David Tetzlaff wrote this review of Blood on My Hands. It appeared in the June/July 2015 issue of Traditional Bowhunter Magazine and is reprinted with permission.
Blood
on My Hands
Gerard
H. Cox
$23.00
Hardcover/$15.25 Paperback/$9.99 Kindle Edition
An acquaintance
of this reviewer is employed by the Disney entertainment empire and she, not
surprisingly, takes deep offense to any contrary inferences directed at the
anthropomorphic themes of the Disney films. Yet much of society’s failure to
grasp the basic processes of the natural world is certainly realized in certain
overly sentimental movie making efforts. Such films often create a wide chasm
between man and his place in nature. Embraced by the anti-hunter crowd,
Disney’s Bambi is a mawkish example
of man as the invader of peaceful nature as if nature is not in itself violent.
Yet in other films, The Lion King for
example, it is acceptable for large carnivores to kill to eat, but not for man.
However, Cox wisely reminds the reader that man as hunter has for millennia
been entwined within the ecosystem, not divorced from it.
However, as some
cultures moved from hunter-gatherers to pastoralists a connection to the land
and animals was lost. Man carved and tilled the land and no longer lived in
communion with it. The blood on our hands no longer emanated from wild animals
we hunted. Man cleared his hunting grounds in order to raise domestic animals
thereby giving author Cox strong reason to state:
Pastoralists
and agriculturists were no longer part of the land: they lived apart from it.
They no longer were related to other animals.
Chapter Three of Blood on My Hands, “Putting Animals in
Their Place” may, at first glance, give the reader a false perception—that
animals are creatures to be demeaned, falling far down the rungs of a human
engineered ladder of self-defined superiority. Au contraire, Cox’s actual intent is to put proponents of the
animal rights agenda in their
rightful place. He takes on Tom Regan’s The
Case for Animal Rights and Regan’s attempt to define those that can morally
assume self-responsibility (moral agents) and those who cannot act on their own
behalf (moral patients) who may be animal or
human:
In
attempting to give animals rights and thus make them more like us, Regan has
paradoxically widened the gap between humans and other members of the animal kingdom.
Of course one of the
leading arguments from animal rightists is the suffering that humans inflict
upon animals, wild or domestic. Any ethical bowhunter who has ever wounded or
lost an animal surely must have contemplated the result of an errant arrow. Yet
is it society’s misdirected morals or our own conscience that seeks to harbor a
deep measure of guilt in this instance? Or perhaps (with risk of exonerating
the hunter from loosing a bad arrow) should we simply return to our historical
place as just another predator? Cox offers this sentiment:
But
I find something over-righteous in dwelling on animals’ suffering: it smacks
too much of a pornography of pain. In a state of nature, after all, predators
kill with no regard for the suffering of their prey. Mother Nature is serenely
unconcerned with sentience.
Author Cox is more than
adept in his effort to place man squarely in his rightful place in the natural order
of things, as predator or as potential
prey. He reminds the reader that we are part of the natural drama, not masters
of it. Cox astutely invokes Monster of
God author David Quammen whose words serve as a firm reminder to those
hunters who have shared the woods, here or abroad, with our large cats and
bears: “….alpha predators have kept us
acutely aware of our membership within the natural world. They’ve done it by
reminding us that to them we are just another flavor of meat." Predator
introductions have indeed stirred deep controversial feelings in the past
twenty years, from Florida to Montana. Yet one cannot deny that wild is that
much wilder knowing that the big
carnivores are out there assuming their role as alpha predators. In
recognition, and perhaps a profound dose of admiration, Cox states:
Our
newly informed self-knowledge appropriately takes the form of humility before
animals more awesome than we are.
Blood
on My Hands encourages the reader to consider that
perhaps we do not have to learn to hunt; instead we have to re-learn to hunt, a recovering of sorts of what is already stored deep in our DNA as
hunter-gatherers. Cox goes as far to say that “hunting is a highly imaginative activity, one perhaps more intuitive
than rational.” Humans do have an innate need to feel connected to nature.
Hence the phrase by some photographers, “I hunt with my camera.” Not quite. The
photographer is an observer. The hunter is a participant. Prior to his first true hunt, Cox spent the better
part of three decades in the outdoors as a non-hunter and easily acknowledges
that rather than being a participant he was “just another eco-tourist taking in the sights.”
Gerard Cox has
certainly done his research for this volume. The book closes with extensive
documentation of his footnotes, followed by a bibliography, and finally (which
more hunting authors should do) an index.
Two
decades after Ted Kerasote’s groundbreaking Bloodties
was published, Gerard Cox’s Blood on My Hands now comes along as another
much needed read for the thinking man’s hunter as well as non-hunters, who in
turn, must be made aware of man’s equitable place in the natural world. Cox
leaves his reader’s with these hopeful words:
Our planet is valuable beyond any meaningful
calculation. We evolved here. The earth was not made for us; we were made for
the earth. We have no other home.
