Dónal Donohoe

There have always been hunters and those who were hunted, down through the ages the Inuit people of the the Arctic regions have hunted seals and other animals using their meat for food , their skins for clothing and the oil extracted from the dead carcass to burn in their lamps and give them light through the long winter night. The bushmen of the Kalahari in South Africa will sometimes pursue an ox on foot for days until the animal no longer has the energy to flee and the bushmen will then, often with one strike, kill it and pray to the soul of the dead animal in thanks for the food that it will provide for them and their families over the following days and weeks. Taking what is needed in order to survive from nature’s resources has been the way for mankind since earliest times, with many indigenous tribes and people taking care not to deplete individual species to the point of extinction or destroy vegetation excessively, realizing that they depended on these same resources for own existence.

© Irene Lundgaard

In my own part of the world there are farmers who will shoot the occasional animal to protect their livestock or the odd individual who will shoot a rabbit or two when the countryside is abundant with such creatures. But there are others who would set loose a domestically reared stag only to be chased sometimes to it’s death by a pack of vicious hounds followed by a posse of horsemen and sometimes women usually dressed in costumes reminiscent of the landed gentry of the nineteenth century whose lifestyles it would seem they would like to emulate. Sometimes it is an unfortunate fox that these groups of so-called hunters and their baying hounds chase, the result again often being that the fox is savagely mauled to death. The practice of hare coursing too although the hounds are muzzled is still none the less not a pretty sight.

Tradition is often sited as justification for these practices, but cannibalism, eating the heart of your enemy to gain the power of his soul and throwing Christians to the lions have also been traditions in this world. Not all traditions are necessarily good or worth keeping. That anyone would want to inflict such pain and cruelty on an animal and experience pleasure in doing so is something that I cannot relate to. Only humans hunt for sport.