Brian Griffith's Blog - Posts Tagged "hunting"

Concerning the European colonists’ attitudes toward wild creatures, we should mention that when they landed in the New World, they were coming from lands where ordinary people had long been banned from hunting in the forests. Since medieval times, the lords and kings had enclosed the woods for their own use. Commoners caught trespassing in the forests faced the usual horrific penalties. As England’s Henry II proclaimed, “He who does wrong in the King’s forest touching his venison shall be blinded and castrated.”

Without legal restraint on the right to profit from killing, people turned hunting into an enterprise like commercial fishing. “Market hunters” started running through resource after resource. It took over three centuries, but eventually they drove the beaver, bison, prairie chickens, whales, sea otters, Pacific sardines, and Atlantic cod so close to extinction that exploiting them further grew commercially unviable. They killed every Carolina parakeet, ivory-billed woodpecker, Labrador duck, and Eastern elk. They strip-mined the billions of passenger pigeons for cheap meat at two cents a bird till every last one was gone. As Edmunde Burke explained, “The laws of commerce are the laws of nature.” And as they traditionally said in Newfoundland, “If it runs, walks, or swims, kill it.”War and Peace with the Beasts: A History of Our Relationships with Animals