Andy Newman is going contrarian on us:
The dislike of some people (mainly urban dwellers) for hunting is a symptom of an alienation from the visceral, sensual reality of the natural world; opponents of hunting live in a world where meat comes shrink wrapped; animals are sentimentalised and pets are treated like children. In truth, the alienation of human life to be decontextualised from the reality of animal husbandry and rearing animals for slaughter is a feature of modern industrialised society, and probably specific to capitalism.
Overcoming that alienation and putting women and men back into the natural world, overcoming the gap between town and country; and the distinction between manual and mental labour should in fact be part of the socialist project of creating a more sustainable, ecological and human-scaled society.
I have always thought it was shocking hypocrisy that so many townies oppose hunting, that kills a tiny number of animals; and usually kills them clean and quick; and yet they happily eat chickens that have spent their entire short life in pain and torment, crammed together in the dark so closely that the dead birds don’t even fall, bewildered, diseased, crippled and wading in their own shit.
The ban on hunting with dogs was really very little to do with animal welfare, and much more to do with imposing social conformity. Opponents of blood sports don’t understand hunting, and don’t understand rural life. There is no equivalent campaign to ban factory farming simply because people want the cheap meat and don’t really care about cruelty to animals if there is any personal cost; but banning hunting allowed people to feel morally superior to other folks whose lives are different. What opponents of hunting object to is not the fate of the hunted animals, but the fact that hunters enjoy it. (Actually, there is also quite a bit of opposition specifically to fox hunting in rural areas, because the hunts are often bad neighbours, who spook other people’s livestock, leave gates open, and are typically snobby; but this opposition doesn’t extend to other forms of hunting.)
Andy bases his post on a BBC report on the supposed mass slaughter house cats engage in; allegedly “a typical urban cat kills around five prey animals every single day”. Reading the report though
it quickly becomes clear that the researcher quoted there isn’t actually saying this, but is only looking into the possibility that cats are to blame for huge number of bird and other small animal deaths. The BBC doesn’t have the best reputation when it comes to reporting science accurately, so I would always take their claims with a grain of salt. To launch an attack on townie hypocrisy on such a slender reed?
To be fair, there is a kernel of truth in what Andy says. New Labour didn’t bring in the anti-hunting laws out of concern for animal welfare, as any casual glance at its farming policies shows, but as a sop to old skool Labour supporters, the party’s rank and file activists and more than a few MPs to whom the fox hunt was still one of the most hated symbols of class ridden Britain — no matter that their leaders had long since embraced capital.
Nevertheless, Andy’s attempt to defend hunting at this late stage has more than a hint of Christopher Hitchen-style mindless contrarianism to it. You know how those things go. Take a topic that’s of special interest to “the left” and take the deliberately opposite stance to what you think is the recieved wisdom. Caricature your opponents as hypocrites who argue from emotion, not reason or are acting out of ulterior motives, then claim your own position is the only correct one to take for a socialist. Bonus point if you manage to work in working class cliches.
In his defense Andy claims hunting opponents are hypocrites for not caring about factory farming, when in fact most anti-hunting activists were also engaged in a lot of other animal rights issues. He claims they don’t really care about the suffering of the hunted animals, but are offended by the joy hunters derive of their pastime, that they’re “alienated” from nature. In short, he’s busy setting up strawmen to knock down rather than engage in real argument in his piece, with a bit of reverse peasant snobbery thrown in.
What’s more, Andy puts forth a juxtaposition that just doesn’t exist, between the noble art of hunting and the reality of modern industrialised food production. These are two sides of the same coin, hunting being a passtime for rich farmers and landowners, (when the working classes do it it’s called poaching) who got the time and the money to engage in it exactly because they own modern, heavily industrialised farms. The idea that farmers of all people are closer to nature than socalled townies is laughable. Any fule knows they only have an eye for nature if there’s an EU subsidy attached to it, as regular listening to Farming Today will soon make clear. Farming is and has been for a long time just as industrialised a profession as that of any pencil pusher and hunting is the same, or else we’d seen nude hunters tearing down foxes with their bare hands, not use horses, hounds driving tactics and shotguns.
