Psychological Transference, Hunting and Animal Rights
The reaction to use of animals is often one that involves psychological transference. There can be good motivation about the issue on either side, but everyone should examine the possibilities for delusion.
It is no coincedence that antihunting and vegetarianism matches up with modern culture’s nervousness about itself in general. And if those who were either pro or con to AR were to fall on the other side of any of the dozen ways in which they are in cahoots with the modern mentality, then their interest would drop to near zero.
One test of the limited truth of extreme AR positions (either for or against) is that country and primitive people don’t ever hold to them–except occasionally and for religious reasons.
To the extent your own situation might be biased or influenced is the extent to which you should moderate your stand.
If you can’t see it, here are a few of the influences on moderns which influence their stand on AR: the definition of skinny beauty, the macho mentality, the differentiation rebellious phase of life, the college experience, powerless and confused feelings, the extreme cruelty to each other, the class prejudice against rustics and the uneducated, the lack of contact with animals, with contact often being pets which are often used to mimic human friendship, the pride in expertise, incomprehension of the death/rebirth aspect of growth in life, and the greed exemplified in liability, trespassing and property rights concerns.
Hermann Hesse’s truism should be kept in mind that the society which most values the individual is always the one that is most automatized. Thus, if we totally banned use of animals (in the modern mode of problem-solving, which has yet to solve a problem), we may well find ourselves in a total factory way of life, with more cruelty, extinction and pollution coming from modes we didn’t anticipate or couldn’t even detect within the modern mental construct and certainly would be powerless to stop.
To be precise: you can have Amish people who humbly eat meat in reduced quantity just as they humbly consume everything they create in reduced quantity, and their consequent harmonious low impact on the earth. Or you can have globetrotting vegetarian AR activists who do not overtly use obvious animal products but who in every other way live a life of enormous consumption and poisonous impact on earth due to the huge factory-made complexity of nearly every element in their lives, and for whom, despite their best efforts, many aspects of their lives could be shown to be in complete chaos and disarray.
The problem is in how we use something, not that we use it.
