Session 8(a): Blood Sports, Animal Rights and Violence

Session 8A: Blood Sports, Animal Rights and Violence
Chair: Roy Wallace

Blood Sport: Hunting as a Form of Respect for Life
Shelby Weitzel
Department of Philosophy, College of the Holy Cross, Mass, USA

Whether viewed as sport or as shameless barbarism, hunting has and continues to be a divisive issue politically and ethically. However, the methods, motivations, and justifications for hunting are not monolithic.
The objections of environmentalists and proponents of gun control most clearly apply to sport hunters. Sport hunters relish the competition amongst one another and celebrate their mastery over animals, with whom they feel little to no empathy. In seeking trophies and demonstrating their prowess, these hunters quite simply glorify violence.
However, it is less obvious that nature hunters similarly contribute to the exaltation and proliferation of violence. Nature hunters emphasize their sense of connection to and affection for nature and for animals. They insist that the kill itself is a small (but admittedly essential) component both in terms of the time involved and in terms of the overall “spiritual experience.” Indeed, the pangs of conscience that they feel when they take a life is meant to indicate the sincerity of their reverence and the preservation of their own humanity.
In this paper, I summarize the moral problems with sport hunting in order to provide a benchmark for my evaluation of nature hunters. Are nature hunters immune to the criticism rightly levied at sport hunters, or do they shoot themselves in the foot, as it were, in their own accounts of what it means to hunt? While sympathetic towards much of what nature hunters cherish about their “art” and about nature, I conclude that there is something deeply troubling about the choice to cultivate this taste for predation, however romantic or steeped in tradition it may be.

The Animal Rights Movement and Violence: Two Viewpoints
Elisa Aaltola
Department of Philosophy, University of Turku, Finland

The animal rights movement has been linked with systematic violence through two opposite aspects. On the one hand, the public images constructed of the movement have often emphasised violence. Not only the media, but also the scientific community and even the government have tended to characterise the animal rights advocates as people motivated by violence. Where as in the 19th century animal advocates were labeled“sentimental” but rather harmless, the public image of today’s advocates consists of terms such as “fundamental” “fanatic”, “extreme”, and lately even “terrorist”. What was previously construed as misguided sentimentalism, is today construed as misguided violence. Both the presumption that the animal rights movement lacks rational basis for its arguments, and the presumption that it is driven by direct physical aggression, are used to marginalise the movement. New laws are passed on animal advocates, making matters such as demonstrations difficult, and enabling lengthy prison sentences; at the same time more room is given to accepted and conformed forms of animal advocacy, i.e. animal welfarism.
On the other hand, the animal rights movement defines its own politics by notions such as “non-violence”, and “equal respect for wellbeing”. There is a heavy emphasis on moral arguments, which are used, not only to justify actions against the hegemony, but also to clarify the acceptability of given methods. The understanding is that animal rights does not advocate violence, but rather goes against it in the form of institutionalised use of animals, and that the methods used in order to achieve this goal do not cause bodily (but rather material, economical, political etc.) harm. Hence, rather than misguided violence, the claim is for informed opposition to violence. These opposite definitions continue to flourish, leading to heated and often fruitless debates, further marginalization of the animal rights movement, and the following toughening of its tactics. The motive of this paper is to investigate the opposing viewpoints by concentrating on three aspects: 1) actual examples of the viewpoints from legislation, media, animal research lobby groups, anti-vivisection lobby groups, and animal rights recourses, 2) examples of recorded events, such as statistics concerning the acts of animal advocates, the police, and the jurisdiction, and 3) the tactics and politics over power used by the opposing parties.