08/05© Ronald L. Moody (2005)
All rights reserved.
Reprinted here with permission.

‘A Peculiar Virtue’
Following the Hunters’ Ethical Compass

“A peculiar virtue in wildlife ethics is that the hunter ordinarily has no gallery to applaud or disapprove of his conduct. Whatever his acts, they are dictated by his own conscience, rather than by a mob of onlookers. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of this fact.”

— Aldo Leopold, essay: Wildlife In American Culture, 1946.

“It is hard to make a man, by pressure of law or money, do a thing which does not spring naturally from his own sense of right and wrong.”

— Aldo Leopold, Conservationist In Mexico, 1937

Virtually every hunter has a personal story of how somebody else’s bad behavior has harmed them or diminished something they care about. The telling of these stories and the fixing of ‘ethical’ and ‘unethical’ labels has become a constant theme in hunter conversations.

People distinguish between ‘good’ actions and ‘bad’ actions by way of governing rules (laws) and mutually agreed guiding statements called ethics.

What do we mean when we say “ethical hunter?” I cannot improve on the definition offered by Jim Posewitz in his book: BEYOND FAIR CHASE. An ethical hunter is: “a person who knows and respects the animals hunted, follows the law, and behaves in a way that will satisfy what society expects of him or her as a hunter.”

I would only add that the hunter, in the end, must satisfy what he hopes to respect in himself.

Acting alone in the wild, a hunter can “get away” with just about any outrageous destructive behavior, as long as the “get away” refers only to escaping personal retribution for the harm done.

Check the citation book of any game warden, or, go to any unsupervised shooting area and observe the accumulated garbage. It quickly becomes obvious that ETHICAL behavior among hunters derives much less from fear of punishment by others than it does from an inner personal force that moves a person to do right rather than wrong.

The debate over hunter ethics typically starts in the breach after somebody behaves in a way that is judged wrong by another person. This approach always fails to produce a solution to the behavior problem because an essential prequisite is missing — a commonly available source of moral guidance to direct that motivating inner personal force we count on to produce good behavior in the absence of witnesses.

In other words, we can judge and perhaps punish past behavior but we haven’t disseminated a tool for shaping future behavior.

Reaction to unethical behavior usually advances directly from outrage to the making of lists - good behavior itemized. Known as ‘codes,’ the logic of lists is they include the most important moral principles that, when obeyed, will keep the hunter from doing very wrong. The value of an established code rests primarily with those who already have their moral bearings and simply need a reference for the right action to take.

The trouble with lists, of course, is they are never complete. The outdoor world is so infinitely variable that unanticipated, unlisted, ethical decisions always challenge every hunter.

This is known as situation ethics. When the choice between right and wrong must be made the list is never at hand or is missing the challenge at hand. The situationally challenged hunter, therefore, must draw from another source of guidance - if that source can be obtained.

The difficulty I see hunters having in their search for this source is largely caused by the narrow view that hunting ethics are peculiar to hunting.

Hunters also are singularly handicapped by the exaggerated value placed on results in American hunting culture. (If you got a deer you are a winner. If you didn’t you are a loser.) Over emphasis on the bottom line produces much of the end-justifies-the-means behavior everybody defines as unethical.

To find a compass for moral navigation in the hunting field, the hunter can peer beyond the hunt directly into the universal moral lens of his or her social culture. But, how does one focus this lens on a particular situation in the hunt?

In my 25-year effort to become a good Hunter Education Instructor I have focused on learning how to put a moral compass in the hand of new hunters. The challenge is descovering what to teach right now that will give the student a decision tool for use on some unknown future date in some unknown future hunting or fishing situation.

What I have learned is that any person’s ethical decisions may be influenced by knowledge of codes and rules, but the MOTIVATION to make the ethical decision is the important lesson. And, such motivation comes directly from that emotional center of the mind created by the cumulative nurturing of parents, family, school, church and community. Call it conscience but it is in each of us to some degree, and our moral agency flows from it.

So, the key idea to put in a hunter’s mind is that going hunting does not constitute escape from the moral values of his or her social world. They are, in fact, one and the same. The hunter must be able to jumpstart his or her motivating conscience. A person who cannot do this can only be dealt with by the community by removal of privilege.

My interest is finding a simple, practical tool, like compass or knife, the hunter can take hunting and use for making ethical decisions when alone in uncertain situations that did not appear in the code of ethics. But the emotional voltage that sparks ethical motivation to use such a tool, or refer to the code, comes from a separate personal source.

The teaching tool I use to communicate to students how to read their personal center-of-the-mind compass is one I describe as the “THREE R’s” of good hunting (which just happen to be the three R’s of ethics of life in general).

They are: RELATIONSHIPS, RESPECT, RESPONSIBILITY. Of these the one absolutely indispensable, can’t-have-ethics-without-it ingredient is respect. A person incapable of respecting other parties in his or her relationships is also incapable of DESIRING to do right and avoid wrong. (The magic of creating the capacity of respect in another person is a subject of its own.)

To go hunting or fishing is to enter an envelope of relationships. The hunter’s every action, even the hunter’s simple presence in the wild, affects other people, the wild animals, and the land and waters in a constant pulling on the web of life - every strand of the web is a relationship.

Respect is caring how one affects the others in this envelope of relationship - it is the desire that our effects on others is good. Responsibility is the action(s) we take to determine what our effect on others will be.

This tight little circle of ideas in the ‘Three R’s” is the compass dial for all the items on all the lists and codes of ethics in the hunting world.

To test the Three R’s as a ethical navigation tool, pick any line on any code of ethics and ask the following three questions. Why do I as a hunter care about the effect of this ethic? Does the ethic affect one or more of my hunting relationships? How do I the hunter make the ethic real by responsible action?

Here is an example of how the Three R’s can be that tool using an obvious item that appears in every hunter’s code.

Q - Why is it ethical to kill only the lawful game described by game regulations?
A - (Because the good hunter cares that his or her harvest helps conserve healthy populations of wild animals and not harm them through over-harvest.)
Q - Does the hunter have a relationship with the hunted?
A - (Absolutely. Each affects the other. Over-harvest means too few deer in the future.)
Q - How is our caring made real?
A - (Responsibility = learning why the rule exists, obeying the rule and being careful not to make mistakes.)

OK, that was easy, like using a compass to find north when we already know the direction.

So how do we use the Three R’s as a compass to navigate a situation that doesn’t appear in any code of ethics you’ve ever seen?

Here’s an ethical challenge you likely do not have written in your code. You are mule deer hunting. A narrow strip of public land provides access to the hunting area through private land from the public road where you park. The adjacent private landowner also allows public hunting. But the landowner’s house is close beside the public land boundary and you must pass close by. As you proceed past the house in the early morning when the landowner family is still sleeping, you see the trophy mule deer buck of a lifetime standing on the public ground, legal, safe and available, but little more than 50 yards from the house. What is the ethical action: do you shoot?

Put the Three R ethical navigational tool to work.

Q - Why does a hunter care about the effect of this situation?
A - You certainly desire the buck. Do you also care how the ranch family is going to feel about being waked by a high-power rifle shot outside the bedroom window?
Q - Does the situation affect one or more of the hunter’s relationships?
A - Your action certainly affects the deer and yourself. It will affect the sleeping family. It will also affect all other hunters if the landowner closes her land to hunting; or if she petitions the Forest Service to close the access strip for safety reasons.
Q - How does the hunter make the ethic real by responsible action?
A - Fill in the blank; it’s your compass.

POSTSCRIPT

The citation from Aldo Leopold that started this essay is perhaps the most frequently quoted statement on ethics from the hunter-philosopher who largely started the discussion of hunter morality in recent decades. Not so frequently quoted is the next sentence in the essay which describes why each hunter should choose ethical actions in establishing who they are.

“ . . . Voluntary adherence to an ethical code elevates the self-respect of the sportsman, but it should not be forgotten that voluntary disregard of the code degenerates and depraves him.”

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

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