DEER HUNTING IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Deer hunting, duck hunting, and fishing provides a great example of evolutionary psychology. People do these things because they enjoy doing them. This is a straightforward relationship, nothing complex or fancy.

Most people who do these things do not do them for the food benefit. Deer hunting is not a cheap sport; a person could easily buy much more meat in a market for less money than they could obtain by going hunting. The average doe weighs about 145 pounds and buck weights 170 pounds and about 40 percent of that is eatable meat. Therefore, hunters clearly do their hunting because they enjoy doing it and not for the meat. Perhaps we can find a reason why hunters enjoy these kinds of sports from examining the reasons of those who do not enjoy hunting.

It is clear that prior to 10,000 years ago, everyone lived by hunting, not just animals but also gathering roots and fruits, etc. With the passage of time, the number of people who hunt and fish is becoming less and less. In the year 2009, in the state of Minnesota, there were 800,000 hunting permits issued and 465,000 took to the field with 32% successfully harvesting a deer.  The population of the state is about 5.2 million and with half male and one fourth of them being of hunting age means, about 4% of the populations are deer hunters. Of course, some women hunt, of course children under 15 years of age and people older that 75 years hunt but the point is that going from 50% to 4% of the population is a significant drop. The biggest fallacy of these calculation is that many more people actually have the desire to go hunting but don’t.

Logically, the change in the numbers of hunters going from hunter-gatherer to agriculture that happened 10,000 years ago was dramatic.  From that point until now, decay in the number of people going hunting is diminishing; more than likely a logarithmic decay meaning the rapid decline slowed to about 4.6% per 1,000 years and is approaching zero at a very, very low rate. I suspect the decay in the number of hunters happens for many reasons. A big one is economics, the high cost has some affect on desire. In my mind, a bigger affect is due to what we can refer to as “our humanization”. I look at the reasons people mention as to why they do not go hunting or do not like hunting or hunters and their perception of the violence of the sport seems the number one reason. For people who eat meat, this is totally illogical. For vegetarians, it makes a lot of sense.  Stephen Pinker and others have extensively studied violence in society and can document an overall decline: cruelty to women, cruelty to animals, and even thought it seems an oxymoron, cruelty in war. The bleeding hearts among us created the recent Syrian crisis over weapons of mass destruction over this point, as if people can be killed more humanely with bombs and guns.

Jonathan Haidt, in his book the Righteous Mind, got it right. Our innate emotions or instincts control who we are and how we struggle to adjust our emotions to culture, what ever that response might be, by reason. We can always find a reason to justify what we do or want to do. We allow our reasoning—no matter how biased—to control our instincts. I feel the desire to go hunting is innate; it is bestial; however, that does not make it wrong or make it right. We do it because we want to do it.

This is at the heart of the conflict between our biology and our culture. Why do we as a society keep saving people who cannot survive without the help of others? Where is Darwinian survival of the fittest in that? If my family is hungry, I will kill a deer without giving it a second thought. If I have the money to buy meat and there is meat to buy, then all of sudden, I do not think deer are beautiful creatures, have rights, and can suffer pain. Nevertheless, even if I do feel these things, I will kill one and feed my family. These diametric views only make sense to me in the context of understanding our humanization
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