Many people today are concerned about health: Health for themselves, health for the environment, and health for future generations. Seemingly endless studies on which ever-present chemicals, additives, preservatives, and seed strains are bad for humans and the environment leave us searching for good alternatives from the long, convoluted food supply and distribution network. [...]
“Quality Deer Management works!" Many of us have seen this campaign slogan handwritten beneath the Polaroid pictures posted on the bragging board at the local game registration station. Or the "Let him go so he can grow" billboards perched along our highways. They beckon to the unsuspecting observer, saying "Just practice Quality Deer [...]
I started hunting with traditional gear when I was about 20 years old. My dad and I both made the switch from compounds. He got a Martin Dream Catcher, and I got a Martin Super Diablo. Both were recurves, and both were sweet shooting bows. I spent many hours practicing in the back [...]
The survival of hunting depends on more than the value of wild meat and wild places for the animals to live.
There has been much debate about moral consideration, that is, what entities are to be considered as worthy of moral consideration. Perhaps the most famous, and relevant to hunting, are the animal welfare ethics of Tom Regan and Peter Singer. Regan, a rights theorist, and Singer, a utilitarian, argue that animals deserve moral consideration, because they are sentient. Others, such as Albert Schweitzer, have gone further, arguing that we ought to have a "reverence for life", thereby including plants, and presumably fungi, microbes, etc. Still others, such as Aldo Leopold, have argued that soils, waters, and all members of the biotic community ought to be considered. The task seems to have been one of increasing one's moral community. That is, increasing the scope of what one considers to be morally relevant. In A Sand County Almanac, Leopold remarks on this phenomenon: "The first ethics dealt with the relation between individuals…Later accretions dealt with the rel
It was early in the Wisconsin bow season and I was hunting on my uncle's farm with a good friend of mine. We hunted Saturday, and were scouting the area on Sunday morning before heading back to school. Matt was trying to get the lay of the land for a return hunting trip. We were walking along a ridge when three bucks approached from downwind. Matt spotted them first and we noticed the first buck was wounded in a hind quarter. As he approached broadside about 10-15 yards away I drew my longbow and released. The arrow penetrated his ribcage and passed through… the arrow lay on the ground on the other side of the deer. With a few bounds the buck was out of sight and the others soon dispersed. We retrieved the arrow and we both felt confident about the shot. We waited about 10 minutes before beginning to track him. The buck had gone off the top of the ridge and down a point. We found him bedded down after a couple hundred yards. He was about 35 yards away when we spotted him, starin
The French existentialist Jean Paul Sartre wrote about what he called being in good faith. For Sartre freedom is a fundamental characteristic of our very being, hence we are responsible for our actions. The only thing one is not responsible for is his/her freedom. Our freedom is a fact of life, and we just have to accept it. Even whether one lives or dies, according to Sartre, is a choice. To acknowledge one's freedom and accept responsibility for choices is to be in good faith, and to deny one's freedom is to live in bad faith. Sartre claimed that humans flee from their freedom and desire to be an object, or have one's actions determined and justified by other causes. One can see a basis for this claim in much of classical and contemporary ethics with its focus on necessity (i.e., doing that which is necessary or only that which is necessary) and determined actions (biological or divine). When used to deny choice and responsibility, this too is bad faith. So what does this mean for hu
