Interview: James Swan, author of In Defense of Hunting, Part 2

>> Read part one of this interview.

James Swan has authored 7 books, including In Defense of Hunting, Sacred Places, and The Sacred Art of Hunting. He has been involved in conservation his whole life, from the first Earth Day to his latest effort, shining a light on the game warden crisis in California.

This is the second of a two-part interview, a discussion about people's physical, cultural, and spiritual origins in hunting.

About 500,000 years ago the human brain size began to increase, enabling more complex thinking and problem-solving. This physical change can only be explained by adding more protein to the diet, and that protein had to come from meat. There is debate about how much of that meat originally came from scavenging the kills of predatory animals, but sooner or later it became obvious that using tools and our thinking abilities we could acquire a more reliable supply of protein, and that meant hunting and fishing. If you believe the physical anthropologists, we would not be who we are today without hunting or fishing.

Look at a person. Their eyes are on the front of their face, like a predator or an omnivore, rather than on the side of their face like an animal that grows up expecting something to eat it. We also have canine teeth, which you don't find in herbivores. We are most definitely omnivores, like bears.

Barry Lopez has made an interesting argument that the basic social structure of small groups of people is based on our ancestors watching the efficiency of wolf packs hunt.

One of my favorite books on how diet has shaped our species is The Paleolithic Prescription, the 1988 best-selling diet and fitness book, by Eaton, Shostak and Konner, professors at Emory University, which reports on research of what are the healthiest human diets since the Paleolithic. For thousands of years that diet has been meat, fruit, vegetables and whole grains. The authors found that when people ate that diet, they experienced few, if any, common health problems of modern society -- diseases of the heart, kidney, and liver, diabetes and depression.

Confirmation of the validity of the Paleo diet comes in the recent book, The Jungle Diet, which is based on research of the diets of contemporary native cultures and arrives at similar conclusions.

It's in our blood, bones and soul.

Q: Similar question-- what exists culturally within people because of our evolution as hunter/anglers? Religion, story-telling, etc?

Erich Fromm, in his landmark study The Anatomy of Human Aggressiveness, speaks almost poetically about how an ethical hunter returns to oneness with nature in the act of hunting, healing a split that is fostered by living in a media-saturated culture.

Freud popularized the idea of instincts. William James agreed with him, and both agreed that hunting was instinctual in man. Being at one with your instinctual identity is basic requirement for mental health, and that's what hunting does for people. Personally, I think hunting and fishing for modern people is as much therapy as anything else, for it enables one to contact some very deep, primal instincts of the soul.

Carl Jung and then Joseph Campbell (see his The Way of Animal Powers) helped us understand how the voices of instincts of the soul manifests as archetypal images that come to life in dreams, visions, and art. Those images and the energies they carry with them become translated into ceremonies, songs, stories, dances, ritual, sculpture, painting and even tools.

Each of us has a personal blend of instincts that we uniquely express, but the instinct for being a hunter and/or fisherman is in the soul of every man and woman, and under the right conditions, they will come to consciousness, because they are tied to survival. Young children, who naturally live close to their instinctual identity, make hunting tools and like to hunt animals, even if no one has ever taught them, research has shown.

I can find none of the notable behavioral scientists of the 20th century who did not believe that hunting and fishing were instinctual in man. John Kennedy's "Education Tsar," Jerome Bruner, designed his "Man A Course of Study" humanities curriculum to include films of native cultures hunting so we could appreciate our origins. Bruner told me a couple years ago that his eyesight was not good enough to hunt these days, but in the fall he enjoyed going out with hunting dogs to flush grouse as it kindled many fond memories.

The hunting story is at least as old as the love story in the history of human culture, and initially it was of equal value to survival. When we lose something like that from culture there is a void.

Hunting stories also shape cultural behaviors, especially cooperation, which a hunting or fishing party must do to be optimally successful. An Inuit man once told me that hunting stories were the thing that held his culture together and enabled it to survive. I think that is probably true for all of us if we look back up our family tree.

Laws and ethics guide the instinctual energies that lead to the killing of other living things to insure animals are conserved, and not abused. This is why the great religions all offer teachings about proper ways of hunting and fishing and there are patron saints to embody those sentiments. In some parts of Europe, on Saint Hubert's Day, November 3, schools close and a Mass of Saint Hubert, the patron saint of hunting, is said in cathedrals, with a musical score played on hunting horns. In some towns in Quebec, hunters bring their guns into the church to be blessed during the Mass of Saint Hubert. I wish we had a St. Hubert's Day in the US.

I also wish we had more wild game dinners that bring people together to celebrate the spirit of wildness in our lives. Eating wild fish and game conveys a subtle harmony with nature that is a powerful teacher of thanksgiving and teacher of reverence for life. Religion began by thanking the spirits of land and water for the food they give us. Presented correctly, a wild game meal can continue that legacy, which fuels the Land Ethic that Aldo Leopold talked about. Wild game dinners are big in New England. They ought to be brought back elsewhere, too.

If you don't feel drawn to hunt, that's fine. Being able to realize that someone else may honestly feel the pull of the hunt is my goal.

Q: And how have people affected the species we pursue, and the animals we enlist to help us?

Since Teddy Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot launched the conservation movement to put an end to market hunting in the early 1900's, most of the major wild game species in the US have become increasingly abundant. There are now more whitetail deer, snow geese and wild turkeys than in any time in recorded history. Elk, antelope and Canada geese have also rebounded. Some introduced species like wild boar and chukar partridge have mushroomed in numbers, offering more opportunities. No game species has been driven to extinction by sport hunting in the 20th century, and if we look at the amount of money spent on wildlife habitat by sportsmen, you will find that hunters and fishermen have been leaders in insuring that fish and wildlife have adequate habitat.

With the all-time high populations of wildlife and growth of urbanization comes increasing potential for human-animal conflicts. Wildlife diseases like avian cholera and zoonotic diseases like Lyme disease and West Nile virus are on the rise. In the case of snow geese, which have tripled in numbers in the last half of the 20th century, a consequence has been the destruction of Arctic breeding grounds, which impacts all species that breed along the northern coast as snow geese pull plants out of the ground when they feed, as opposed to Canada geese that are grazers like cattle. Some of those lands will take decades to return to fertility, if ever in our lifetimes.

The fact that wood ducks were once hovering on the brink of extinction due to loss of nesting habitat in old growth riparian forests and market hunting, and now have become one of the most common species of breeding waterfowl in many areas, is due to both conservation of habitat and erecting wood duck boxes.

One of the challenges of modern wildlife management has become over-populations of animals. As more and more animals habituate to people, while it may be nice to have deer, geese, etc. around, it also brings problems associated with carrying capacity. One of the most gut-wrenching experiences I can recall is walking into a deeryard in northern Michigan in the dead of winter and seeing hundreds of deer starving to death.

More deer attract cougars, who like moving prey, including two-legged. Mountain lions are popping up all across the east coast. Coyote attacks are on the rise across the US. In Canada wolf attacks on people seem to be increasing. In many areas, deer-human conflicts in urban areas, especially during the rut, are increasingly common and problematic.

These habituated animals are something very new. People have been hunting wildlife ever since man appeared in North America and behavior patterns reflect this, but with vast areas no longer open to hunting, animal behavior is changing.

I have not seen any data to show that birth control methods currently available can be used effectively to control a wild deer herd. And this is very expensive, as is hiring "sharpshooters," who are deer hunters that get paid to hunt. Cities across North America that have tried urban deer hunting with archery have been very happy with the results. It's very cost-effective, quiet, and it's not hard to insure that those who can hunt are skilled, as well as ethical.

As for the animals that are our companions in the hunt, hunting dogs love to hunt. It's in their blood. To see hunting dogs at work is a thing of beauty.

One of the most wondrous examples of interspecies cooperation is when birds of prey hunt with man. Those birds could leave at any time, and yet they do not. The invisible chord that connects them is sheer magic. I highly recommend the movie "Kiran Over Mongolia," which is about a teenage Mongolian boy and his quest to become an eagler. His story is the story of many youth today.

Q: You live in California, which is one of the few states that saw the numbers of hunter/anglers go up in 2007. Why do you think the numbers are going up in California as opposed to nearly every other state? (One of the people I spoke with about this recently attributed it to the "Michael Pollan/Omnivore's Dilemma effect")

It's true we did have small gain in hunters in CA in 2007, but let's temper that a bit. According to DFG Captain Roy Griffith, who is in charge of Hunter Education for CA, the numbers of both hunters in CA have been steadily going down over the last couple decades. In l980, 509,964 hunting licenses were sold in CA. By 1989 the number had dropped to 380,000. And by 2001 it was 288,000.

2005 was the bottom year for both fishing and hunting licenses - 1,996,663 resident fishing licenses and 262,229 resident hunting licenses. There have been increases since then, but they have been small. Last year there were 268,174 resident licenses sold, which is an increase of about 3,000 over 2006. For license data see: http://www.dfg.ca.gov/licensing/statistics/statistics.html

Maybe the numbers are stabilizing. But let's be honest, 268,000 is quite a drop from 509,964. A major reason, by the way, is that the state's deer herd has dropped from about two million back in the 1980's to less than 500,000 today.

Hunting has always been pretty much a white man's sport, but that's changing, at least out here. California does not keep statistics on ethnicity of hunters and fishermen. Other states that do report that the number of Hispanic hunters and fishermen is growing. Asian-Americans who hunt and fish is also a growth area in California. Many of these people come from cultures where hunting and fishing for food are accepted, and they are serious. I would say that the best hunter at the Delevan National Wildlife Refuge where I like to hunt, is Hmong. He is short and can hide in cover larger people cannot. He uses hand-made silhouette decoys that look like Balinese puppets, and he really gets drake mallards like no one else.

A growing number of women are also taking up hunting and fishing, thanks in part to the Becoming An Outdoorswoman workshops. There are also some other programs that teach whole families about outdoor recreation skills, like the US Sportsmen's Alliance "Trailblazer Adventure Program" that has helped over 500,000 families learn to enjoy the outdoors since 2001.

One other factor that is helping bring kids into hunting is the Archery In The Schools program that has become a national groundswell all across the country. Studies show that kids who learn to shoot archery in Archery In The Schools Program are interested in learning about hunting, and for many kids, learning archery is a new lease on life as it is a sport that requires different skills than many conventional sports.

If you combine the money spent by the 260,000 hunters and two million anglers in California, it totals out as more than the value of the state's grape crop. For more on economics of hunting and fishing see: http://www.southwickassociates.com/impacts/default.aspx I bring this up because hunting and fishing license sales provide important revenue for managing fish and wildlife.

One of the reasons for the game warden shortage in CA that I talked about in the first half of this interview is due to declining numbers of hunters and fishermen, and a corresponding drop in license revenues. I wish we had more hunters and fishermen afield in the Golden State, as Thoreau said, it is one of the best teachers of conservation and ethics, and it also pumps more money into the state resources agency which puts more wardens in the field. When we recently interviewed Chief Nancy Foley about the effects of having only 192 wardens in the state and she said that California could use 2,000 game wardens to deal with the poaching problem that has arisen from the warden shortage.

Michael Pollan's book has undoubtedly helped people who want to promote sustainability, but are troubled about whether hunting is the proper thing to do. Just how many have taken up hunting as a result of reading it I am not sure. This spring I taught workshops for all the state's Hunter Education instructors. One or two of the mentioned people coming into their classes after reading the book.

Pollan's book reminds us of what a lot of environmental education in recent years has tended to leave out - the realities of being a participant in the food chain. I think every school ought to have a garden and teach about where plant and animal foods come from - not the back room of the supermarket, but because people someplace have to get their hands bloody and dirty harvesting it. That experience, harvesting food, is a powerful teacher of humility that builds respect for nature that makes one become a conservationist.

Q: With recruitment going down for hunters nationally, perhaps in part to public perceptions of hunting, how can hunters help improve negative perceptions of hunters?

In my most recent book, Chasing the Hunter's Dream, (HarperCollins, 2007, co-authored with Jeff and Sherol Engel) I had to wade through the stats on hunting lands for every state and province in North America. Wildlife habitat is important for wildlife, but the decline of affordable access to huntable lands is a key in the declining numbers of hunters, because more and more hunting lands are becoming fee-only or not available. In the Sacramento Valley people lease out 4-man sunken pit blinds in rice fields for about $1000 a seat/year. That's pretty steep if you only get out a few times. Access to the federal and state refuges in California is by reservation. If you don't get drawn, you wait in the "sweat line" for someone to leave so you can take their place, and you still pay a fee. Factor in the cost of gas, and casual hunting where you used to go out for a couple hours after work or school, is a vanishing species.

Game farms are going to play an integral part in the future of hunting because it's harder to find a place to hunt. Agribusiness has chased a lot of the small family farmers out of business, and with that has gone the old ethic of "ask the farmer" for permission to hunt on his land. Being able to offer released quail, pheasant and chukar hunts on a farm is what is keeping a lot of smaller family farms in the black. Those family farms are also the ones who tend to grow organic vegetables. They are the backbone of farmers markets. Got to support them.

Last year I spoke to the North American Gamebird Association convention. Really nice people. I think it's critical that people who run those clubs, and the people who use them, follow "Fair Chase" principles, otherwise they run the risk of making it look like modern hunters don't like to have a challenge. Taking care to give birds room to develop flight prior to release is important. Some clubs never expose penned birds to people, which makes them behave more naturally. Others release the birds days or weeks before people arrive.

Two wrong directions of hunting, in my view, are remote hunting via the Internet, and "pro" competitive hunting for big money prizes, whether it's "catch and release" or not.

Unless someone is in an iron lung or confined to a hospital bed, there are numerous groups who will gladly take them out and devices to help handicapped people shoot guns and bows.

My friend Theodore Vitali, a Catholic priest, Chairman of the Philosophy Department at St. Louis University and avid hunter, speaks eloquently about the ethical relationship one has to wild animals you hunt. Father Vitali feels it's your ethical responsibility to the animals to take them quickly and humanely.

Friendly competition, like a big buck contest, is fine. As more money gets factored in, however, hunting becomes another pro sport with animals carrying around dollar signs on their sides, rather than honest and ethical hunting. "Catch and release" hunting with tranquilizer darts is not my idea of hunting, especially after "Ol Barney" gets nailed with a dart two or three times and is walking around with a hangover.

Studies show that over 80% of the general public supports ethical hunting, but non-hunters are not so sure that all hunters are ethical. Ethical hunters are not the ones you normally hear about in the media. Ethical outdoor sportsmen are conservationists, quiet people who donate time and money for habitat conservation. It's time they come out of the closet.

I wrote In Defense of Hunting and The Sacred Art of Hunting because there did not seem to be a good, concise treatment of the motivations of ethical sport hunters, and there was so much mis-information being thrown around that was causing divisiveness and exploitation of animosity. It took me several years to write each book, because for some reason no one had bothered to assemble the data on the psychology of hunting. The behavioral science data overwhelming support ethical hunting and fishing. People need to think critically about issues. Stereotyping, demonizing and stigmatizing is contrary to community mental health and divisive.

The opponents of hunting admit they will try to get every bit of media attention they can, regardless of what they say. Hunters, on the other hand, are guilty of not trying to communicate with the general public about what they do. They now have their own TV channels instead of being part of regular networks. Their magazines reach sportsmen. The organizations spend precious little on communicating with non-hunters. Attempts to explain hunting to the general public are rare. Here I want to laud the State of Colorado, who has used a special tax on hunting licenses to mount a highly professional ad campaign to explain hunting to the general public in TV and billboard ads.

In the Information Age, every hunter needs to be able to explain why they hunt, if a microphone is placed in front of them and the cameras are running. Giving them the ammunition to answer that question is one reason why I wrote my books.

More people in the entertainment industry hunt and fish than you might think. So, why don't they make TV and movie projects about hunting? Try to get money from the hunting/shooting community to fund mainstream media projects. Good luck. That has got to change.

We live in a media-driven world where screens shape so much of what people think and feel. Using those screens, big and small, to help people reconnect with nature is a powerful tool.

Studios release over 400 films a year. Most don't make their money back. I think the impact of the feature film A River Runs Through It" - both at the box office and in inspiring more people to go fishing - is a ray of hope. Made for $12 million, "A River Runs Through It" grossed $43,440,294 at the domestic box office, which isn't bad considering that it's widest release was in 1,080 theaters, only about 1/3 of the theaters that are involved with a big release today.

In two years after the picture came out there were over a 100,000 more people fly fishing, and the economics of the fly fishing industry nearly doubled. It's gone down since then. Need more movies like that. The people are there to make them.

The feature films "Dances With Wolves," and "The Ghost and The Darkness," also were box office successes that helped people gain insights into hunting. Jeff Daniels' "Escanaba In Da Moonlight" enabled us to have a good laugh at a UP deer camp, and it has been wildly successful for a small independent film that cost just over a million dollars to make. Some of my other favorite hunting movies are: "Jeremiah Johnson," "Dersu Uzala," "Ofelas" or "Pathfinder" by Mikel Gaup, "Atarnarjuat: The Fast Runner," and "Kiran Over Mongolia." The wilderness survival movies, "The Edge," and "The Snow Walker" also are great.

I really enjoyed Sean Penn's movie "Into The Wild." I was on the 2007 Screen Actors Guild nominations committee for the SAG awards, and I voted for Emile Hirsch as "Best Actor." The sad thing about the movie is that Chris McCandless did not take a hunter education class and get a license before going out on his solo. If he had, he not only would not have been a poacher, and he might have gotten enough good information to survive.

The successes of these pictures gives me hope. Movies and TV are the primary storytellers of our times. If some folks want to invest in mainstream hunting and fishing-friendly feature films, you've got my address.

Q: Where are your favorite places to hunt and fish?

I grew up on an island in Lake Erie, Grosse Ile, which I used to think was waterfowl hunting central. I loved hunting from sneak and layout boats on Lake Erie when the diving ducks came down in October. I think that the last flight of red-legged black ducks that come into Michigan from Hudson Bay when the snow starts to fall are numinous.

However, when I moved to California and ventured out into rice fields of the Sacramento Valley north of Sacramento, I found a whole new level of waterfowl abundance. It's not well known, but California waterfowl hunters have the highest annual bag per hunter of any waterfowl hunter in the US - over two dozen ducks a year on the average. Put me in a blind out in the rice fields around Willows and Colusa and I am a happy man. The biggest challenge sometimes is what to call to as so many birds are in the air.

A couple years ago I began hunting chukars in the high desert along the CA/NV border with some of my warden friends. You almost never see another hunter. Wild horses and burrowing owls are common. I love it when I can feel like I am stepping back in time when I go hunting. You bag a bird or two there and you know you've been hunting.

I have not been back there in years, but my favorite deer hunting grounds are on Drummond Island, which lies in the St. Mary's River off the east end of Michigan's U.P.

If I am going after salmon and halibut, take me to the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska, please. Seward, Ninilchik, and Homer are sacred places.

I've flyfished since I was able to walk. I have fished a lot of places in the West and had a lot of fun, but I don't think I have ever enjoyed trout fishing as much as on the Pere Marquette and Manistee Rivers in Michigan. When there is a hatch of drakes, or the humongous caddis flies are swarming and I am waist deep casting an ultralight fly rod to the sounds of lunker browns feeding in the twilight, I am truly in heaven.

Q: What gives you hope about the future of hunting and fishing?

We need to get more people outdoors, and the Sierra Club is doing a wonderful job of doing that, but we need more mainstream media programming to help build bridges among ecologically concerned people of all persuasions, as well as to de-stigmatize outdoor sportsmen, and environmentalists in general.

The fact that the Sierra Club is reaching out to sportsmen gives me hope. I hope other environmental groups will join them and restore the conservation networks that once were so strong among all people who enjoy the outdoors, regardless if they hunt or fish or not. The philosophies of Teddy Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot, John James Audubon, and Aldo Leopold and John Muir are not that different. You build coalitions by finding common ground, not looking for differences.

Another thing that gives me hope are the 55,000 Hunter Education Instructors in the United States. Working without pay, some for decades, hunting today is safer than ever before and all 50 states require passing such courses to get a license. Hunting is now as safe as ping pong thanks to Hunter Educator Instructors, which include Bowhunter Education Instructors, as well.

Volunteerism in general among hunters is strong. That translates into wood duck boxes, cleaning up trash on public refuges, raising money to save and restore habitat and reporting poachers on the hotlines that state agencies run. Those are all positive signs of commitment.

The passage of laws that insure no net loss of hunting lands is also encouraging, although any law can always be reversed. I was an expert witness on the first court case in the US to try to use a "Right To Hunt" law to protect a hunting club. The judge ultimately said that shooting sporting clays at a club could only be legal is done prior to a hunt. That removes the possibility of going to that club to perfect one's skills. Such laws are an important step forward, but no panacea.

The fact that over 80% of the general public understands that ethical hunting is okay is also definitely something that gives me hope. Considering the hundreds of millions of dollars that have been spent trying to demonize hunters, the finding that 80% of the general public supports ethical hunting shows that people have the ability to think critically and understand the biases of the people who say things.

A growing number of hunters are opting to use traditional methods of archery and falconry. They also are interested in mythology, spirituality, and traditions of hunting more than how big or how many they can bag. Some Indian outfitters are also offering to share their culture on some hunts. I view this as a very positive step.

The more that you can input your own creativity into a sport, whether it's making your own arrows, or tying your own trout flies, the better. Personally, if I bag a one chukar on the wing with arrows that I made myself with fletching from turkey and geese wing feathers from birds that I have shot, that bird is more meaningful that a dozen bagged otherwise. The same for flies that I tie using feathers and fur from critters that I bagged.

The greatest trophies of all are memories and dreams.