From: Michael S. Lorrey (retroman@together.net)
Date: Wed Jan 13 1999 - 07:57:57 MST
Ian Goddard wrote:
> At 05:47 PM 1/12/99 -0500, Michael S. Lorrey wrote:
> >
> >> If the study you refer to pertains to modern
> >> times, I'd note that most raised as hunters
> >> live in rural areas with lower crime rates,
> >> so your implication that killing some animals
> >> engenders compassion for others could be false.
> >
> >So you admit that raising a human child (typically male) in a vegetarian
> >and/or urban environment without hunting deprives the child from expressing
> >his evolved instincts to hunt, and may wind up subliming this repression into
> >cruelty to humans and other animals?
>
> IAN: No, I don't admit that at all! What I
> said was there's lower crime in rural areas
> per se. I doubt that the reason is because
> rural people kill more animals. I'd suspect
> that it has to do with rural people being
> self-sufficient by nature with solid family
> support and folks aren't so crowded together.
> The close proximity of people in the cities
> maximizes opportunities for thugs to attack
> and makes a life of crime more economical.
I look at criminals as a natural phenomemon of the urban economic ecosystem.
Individuals that are denied skills or opportunity to practice productive skills in
the society will resort naturally to predatory economics, being economically
carnivorous upon the assets of the members of the herd. It does not matter if the
predator is an Ivan Boesky or John Dillinger, it is the same behavior. Just as
with natural predators, criminals will develop a 'drug of choice' or preferred
form of prey, which is why most criminals only practice one or two forms of crime.
Violent crime is similarly a form of repressed predation. Since in an urban
environment, there is no other species besides humans, dogs, cats, and rats, you
will get sociopathic individuals who will express their natural hunting urges
first upon 'acceptable' species to prey upon, then marginally
acceptable/unacceptable species (dogs and cats), then as the individual becomes
more dislocated from society, they may prey upon the unacceptable prey species,
humans. This progression is a visible indication of the progression of their
mental illness, but the hunting urge is not the illness, merely how the illness
expresses itself in an environment of a limited ecosystem.
This is one reason why I view the general urban/vegetarian fear of guns and gun
owners as also an instinctual fear that the herbivore has for the carnivore. We
as humans also have this instinct, which comes to the fore as we practice a
vegetarian lifestyle, since we did evolve from vegetarian/scavengers who were
preyed upon by many predators, including homo erectus, and the great cats. This
fear, when it becomes the core of mental illness, is manifested in haplophobia,
which is recognized in the literature as an irrational fear of guns. It is an
illness of transference, as we have a natural fear of seeing the natural weapons
of predators exhibited.
When attacked, a herbivore will tend to flee, while an omnivore will tend to stand
and fight, which explains the whole debate over right-to-carry vs.
no-right-to-carry concealed weapons, as it is merely a manifestation of the
different viewpoints of the herbivorous (sublimated as an economic herbivore or as
an actual vegetarian) humans who prefer to avoid and flee and that of the
omnivorous humans who would prefer to stand and fight a predator, and would prefer
to be equally matched to that predator in weaponry. Herbivorous humans, as herd
creatures, will depend upon the 'tamed' few deviants they think they have control
of (i.e. police/government) to protect them from the predators, but will also seek
to disarm the omnivores due to misplaced association with the predators.
> Also, most primates aren't carnivores, and
> as I recall, if they eat any flesh it's less
> than 10% of their diet (the great apes are
> strict vegetarians), and so the idea of a
> human "hunting instinct" seems debatable.
Uh, not quite. While the gorilla and orangutan are vegetarians, chimps and baboons
are omnivorous carnivores, eating everything from roots to leaves and nuts and
fruit, grubs to lizards, birds and injured ungulates, etc. including, sometimes,
each other.
Now, as for humans, considering that we have evidence of tool use in the
harvesting of ungulates (proto-horses, proto-bison, mammoths, proto-deer, etc) as
well as other species like the great sloth, cave bear, etc, for several hundred
thousand years, and we have fossilized spears etc which are also several hundred
thousand years old, we know that hunting has been a constant practice of human
beings throughout their history. We also know that the late homo erectus preyed
upon the early homo sapiens, as well as many other species, so the evolved
practices go much farther back than just human history.
We also know from the few cases of 'feral children' that hunting is a practice
which develops naturally if the opportunity is there (i.e. there is ample game
available to develop skills with).
Mike Lorrey
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