EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY AND KILLING LIONS

Minnesota Dentist pays $55,000 to kill pet lion on the edge of Zimbabwe’s Hwange Game Preserve. Once again, our humanity is challenging or innate feelings. As always, these things are complicated to understand or even to define. The truths are this man, note the gender, have a reputation as a sportsman and a trophy hunter. Also, we know the lion as a wild animal; therefore, it is a dangerous animal and people should kill dangerous animals. Others say this dentist is not a sportsman and that the lion was not a dangerous animal. Clearly, his wife and family were not involved in that situation, and he should not have been killed that lion. However, others argued that there is a surplus of lions, and the hunter was doing a good thin by thinning out the population. It is also true that the man is not following his bestially endowed instinctual hunting drive for food or protection of himself and his fellow man especially his wife and family. The entire first paragraph reeks of inherent or innate drives. Among the innate bestial drives are the gender roles in hunter-gatherer structure, survival of the fittest, territoriality, reputation, bravery, and hierarchy dominance to name a few. As human beings, we sense the wrongness of all of this but are not willing to address the issues involved. No one wants to revert to the hunter-gatherer social structure. We do not need to hunt for food. No one would think that this man should shoot cows for a sport even if he is such a poor aim that the cow should be in a stanchion. Some of us deny that killing is the foundations of that structure even in the face of slaughterhouses that supplies the meat we eat every day. Some people demand the right to own guns. Some feel hunting is a sport, as such; anyone who chooses to be a hunter should be able to pursue that as a hobby and consequently we should envy his success by appreciating this in the form of mount heads hanging on a man cave wall. We now we need room to live, even if we squeeze out the plants and animals from their natural habitat and are willing to kill off the animals population to claim the territory As our natural habitat. Of course, we cannot have “wild” animals living among us. We have to protect human life but deny state governments the right of self-defense by executions. We tie ourselves up in knots over the question of should we execute mentally ill people but at the same time declare murderers mentally ill. What do we do about the people who are incurably mentally or physically ill and entirely dependent on society for their survival? Do we kill them too? We tend to feel the gift of life supersedes the quality of life even in the most ghastly situations. Terri Schiavo fiasco in which the entire federal government became involved caused many to rethink their position yet, we as a nation seem unable to consider the abortion question in terms of quality of life of either the mother or the newborn. The case of the dentist killing a pet lion should bring all of this to our attention. It is time to face the development of our humanization in terms of the conflict with our innate being; it is time to embrace evolutionary psychology in all of our social thinking. URL: firetreepub.blogspot.com Comments Invited and not moderated