10/01© Ronald L. Moody (2001)
All rights reserved.
Reprinted here with permission.

Human Evil and the Teeth of the Wolf

The well-known human capacity for violence against our own kind is much on our minds as I write.

We Americans are certain to become more acutely aware of any violence that occurs in our society. People will form more sharply-angled attitudes toward any aspect of life seen as a source of harmful aggression. This has been the direction of our history, at least since the end of World War Two, and sudden trauma on a world scale will only speed up the attitude evolution.

In the immediate wake of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, Americans of Middle-Eastern or Islamic appearance avoided public places because they knew people would be prone to violent emotional reactions. The American hunter is certain to feel similar desire to avoid hostile public attention -- and for a similar reason. Sooner than later hunters are sure to encounter louder, stronger urban voices challenging a way of life that involves the death of hunted animals at the hands of weapon-bearing humans.

For the uninformed urban citizen, killing is killing and guns are guns. As much as they may wish to, hunters cannot hide from the judgment of their fellow citizens. They can only hope to reach out and inform in order to persuade -- and most importantly, earn trust.

Modern hunters have long felt a growing social pressure to validate hunting within the moral and biological framework of our urban industrial civilization. The changing character of the American people have placed this burden on many old cultural institutions, as well as hunting.

To their credit, progressive Nimrods, on one hand, have responded with efforts to teach non-hunters the honorable story of the hunt. On the other hand, they strive to teach modern hunters to respect wild animals and the wild places they live rather than use wildlife as living "hockey pucks" in a human dominion game.

We also have made strong efforts to end anachronistic practices such as shooting of penned animals on "game farms" because such activities are badly out of alignment with modern values.

Not the least of our efforts has been to persuade hunters to decline the use of high-tech gadgetry that overwhelms the natural defenses of a wild animal and makes the hunt a public spectacle of butchery.

When telling the honorable story of hunting in modern life, we teach how modern wildlife conservation is essentially a hunter-driven invention. We teach how hunting is the original human survival scheme and a natural part of who we are as persons and as a species.

Perhaps, most importantly, we have begun to emphasize the unique moral relationship between human hunter and game animal that is the foundation of all non-subsistence hunting. In this relationship the hunter binds himself or herself in a moral obligation to the hunted: that in exchange for the privilege of taking our rightful game, we obligate ourselves to preserve the kind of the slain and provide the place on Earth needed for them to lead free-roaming lives according to their natural order.

All of this hunters are doing. But, now, once again, it will not be enough.

For now we are forced in untimely fashion to follow the Nimrod's Trace one more step toward the root of our soul -- to discriminate between the climatic event of the hunt and the fruit of human violence -- death of the game as distinguished from death of one person at the will of another. We must know the answer to the question: does learning the art of killing in the hunt make the people who hunt more prone to human violence?

No, you say; but on what logic and evidence do you stand?

Many hunters find it more tolerable to withdraw from social discourse rather than make the effort to engage the challenge. But such retreat creates a leadership failure that allows people to get lost in the forest of moral confusion where irrationality makes sense.

All the while we are struggling in this semantical and cultural monkey thicket, those who know the wild have the logic and evidence close at hand.

To find the difference between the murderous behavior we human call evil and the climax of the hunter's quest, we need look no further than the teeth of the wolf.

The wolf cannot live according to its natural order without killing; it is a predator. If you believe in God, then you believe it was God who put long, sharp daggers in the mouth of the wolf to better pull down, slay and devour the deer. But it must also have been God who gave keen senses to the deer and gave the deer the ability to birth fawns just a little more quickly than the wolf can eat them. Wolf and deer dance around the life circle of birth, hunger and death. The result is that both wolf and deer continue in an existence of mutually dependent health -- for, without the wolf, the deer would soon destroy itself through its fawns.

Death in the natural order is, therefore, a healthful part of the divine creation. Out of all the religious images of all the great religions of the world the image that best portrays the circle of life is found in native American traditions. It is that of a snake drawn in a round circle with the head of the snake swallowing its own tail. The snake is life and it can live only by devouring itself.

And all of this happened and happens totally beyond man. The circle danced by wolf and deer arcs far beyond any ideas humans may have about it. The civilized human who hunts does so, to some extent, by departing the unnatural order of civilization in a personal journey to explore his or her roots in the old, wild Earth. To the distance our hunter's journey follows the natural circle of birth, hunger and death, the food we kill will cause no offense to the divine creation. We simply follow the arc created beyond us.

Evil, in contrast, is a human violence that weakens or breaks the circle of life. The destruction of a species can be evil; just as the willful destruction of human life for an unnatural purpose is well understood to be evil. Whatever myriad form it assumes, evil can be recognized by the pain of its human device and its spiritual effect on the circle of life.

Yet we humans have, for untold centuries, employed the hard-working wolf as the icon of evil -- the terror in the night. The supreme irony is that human evil becomes most manifest precisely at the point that man defines himself outside or beyond the natural order of life on Earth.

Teeth leave the wolf no choice about its relationship with death. The human hand, however, can be turned in any direction. It is the path we take that marks our course toward good or evil. Perhaps we will follow the circle around and discover that honoring our natural roots in our journies through the Earth actually leads us away from evil.