On Tuesday, 27 Sept. 1994, Gene Hunn wrote:
We recognize the pig's pain because it is expressed in ways very similar
to our own way of expressing pain; plants may feel pain, say as the
chainsaw rips into their cambium layers... or as their fruits (plant
fetuses?) are plucked from their branches... who knows? We are not
capable (presently) of reading whatever signals plants might being giving
off as expressions of distress at having their lives so rudely
interrupted. It has been shown that alder trees produce airborn
chemicals that communicate to nearby alders the presence of parasitic
tent caterpillars, which causes uninfected trees to produce more of a
chemical distasteful to the parasites. It does not seem too long a
stretch to imagine that plants' "scream" chemically when their lives are
threatened.
On Mon, 26 Sep 1994, Brian A. Luke wrote:
>
> >
> > The difference between a pig and a carrot is in part due to the fact that
> > we judge the pig more like us and therefore more deserving of moral
> > consideration as a sort of quasi-human.
>
> When a pig thrashes around in pain, and I react against it, I'm not
> thinking "oh, this is horrible because the pig is LIKE ME," I'm
> thinking "oh, this is horrible because the pig is suffering."
>
> >
> > As for hunting never having played an essential dietary role, consider
> > arctic and sub-arctic peoples. Agriculture at such high latitudes is
> > impossible without very large inputs of fossil fuel energy that are
> > ultimately more ecologically destructive than hunting. Before you
> > dismiss Inuit/Eskimo and sub-Arctic Indian hunters as concerned only with
> > trophies, consider what they have to say. For example, read Richard K.
> > Nelson's _Make Prayers to the Raven_.
> >
>
> To clarify my suggestions: I believe that NON-indigenous north
> american hunters are all trophy hunters. There are indigenous
> peoples who must hunt to subsist, such as Inuits, so they are not AT
> THE PRESENT trophy hunters. But, if we consider Jim Mason's
> suggestion, it is possible that they only got into the ecological
> niche they presently occupy (which requires hunting) because of male
> trophy hunting. That is, long ago men started hunting large mammals
> for status, not for nutrition. Then they gradually followed the
> herds northward until it became necessary, in their new locale, to
> hunt for subsistence. In this sense hunting and meat-eating may be
> at root male womb envy.
>
> Brian Luke
> University of Dayton
Jim Mason's theory sounds pretty far out to me. Human hunting and/or
scavenging of meat has been shown to be as old as our species. To
attribute arctic hunters to some latter day migration following the
trophies in a desperate effort to assuage male feeling of womb envy seems
to be a case of "over theorizing." True, the "hunting huypothesis" has
involved a serious distortion and exaggeration of the importance of
hunting in human evolution and in the economies of human
hunter-gatherer-fisher peoples, but what seems to me a reasonable
explanation for it is the notion that a peculiarly human reproductive
strategy involves a division of labor based on sex (women typically
gather mostly plant foods, men typically devote most of their harvesting
energies to hunting large and medium sized animals) with obligate sharing
of the product within families and communities. Certain birds exhibit a
similar strategy, especially hawks, in which the female is the larger,
the male the smaller, so that each concentrates on different sized prey,
the male ranging more widely and bringing smaller prey items more
frequently back to the incubating female, the female making occasional
forays for larger prey near the nest. Such a system in which both
parents contribute substantially to rearing the young is rare among
mammals but seems the essence of the human hunting-gathering scheme. It
avoids males and females competing with each other for the same food
sources, to the disadvantage of their young. In short, human hunting is
part of a COOPERATIVE effort by males and females to rear their young,
not a question of females and males COMPETING to see which is the most
important.
Gene Hunn.> > >
