Search

Hunting has a unique status as a sport and leisure activity alongside its practices having high stakes for society related to ecology, biosecurity, animal welfare and public safety. As such, hunting must increasingly legitimate itself before the public both in terms of ethically justifiable motivations for why to hunt and ethical standards for how to hunt. One way in which public acceptance has been sought in recent years has been to frontline 'women hunters' as the hunting community's indirect ambassadors. An effort to recruit more women is also seen as imperative to the survival of hunting in a practical, demographic sense. When women enter hunting, they enter an arena that is opaque and difficult to navigate along with heavy baggage from gender roles, expectations about proximity to wildlife and nature, and masculine norms on behaviour. In this study, we demonstrate through semi-structured interviews, participant observation and auto-ethnography of a hunting license education in Sweden, how women navigate spaces carved out for men. The findings show traps of emphasised femininity, expectations of women as 'softening influences' on male hunters to rein in their potentially unethical behaviour, and as differentially positioned in the learning process of hunting. However, using Bourdieu's social capital, findings also reveal that women negotiate and trade attributes in creative ways – such as landownership, meat handling skills and knowledge – to gain an advantage, status or level the playing field. We argue that regardless of gender, being in a position of sufficient capital to be able to call out unethical behaviour in the hunting team is crucial insofar as it serves the hunting community's ultimate interest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although hunting is declining in western countries, the number of people taking the hunting exam in Sweden are stable, and new demographic groups are becoming hunters. Through interviews done in Sweden with both new and experienced hunters, as well as focus groups with young hunters at agricultural colleges, we investigate how they navigate praxis and ethical frameworks taught in hunting. Using theories on moral learning, as well as Walzer's thick and thin moral argument, we contrast the views of these young hunters with the ethical principles outlined in the educational literature for the hunting exam. We then present how young hunters reasoned around issues regarding hunting ethics, animal welfare and the place of hunting in modern society, both inside and outside the classroom. The young hunters we spoke to acted as moderators of modern trends in hunting, often bringing 'destabilising' influences like social media and female hunters. Young hunters are enculturated into traditional hunting structures and, in the process, caught in a dialectic between modern influences and traditional hunting culture. Our findings highlight challenges such as 'false consensus' and 'ethical trade‐offs' in the learning of hunting ethics, which emerge potentially due to a lack of space for deliberation on hunting ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The seeming absence of mutual consent in interspecies sports makes it difficult to justify non-human animals participating on equal terms with humans in for example sport hunting. Nevertheless, hunted animals might appear to be 'playing the game' to the extent they resort to counter-deceptions, which often fool the hunters or their dogs. In this paper, we consider whether counter-deception by hunted animals is evidence that they are not playing the hunter's game at all, or rather playing a different serious game of survival, one in which they repudiate the role of 'worthy opponent' instead by playing the role of trickster-resistors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern hunting appears to be undergoing an identity crisis as a result of transitioning from labour to leisure. This transition is by no means linear or absolute. Today, hunting is framed both as a hobby for the leisure participant, and as a societal duty that delivers wildlife management, pest control for agriculture, sustainably sourced meat and euthanasia of injured wildlife. Hunting is hence doubly serious as 'serious leisure': it involves skill and perseverance, but it is also seen as serious in constituting societal labour. In this article, we employ netnographic research to examine how and in what contexts labour‐leisure tensions are manifested among Swedish hunters. We observe hunters struggle with the balance between leisure and labour on four levels: (1) internally, when it comes to reconciling their personal motivations for hunting; (2) between hunters, resulting in the normative differentiation between 'urban leisure hunters' and everyday hunters in the countryside doing 'real' work; (3) between different hunting practices; and (4) between wanting to enjoy the freedom afforded by the leisure label, while also inviting formalisation of hunting's role as a public service, including compensation. Our findings show the contradiction between labour and leisure is also differently managed across these levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores whether and to what extent the practice of leisure hunting is used as a way to transcend the human-nature alienation and thereby reconcile modern society and nature. The study is based on semi-structured interviews with hunters around Stockholm, Sweden and participant observation. In the paper, modernity is discussed from a Marxist perspective as causing the alienation of human beings from nature and natural sources of production through processes of industrialisation, capitalism and urbanisation. By exploring hunting as an ancient activity in a modern society the paper further discusses whether hunting can, through managing and harvesting wildlife, offer some kind of insight into people's interaction with natural sources of production. The question is whether hunting has the potential to facilitate a more profound appreciation of wildlife and ecosystems by reconnecting people with nature. The effects of Modernity on hunting are also discussed to reflect some of the paradoxes and internal contradictions that exist within hunting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]