Sickos thwarted

Good news: in the foreseeable future there will be no more hunting of bears and wolves in the Great Bear Rainforest. The Raincoast Conservation Society has bought up the rights for trophy hunting for an area of some 20,000 square kilometres on the coast of British Columbia. The Society spent $1.35 million to buy out Bella Coola Guide Outfitters, which had the exclusive rights to trophy hunting there. The CBC reports that the Society and First Nations plan to develop an alternative hunting industry in which cameras will replace guns and the trophies will be photographs. This will not sit well with those who think that proving one’s manhood involves killing innocent creatures and mounting their heads over the fireplace or turning them into rugs. José Ortega y Gasset, the Spanish philosopher whose Meditations on Hunting is the bible of “thoughtful” sport hunters, wrote that “one does not hunt in order to kill: on the contrary, one kills in order to have hunted.” This fascistic mindset claims that hunting is a matter of communing with the forces of nature by asserting one’s dominance over other creatures, and that without the peak experience of killing, the hunt loses its raison d’être. For now, it looks like fascists will have to prove their manhood in other places.