5. Our Hunting Heritage
America is a hunting culture. Hunting, fishing and trapping were common activities most people participated in until recently. Our history as a country is one of a people who survived through subsistence hunting, commercial trapping and utilizing our natural resources the way nature intended. In the 1970s my own family made frequent fishing outings and we kept every fish we caught in a deep freezer to supplement what our meager incomes purchased.
Hunting, fishing and trapping as well as the nearly lost arts of prospecting and land cruising, are not just quaint pastimes but essential parts of the American character. While these activities are now considered sports, due to their trivialization and marginalization by leftist environmental groups, they were once expressions of our interaction with nature and thus the divine. In the act of killing a deer we once fed our families for the winter, and clothed ourselves when we were too poor or remote to buy clothes. The wild fur trade, still thriving even today, gave many industrious families desperately needed extra income and a good fisherman need never go hungry.
Our increasingly urbane lives have created a dearth of hunters and other sportsmen. While the Left sees this as progress, it throws nature out of balance as surely as the Greens believe our activities do. Turkeys have overrun a section in Staten Island: video from Cherry Hill, NJ shows a flock of turkeys attacking a mother and her child and in the Garden State they have been known to attack everyone from mail carriers to nuns.
But turkeys are humorous compared to the other animals that have begun encroaching on human habitats. In Wisconsin aggressive wolves have been targeting humans as prey animals and Canadian folk singer Taylor Mitchell was killed by coyotes while out hiking in 2009.
Most of these interactions are due to anti-hunting and anti-gun activists controlling the narrative about outdoor sports and nature in general. The Utopian view of the Left extends to nature which they see as they want to see it, not as it is. As social conservatives we are carriers of tradition, and in that tradition, knowledge which can not lightly be lost.
While it may not seem important for social conservatives to actively promote and support hunting and trapping rights, the consequences to humans of us not conserving our traditions serve as a good example of why we seek to conserve tradition in the first place. You needn’t hunt and fish yourself to help protect our sporting heritage and work to educate youth on the realities of hunting, animals and nature. The anti-hunting movement is a symptom of leftism and urbanization working together to separate people from nature, overthrowing over 5,000 years of Western tradition in which mankind has taken his place at the top of the food chain. Increasingly violent encounters with wild animals who have lost their fear of humans because for generations they haven’t been hunted or trapped is the price we pay for embracing the unnatural views of leftism.
Next: Defending women’s rights.
