10/05© Ronald L. Moody (2005)
All rights reserved.
Reprinted here with permission.

A Brillant Moment -
Being There as Hunters Find Their Voice

In my own personal hunter’s language there is an experience I call the “Brilliant Moment.”

Most of these Moments occur while I’m visiting the wild as a hunter, but not all of them.

The term derives from the way an imagined bright light seems to shine upon a striking occurrence when you know that what you are witnessing is important even as you are looking at it. (No ‘brilliance’ on my part is involved.)

Brilliant Moments aren’t the glorious or passionate experiences of life that feel like fire and ice. Rather, this Moment is the veil-parting when you encounter something important and beautiful, or, that you have lived long enough to witness the progress of something that has been a long time coming.

A Brilliant Moment of the latter type occurred in Missoula, Montana recently.

Missoula is the kind of place that, if hunting & angling was finance, Missoula would be Wall Street. The mountain valley university town is headquarters for a couple of major hunter-conservation organizations - the Boone & Crockett Club and the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation. State and local conservation groups cluster there with strong chapters. The city’s location in the middle of premier Rocky Mountain wild landscapes probably has something to do with all this.

The setting of the Moment was an evening panel discussion on the topic of “Hunting in America: understanding a conservation ethic” - hosted as part of the annual Montana Cine Wildlife Film Festival.

Visualize a small movie theater room with an audience of about 60 people being faced by a panel of eight presenters and the moderator.

The discussion warms up with remarks from the stage reflecting on familiar themes of habitat conservation, hunter behavior, government actions and use and abuse of public lands.

The audience, however, quickly makes it clear they are in the sandbox to play as well.

The forthcoming hunt for bison around Yellowstone Park is the point of a sharp ethical question from one audience member. This is a complicated topic and the parry and thrust leads into habitat challenges, disease in wildlife, and the threshold of fair chase hunting. The gathering seemed well on its way to visiting an eclectic array of hunting ethic issues.

Then a hand goes up in the middle row and the Brilliant Moment begins.

“Hunting and Killing are wrong:” pronounces an audience member with the voice of a hanging judge. “Our species should be able to move above killing.” There was more to the verdict but that was the point of it.

I had been to just such a lynching before. Nineteen years ago in 1986 I sat in a similar group of thoughtful hunters gathered of an evening to discuss pretty much the same menu of subjects. Like a bolt of lightening, the same strident challenge from a fellow attendee shocked the group who obviously never thought of anti-hunters as real people should they ever think of them at all. This had never happened before and the challenge was met by stunned silence. Nary a nimrod spoke in reply.

Later, in the BS circles outside the meeting room door, growls of “how did they get in here,” “should of told them that’s just the way we do things and they can like it or lump it,” and, the old reliable, “you’ve gotta have hunting to control wildlife numbers.”

In the Brilliant Moment of 1986, however, I learned that I, and a lot of other ostensible leaders of the hunting community didn’t know enough about the moral foundations of hunting to speak to the challenge presented.
We simply hadn’t thought about it. We assumed the truth was obvious. It’s your assumptions that kill you every time.

The 2005 Brilliant Moment, however, illuminated a hunter response in stark contrast to that of 1986.

First, the panelists on stage were ready with replies that clearly showed, they, leaders of hunting organizations, have been giving the morality of hunting question a lot of thought. Surely this was to be expected, however.

Brilliance began with the hands raised in the audience.

Rank and file hunters around the room had something to say. They wanted to talk about their own doubts and their emotional struggle to integrate what they knew to be right in their soul with the rational conundrum of killing an animal you admire and respect. Indeed, a lot of hunters wanted to speak to this challenge, not with the voice of a chauvinist but that of conscience.

Clearly, these Missoula nimrods had come to the decision to kill as a logical outcome of the hunt via a process of personal pilgrimage. Few unquestioned assumptions intruded on the Moment.

Most telling, and perhaps the initiation of a new color of brilliance, was the audience member who said, first, that he was not a hunter. He had, in fact, begun his opinion of hunting as a youth in strong opposition. Then he described a journey of personal observation over the span of his life that led him eventually to accept and even support hunting - though he personally will never hunt.

That’s something new and important; hopefully I’ll live long enough to see the fruit of it.

We live in an era of our Republic when civil heroism in peacetime gains little acclaim. I have the greatest admiration for citizens who will walk into a room full of people and speak in solitary opposition to the majority prejudice with a firm voice. Such are my feelings for those strong anti-hunter souls who initiated the Brilliant Moment.

Having said that, I conclude from this experience that hunters have made a lot more progress since 1986 in developing personal rationales for being hunters than have the anti-hunters in opposing it. More pointedly, our 2005 hunters were quick to describe the role of the non-hunting majority in destruction of wild animals and wild places by the habitat displacement and political policy.

Indeed, the anti-hunting logic seems not to have advanced or become any more detailed or nuanced in 20 years. I do not see this as a boon to the pro-hunting argument. American hunters as a group continue to display an incipient blindness to moral questions that haven’t been forced upon them by public criticism.

The practice of hunting in modern society is creviced with facets of doubtful morality or ethic. Hunters have progressed, but they don’t seem to have advanced to the point of acting on flaws in their culture until coerced by outside pressure.

The dark side of this philosophical tension between anti-hunters and hunters is the mutually enforcing cycle of absolute mindless defensiveness that is produced when one party attacks the other with absolute mindless offensiveness. Time and again I’ve seen hunters, who first seemed receptive to a well-reasoned argument for better ethical standards, close their mind when the anti-hunter bogeyman is conjured up.

Hunting is confronted with numerous potentially fatal social and political hazards. But the greatest self-inflicted danger to hunting is the pavlovian response of intolerant defensive to anti-hunting critique. Cultivating the skill of dissent and debate - and the capacity for action on the outcome of their own debate, should be seen as an essential survival skill by hunters.

In the darkness following my most recent Brilliant Moment I can’t see this happening without stronger leadership from those organizational leaders who hunters respect and listen to.

The final take-home lesson for this Brilliant Moment is that people in your own community will engage the difficult moral and ethical challenges of hunting if somebody, such as yourself, will organize it. If hunting, or any other fading way of life in our society, (family farmers take note) can revive its vitality and relevance, it will find its way through just such illuminated, homemade do-it-yourself learning experiences.

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

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