Hunting Supply
Hunting is one of the most ancient and time honored traditions of our species. We are listed at the top of any food chain that we are listed in, the ultimate predator. When compared to other predators, our natural capacities seem sadly lacking. Our closest cousins in the animal kingdom don’t exhibit the dominance we do. Apes, chimps, and monkeys exhibit our social behavior, but not our predatory behavior, so what is it about us that makes us so special?
We like to call it mental capacity, or ingenuity, creativity, inventiveness, or any one of a number of other adjectives. The fact of the matter is that we don’t have anything that sets us apart from any animal, except for our minds. Some scientists have taken that a step further and hypothesized that what sets us apart from the chimps is our ability to learn and manipulate language. Our linguistic capacity is unrivaled in any other species. The closest that animals come to us are Apes, who can be taught sign language but lack the mouth dexterity to form words the way we do, and Parrots who exhibit a limited vocabulary that has only recently been shown to be functional. If that sentence strikes you as odd, it should. It goes against conventional wisdom to believe that parrots actually understand the words they say; we even use the word ‘parroting’ to refer to someone who is saying the right words but doesn’t understand what they mean. But parrots can actually understand some (if not all) of the words they say.
Even so, apes and parrots have not picked up the ways of the hunt the way mankind has. Hunting and hunting supply have been a way of life for us for as far back as historians can trace our progress. The first societies were hunter-gatherers, which meant that they gathered what they could while following the roaming herds. A major turning point in our development came with the development of agriculture and the domestication of wild animals.
With domestication, we could raise a tame food source, rather than building up hunting supplies and chasing down wild game. The process was a more efficient use of time, and it brought with it a new direction for the progression of man.
That isn’t to say that with the advent of farming hunting suddenly ceased to be a necessary part of our lives. Farming requires land, and not just any land, but land fit for crops and grazing. It also requires the efforts of more than 1 person to successfully run a farm of any decent size, a fact that is no less true today than it was thousands of years ago. So hunters would still go out and hunt.
Over time hunting shifted away from being a task undertaken out of necessity; and towards existence as a pleasurable pastime for individualists. By the time the American colonies were founded, hunting became a way to supplement the food supply of new settlements, and this practice followed the settlers as the moved west. The image of a lone hunter testing his mettle against the wilderness has become romanticized in American culture ever since this time. Somewhere between settling the frontier and modern life, hunting and hunting supply have found a niche in our culture as a release from everyday life and a reminder of a simpler time.