Ruminations on Modern Subsistence
The use of animals as food, clothing and shelter is popularly determined to be not ‘necessary’. But those who kill animals in the past or present for ‘subsistence’ are almost always respected for the humble, balanced, harmonious wholeness of their folkways.
This contrast raises important questions. First, the use of animals is not necessary only as it is replaced by the use of factories, which use, displace and kill animals. Second, necessity beyond sugar water and a prison cell is only part of a social construct. If anyone eats meat, it’s necessary subsistence unless they choose to do otherwise. Of course there may be more or fewer delusions involved.
Dividing people into groups where subsistence is OK for one but isn’t for another, requires accepting responsibility for the artificiality of the action. That is, if you put white fishing families into starvation, bankruptcy and exile because they can’t use gill nets while neighboring Indian families can, you need to accept proper responsibility for doing this. Subsistence today is just as important for a whitebread family living in the suburbs as it is for Indians of today or 300 years ago.
I don’t even think we can say that primitives are in a ‘no fault’ position regarding the moral issues involved. Eskimos could choose to move south and be vegetarians as readily as any Hindu, if it really was the right thing to do. And farming was known about hundreds of years ago, as well as the inner value of animals—and nomadic people chose to accept the ‘guilt’ of a hunting lifestyle rather than adopt farming practices.
Those in power who make rules and opinion about subsistence don’t often like to admit culpability, so there’s a risk of a cover-up of the real problem. Like everyone else involved, their own motivations are scarcely very clear.
Since there’s not enough fish and game for everyone to live on, we submit to bag limits, which is fine, but we moderns are pressured into believing that it’s immoral to take game unless we’re wearing certain colored clothing and use poles instead of nets or guns instead of traps.
Many times in history, where a group has acquired the power to effect social rules without due responsibility, admission, and limits, that group has quickly put many people on the subsistence of sugar water and prison cells—and even less.
The king used to throw the people off the land. The state will do it this time around, and it may well be the state fish and game division who ends up doing it to us on our own land. The game isn’t ours and in fact we aren’t hardly our own either. They’re in charge. And they’ll take it from here.
Whenever people who are being groomed for this kind of power face resistance from freedom-lovers they resent it.
Fanatics are easily blinded and taken advantage of by tyrants of all stripes, inner and outer.
[MORE…]
Subsistence Hunting and Fishing?
Is it only open, in general, to Native Americans?
Is there any increasing tolerance or diversity of hunting/fishing methods allowed in general?
I hunt/fish for the table. Not commercially. I’d like to improve my odds is all. It’s not a ‘lifestyle’. I’m not spending money on it. I don’t have all day. It’s probably why I incline toward trapping rather than hunting. I’m closer to a farmer of field’n’stream than a ‘dabbler’. Heck, I’m closer to an aborigine than a ‘sportsman’—I’ve always noticed how when they show the guns that primitive peoples use they look a lot like mine! –Duct-taped and wired-up singleshots, for the most part.
I suspect that states might vary widely on the topic.
Some states have subsistence permits or whatever, others might be simply are lax on regs/limits. I have no argument with any aspect of it per se. Limits are fine where needed. Regs are fine where needed.
I notice that as more ways of fishing and hunting come on board and get special seasons—and also as open areas become more crowded–that DIVERSITY is creeping into the picture. (Blackpowder and crossbows in hunting. Bowfishing in fishing.) How far will it go?
It seems like diverse modalities could be managed as well as any.
I have an interest in nets, traps, arrows, spears, trotlines, juglines, setlines.
(I’m personally always responsible in my food-gathering and would be no matter what modality I use. No wasteage or wounding.)
