of a personality cult. One of the great failures of the hunting tradition is that so few nimrods have read what these two heroes wrote or even know who they were.

Informed followers of the code, however, always know what a hunter means when she, or he, says: “I’m a Leopoldian hunter.”

Across nearly 200 years of increasing artificiality and urbanity in the lives we lead, the heroic hunting code still extols fortitude, courage, high skill and complete familiarity or even ‘oneness’ with the wilderness.

Heroes only die when the ideals they represent are no longer relevant to people - or when new heroes are more attractive. To paraphrase Homer in The Iliad; men tremble when the gods compete.

Which brings us to the second great hero cult among contemporary hunters.

This hero never has had a single name, but we all recognize him when we see him. Where natural heroes were personally strong or woods savvy, this hero is the master of technology to give him/her strength or smarts. I call this heroic archetype, Captain America, because the comic book character is a modern version of the classic folk hero like Paul Bunyan. And Captain America’s reliance on power weapons and tools begs comparison to Bunyan’s huge ax and blue ox, ‘Babe.’

Like Paul Bunyan, Captain America never was a single real person, he is a personification of values that defines who American hunters are trying to be.

The growth of Captain Americans is a natural result of people living the main part of their lives in an industrial world. Away from the hunting field, Americans judge who is more successful or worthy by the car they drive, the house they live in, the clothes they wear. To a large degree, how important you are is defined by what you have - whether we’re talking about Hummers or record book trophies. Captain America follows the Golden Rule - ‘whoever has the gold, rules.’

The complete identity of Captain America is formed when material status merges with danger-daring. The courage to meet and defeat danger is one of humanity’s universal merits. In a tame world where man-eating lions no longer roam, other dangers must be met in order to fulfill this value. Unlike Leopoldians who dare danger alone in the wilderness, Captain Americans are attracted to speed and brinkmanship to display courage.

Top off material status and danger lust with a strong dose of time famine and a dash of laziness and you have Captain America. He and she doesn’t have much leisure time to hunt so they want all the fun they can obtain in a limited time. They are highly mechanized and see use of a lot of gadgets and high tech lethality in their guns as badges of heroic mastery - picture Luke Skywalker in blaze orange.

Competitiveness is as American as Thanksgiving Turkey. Captains are seriously competitive, which partly explains how they get enough money to be Captains. They keep score in competition with other Captains so they need a scoring system for their success as hunters.

Captain Americans are real people, living according to a real value system that reflects how many, if not most, Americans judge success. There are a lot of them and they are not going away - a least as long as their industrial world survives.

What creates much conflict between followers of our two different heroes is not the underlying values, different as they are. It is the hero-on-steroids effect of media advertising and marketing that forces many angry cultural collisions between followers of differing heroes.

The advertising steroid raises up a false hero by creating an artificial belief in the necessity of buying a product in order to be a ‘real’ hunter, or a ‘successful’ hunter. The steroid hero is portrayed as being just like the real Captain America but bigger, faster, stronger. The result is conflict with followers of less technocratic heroes when the buyers of the steroid-hero product try to imitate their newly acquired blueprint of behaviors in the hunting field.

A perfect illustration is the all terrain motor vehicle known as a four-wheeler. Ads for these vehicles invariably show riders performing heroic deeds bashing across mountain streams or roaring up steep forest slopes. There are no ads showing hunters parking on a road and walking into the woods. The result is a common belief among many Americans that one simply can’t go hunting unless one (a) owns a four-wheeler and (b) intends to bash streams and climb slopes.

All of this paints a stark black and white image of hunters and their differing heroes. In fact there are many shades and hues of identities among modern nimrods.

The problem is that hunters only converse across cultural lines (using the four-wheeler example) in shouting matches during hearings over travel management plans on public land. Any loyal follower of a hunting hero thinks hunters like themselves are ‘real’ hunters while all others are ignorant and probably inferior hunters.

The hunting heritage, and the wild lands and animals who depend on hunters, deserve a more heroic conversation.

Ron can be reached by email at couleeking@hotmail.com.

<<<>>>