BY JOHN NASH

An open letter to John Thomas, President and publisher, Psychology Today.

Dear Mr Thomas,

On November 29, 2024, your esteemed publication, Psychology Today, published an article entitled “Trophy Hunting, Ageism, and the Loss of Animal Cultures” by Professor  Marc Bekoff Ph.D.

The article began with a quotation:

“Trophy hunting is leading to the extinction of a number of species. Scientific studies have demonstrated the links between trophy hunting and population declines. Yet exports of hunting trophies continue to increase. The annual lion-hunting quota is now equivalent to one-third of the males that can be hunted. For the good of conservation, the days of the ‘Great White Hunter’ should be brought to a close. —Jane Goodall”

I have no doubt that Dame Goodall’s statement was accurately reproduced by the author, fulfilling your editorial promise that “expert author content is fact checked for accuracy”.  Unfortunately, however, accurately reported or not, Dame Goodall’s statement itself is not, to put it politely, an accurate representation of either physical or scientific reality.  Elsewhere, Professor Bekoff is described as “cofounder of the Jane Goodall Institute of Ethologists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals” and therefore, I suspect, is hardly neutral – besides, he writes widely on the subject of animal rights.

I offer, by way of comparison and balance, the following statement from Professor Adam Hart, a specialist in Southern Africa conservation matters:

“No hunted species is threatened by trophy hunting. In fact, trophy hunting is instrumental in protecting the habitat and their species in many cases.”

In addition, may I offer you the following joint statement from Semcer and Child – Catherine Semcer is a member of the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCru) at the University of Oxford, pursuing a DPhil in Biology, research fellow with the African Wildlife Economy Institute at Stellenbosch University in South Africa and chair-elect of The Wildlife Society’s International Wildlife Management Working Group. Professor Brian Child is an associate professor in the Department of Geography and the Center for African Studies at the University of Florida who spent twelve years working in Africa for Zimbabwe’s Department of National Parks and Wildlife Management. They say:

“The first (misinformation) is the idea that trophy hunting is driving species to extinction. Decades of published, scientific research and field experience show this is demonstrably false. There is not, as far as we can tell, a single species where trophy hunting is listed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Red List as a key threat driving it to extinction”.

After such a start, the remainder of Professor Bekoff’s article requires a large pinch of salt.

At best, you failed to footnote that the peg upon which the article hangs is questionable and that the article is sourced from an ideological animal rights based source. You failed to point out that trophy hunting is a highly contentious and fiercely debated issue, diametrically split into academic deontological ethics on one side and pragmatic field ethics on the other.  The article is very subjective and, together with similar works in the populist genre such as “Trophy Hunting: A Psychological Perspective” by psychologist  Professor Geoffrey Beattie, it is hardly surprising that some critics suggest psychology is losing credibility among the general public.

The great sadness is that by jumping on the civilian political bandwagon of animal rights, Professor Bekoff and others like him hide a whole fascinating world of wider human evolutionary psychology, a much bigger, biologically informed approach that combines evolutionary biology with human psychology, rather than less rigorous modern civilian emotion. 

In brief, hunting’s larger picture is one that is less based on arguments about determinism but reflects existential civilisation itself.  It is a simple fact that nature has no rules or ethics or morals –  living things in the wild either survive long enough to reproduce or they don’t.  Nature doesn’t care.  Long ago, to protect ourselves from the violent competition of nature and the environment, we humans invented a notional cave to protect ourselves.  Safe inside our “cave”, we were better able to nurture our kind and reproduce.  We call that cave human civilisation.  Inside, we evolved rules based on “Sharing and fair exchange without violence”, a first rule that probably sprang originally from instinctive mammalian nurture, but then evolved as civilisation evolved and is now our huge body of human ethics, morals and rights. (John Nash & Dominic Wightman ‘Dear Townies’, Western Publishing 2024)

But our ethics, morals and rights are still the rules inside our human cave of civilisation.  Outside, in nature, there are no rules other than those of evolution, a supremely elegant, simple, adaptive and self-regulating system with unquestionable provenance and scientific evidence.

We humans have no animal, vegetable or mineral resources in our cave, so we send people out into nature, to compete where there are no rules in order to win those resources, take them into ownership for us, and bring them back to the cave.  They are hunters, and they set aside their indoor human ethics and morals when they go outside to become objective predators in nature. Predators are normal in nature.  When human predators return home, they become civilised again indoors to better utilise and distribute the resources, a transition far more worthy of psychological research.  Today, hunters have also evolved into civilisation’s primary industries, but their function and calling remain the same.

The lack of rules is why it is not “cruel” when a lion kills an antelope – it is merely evolution at work. “Cruel” is a judgement made by comparison with human indoor rules, not with evolution in outside nature.  Similarly, when a human predator kills an antelope or even flattens a whole ecosystem in order to plant carrots or build a university, it is predation, not cruelty.  Predation is perfectly normal in “outside” nature, where human morals, ethics and sentience are all irrelevant.

Human rights are the inalienable rights we humans have from birth because we are born inside the human cave.  Animals, born outside in nature, have no rights.  Animal rights are an abstract concept that does not exist outside human minds and laws.  Rights are indoor human things, separated from nature by civilisation itself.

Of course, we humans are a kindly, nurturing species, so we find animal welfare a comforting concept and desirable behaviour.  But animal welfare is a gift we give to animals, not something they own.  Animal welfare varies with circumstance – upon our degree of need for the removal, meat or territory of the animal in question and upon culture or the availability of alternatives. Welfare varies upon whether an animal is a pest, a food animal, an assistance animal, a beast of burden, a pet or a companion.  Animal welfare is higher in rich societies than in poor societies and higher in post industrial service economies than in  hunter-gatherer societies because animal welfare is really a matter of what we can afford to give.

The inside/outside cave metaphor also explains why animals are “things”, not “persons” in every legal jurisdiction in the world.  We are obliged to use animals, their derivatives and their environment as resources and commodities and have been for as long as we have been humans.  We could not exist without doing so.   

It means that one cannot measure “outdoor” human hunting by means of “indoor” civilian ethics and morals. That is the fundamental mistake of many modern obligate civilians, particularly urbanites in the so-called “First World” – people who live a cosseted life inside civilisation’s cave, eating supermarket food and wearing synthetic clothes, totally cut off from nature and predation for so long that they have to imagine it, much like Plato’s celebrated cave dwellers and their flickering fire.

Without balance, Psychology Today appears to judge all “outdoor” matters through the lens of “indoor”civilised standards. In doing so, it is like a blind man standing before a Michelangelo, missing most of it.  It sees hunters unjustly as neurodivergent, and looks at nature, hunting activity and wild animals through its civilised, civilian eyes, unable to make any useful, objective observations. It is left only with emotions – witness the rather absurd “Great White Hunter” insult in Dame Goodall’s quoted statement that began Professor Bekoff’s article. Today, hunters of all races are welcomed in the hunting nations of Africa and they pay for the animals they hunt. They pay well, take home the inedible bits that Africans throw away, and the animals are subsequently eaten – protein, especially organic, free-range protein, is far too precious to waste. Both sides win and wild animals prosper in these countries because they have value above cattle. In the real world, Great White Hunters died with Queen Victoria. You insult hunters and the Africans who cater for them.

Consider, too, her nonsensical statement, “ The annual lion-hunting quota is now equivalent to one-third of the males that can be hunted”.  In South Africa, of the hundreds of lions legally hunted each year, only half a dozen or so are wild-born, and they are invariably off-reserve or cross-border pests, effectively lions on destruction permits because they are a danger to cattle or people and destined to be shot anyway. Most hunts are of farmed lions, raised by lion farmers to be sold as pets, for petting farms, to zoos, for restocking, for release and hunting as ferals, or to satisfy the foreign derivatives market. It is no different to any other stock farming enterprise, albeit with a robust rural African flavour perhaps a little too strong for urban civilian palates.  Her statement is again simply counterfactual.

I have no wish to take anything away from Dame Goodall’s important work on chimpanzees, but she is also an animal rights activist, like Professor Bekoff, with a falsely constructed, particularly civilian, anthropomorphic viewpoint.  Even your own publication recognises the danger. In answer to the question, “Can anthropomorphism cause misunderstandings?” You say,  “Yes. Non-human animals share many mental faculties with humans. But the tendency to read animals based on human ways of thinking and behaving could lead people to exaggerate the similarities and misunderstand the meaning of animal behaviour—or even project their own personality characteristics onto animals”.  Despite your assurance that “Psychology Today is devoted exclusively to everybody’s favourite subject: Ourselves”, there is still a real world outside – the world of animal resources and the hunters who predate them.

Evolution walks on two legs – (a) survive long enough to (b) reproduce.  At their most basic, these two legs provide the historical (non-academic) world idea that there are masculine and feminine principles at work – the “outside” masculine principal to protect and provide and the “inside” feminine principle to nurture and reproduce – the caveman metaphor, Darwin with a smile. The two principles are as entirely equal, opposite and complementary in operation as two halves of a wheel.  Hunting is the performance, passion and celebration of the masculine principle, the indispensable and honourable supply side of human civilisation. It is not something aberrant.

In concentrating negatively on the difference whilst overlooking the equal and complementary reality, Professor Bekoff’s pragmatic half is missing. It is perhaps time for psychology itself to become more honest, to get outdoors a bit, breathe a little fresh air, drop the unjust discrimination and try to make itself whole again. 

Speak to hunters – you might also learn something useful about humans.

J.N.

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John Nash grew up in West Cornwall and was a £10 pom to Johannesburg in the early 1960’s. He started well in construction project management, mainly high-rise buildings but it wasn’t really Africa, so he went bush, prospecting and trading around the murkier bits of the bottom half of the continent. Now retired back in Cornwall among all the other evil old pirates. His interests are still sustainable resources, wildlife management and the utilitarian needs of rural Africa. John is the co-author of Dear Townies with the Editor.