The long history of hunting

Hunting: The Pursuit That Shaped Humanity, Brian Fagan, Yale University Press, £25

On a misty January morning last year, I pedalled an old bicycle along a series of dusty tracks that criss-cross the wetlands of Keoladeo National Park in Bharatpur, eastern Rajasthan. The canals and dykes were completed in the 19th century and soon afterwards the freshwater marshes began to attract a large number of migratory birds, especially storks and rare cranes from Siberia. Nowadays, these flocks draw countless camouflage-clad twitchers and tourists, armed with binoculars and cameras.

Conservation is a relatively new consideration for the sanctuary, which was upgraded to a National Park only in 1981, giving it the highest protection status. Inside the park today, a reminder of a more bloodthirsty past comes in the form of a series of plaques, marking the dates of notable shoots by maharajas, lords and colonels, each one logging the number of guns and birds bagged. 

When Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India between 1898-1905, formally inaugurated the reserve in 1902 he did so with an organised duck shoot. His party shot a few hundred birds, but the record was held by Lord Linlithgow, another viceroy of India, who in 1938 downed 4,273 birds in a single day.

The writer, archaeologist and anthropologist Brian Fagan, who died last year at the age of 88, dedicates a chapter to the royal hunts of India in his posthumously published book Hunting: The Pursuit That Shaped Humanity. Over the centuries in India, hunting parties were organised and used as a way for nobles and rulers to showcase their power and privilege. Later, these hunts became an integral part of governance. The British Raj, keen to advance its commercial and political powers, embraced local hunting as a way of gaining control over unfamiliar places. As Fagan explains, British officials spent much of their time ‘testing the loyalty of local rulers, acquiring information, and expanding into unknown, often hostile areas’. Shikar (Bengali for hunting) parties were useful events for addressing political grievances and gaining intelligence. It was also an opportunity for the British to mingle ‘with local leaders, eating and sleeping among them and having endless opportunities for low-key conversations that quietly smoothed over controversies’.

Before the book goes into detail on hunting as royal spectacle – as well as conservation and modern controversies – Fagan, who was professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of California and not himself a hunter, delves into the earliest human hunting techniques. 

Archaic human hunts required far closer contact with prey than shooting it with a rifle. Neanderthal hunting weapons were ‘sharp and lethal, but their effectiveness depended on stalking’ and close-quarters killing. Humans also scavenged the carcasses of animals that other predators had already killed.

Fagan describes how ancestral humans in Africa would wait up in trees for lions to be done with an antelope so that they could safely descend to feast on the ribs and marrow. Another memorable picture he paints is that of Ice Age wallaby hunters in Tasmania as early as 35,000 years ago, when much of their landscape was open tundra and grassland. And he explains how early indigenous Australians, when taking part in ‘food-getting practices’, would use hunting dogs to run down marsupials, which they then ‘dispatched with wooden clubs’.

Later, when domesticated animals assumed a more central role in human society, humans had opportunities to live alongside them with care. But that is not what happened. Instead, Fagan writes, the relationship became ‘often crueler and more exploitative.’

Fagan’s investigations into the battles between hunters and conservationists are enlightening, and demonstrate how the two sometimes meet in the middle and converge. A photograph in the book shows Theodore Roosevelt, for example, dressed as a deer hunter in 1885, yet he was also a leading force in the founding of conservation societies in the United States. Roosevelt is a household name, and a good place to start, but more attention is given to a wildlife conservationist who worked less in the limelight, George Bird Grinnell (1849-1938). An anthropologist, historian, naturalist and, above all, a writer and journalist, Grinnell was horrified by the suffering and slaughter of game by commercial hunters, especially buffalo, at all seasons, with no regard to age or sex. Grinnell edited an influential magazine, Forest and Stream, from 1880 to 1911, and among his achievements was that he headed a successful campaign to outlaw the use of dogs and lights for hunting deer. He was also deeply involved in preventing the construction of a railroad through Yellowstone. Grinnell spent many years studying the natural history of the North American Plains, during which he witnessed the last great Pawnee (the prominent indigenous people of the Great Plains) buffalo hunt in 1856, ‘when 1,000 horsemen killed 1,000 buffalo in a day, encircling them as they scattered for ease of butchering – the women’s task’.

Women, though, are not sidelined or seen as passive hunters in Fagan’s book. They are prominent throughout and are sometimes seen as drivers of hunting. He reminds us that the Greek historian, soldier and philosopher, Xenophon, who in the fourth century BC maintained a hunting ground near Sparta in the Peloponnese, believed that women who hunted had the blessing of the goddess Artemis. 

In his chapter Parks, Plumes, and Pigeons, Fagan turns his attention to military wives (‘who took up hunting on the frontier to pass the time’) and milliners, and the ‘Plume Wars’ that took place during the late 19th century. Women were the major consumers of bird feathers because this was a time when colourful feathers of wild birds, known as aigrettes to milliners, developed into a multimillion-dollar trade in exotic feathers. Elaborate hats ‘added to a woman’s height and were considered both elegant and a dignified finishing touch… This millinery resulted in the slaughter of about five million birds annually, everything from ducks and egrets to larks – about 50 US species’. Fagan describes how the hunters destroyed entire rookeries, leaving eggs and chicks to predators. The slaughtered birds were stripped of their feathers, their carcasses left to decay. Things shifted with the arrival of the anti-plume movement, and the outbreak of the First World War, which brought with it more sombre fashions. Unsurprisingly, birds were eventually recognised, too, as a means for controlling insect pests, to the benefit of both human health and agriculture, such as when the Plains suffered from major grasshopper outbreaks.

Fagan’s stance – in this, the last major volume before his death – against the more mindless aspects of hunting is apparent and he pulls no punches, especially when discussing the hunting of big game, rampant since the 19th century: ‘When I see these heads today, the prey’s staring eyes make me feel as if I owe them an apology on behalf of humanity.’ On trophy hunting in particular, he writes: ‘a wealthy person’s pursuit, generally for those who are enthusiastic about displaying their machismo… Many trophy-hunting organisations claim that they are engaged in long-term conservation of game stocks. This is, of course, nonsense. They are hunting animals in captivity, or with restricted movement.’

His respect for wildlife and the natural world, is apparent even on the book’s opening page, where he includes a quote from William Hornaday, founder of the American conservation movement and the first director of the New York Zoological Park, known today as the Bronx Zoo: ‘One quail on a fence is worth more to the world than ten in a bag.’ Nowadays, this is a sentiment hard to argue with.