Across the country and around the world, people avidly engage in
the cultural practice of hunting. Children are taken on
rite-of-passage hunting trips, where relationships are cemented and
legacies are passed on from one generation to another. Meals are
prepared from hunted game, often consisting of regionally specific
dishes that reflect a community's heritage and character. Deer
antlers and bear skins are hung on living room walls, decorations
and relics of a hunter's most impressive kills. Only 5 percent of
Americans are hunters, but that group has a substantial presence in
the cultural consciousness. Hunting has spurred controversy in
recent years, inciting protest from animal rights activists and
lobbying from anti-cruelty demonstrators who denounce the custom.
But hunters have responded to such criticisms and the resulting
legislative censures with a significant argument in their defense
-- the claim that their practices are inextricably connected to a
cultural tradition. Further, they counter that they, as
representatives of the rural lifestyle, pioneer heritage, and
traditional American values, are the ones being victimized. Simon
J. Bronner investigates this debate in Killing Tradition: Inside
Hunting and Animal Rights Controversies. Through extensive research
and fieldwork, Bronner takes on the many questions raised by this
problematic subject: Does hunting promote violence toward humans as
well as animals? Is it an outdated activity, unnecessary in modern
times? Is the heritage of hunting worth preserving? Killing
Tradition looks at three case studies that are at the heart of
today's hunting debate. Bronner first examines the allegedly
barbaric rituals that take place at deer camps every late November
in rural America. He then analyzes the annual Labor Day pigeon
shoot of Hegins, Pennsylvania, which brings animal rights protests
to a fever pitch. Noting that these aren't simply American concerns
(and that the animal rights movement in America is linked to
British animal welfare protests), Bronner examines the rancor
surrounding the passage of Great Britain's Hunting Act of 2004 --
the most comprehensive and divisive anti-hunting legislation ever
enacted. The practice of hunting is sure to remain controversial,
as it continues to be touted and defended by its supporters and
condemned and opposed by its detractors. With Killing Tradition,
Bronner reflects on the social, psychological, and anthropological
issues of the debate, reevaluating notions of violence, cruelty,
abuse, and tradition as they have been constructed and contested in
the twenty-first century.
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