Big Game Hunting In An Age Of Virtual Reality - Why Not Shoot To Kill?

Reed Reventlow had been a big game hunter until both Kenyan game laws and American public censure shut him down, but not before his trophy room was hung with bighorn sheep taken in the high Sierra, cougar and mountain lion from the Absaroka mountains, and leopards, cheetahs from the Serengeti. 

As a young man in India he and an Indian Army Colonel had hunted tigers in Assam and wild boar in the forests of Madhya Pradesh. He was proud of the fact that he had taken down big and small game in every continent, and his reputation as a fearless stalker and dead shot preceded him.  He was never one to use beaters to drive his prey into the open for an easy kill, and was as fearless as his native African guides whose forbears had tracked, stalked, and killed with arrows and spears. 

He was not interested in rhinoceros, although many of his mates said there was nothing like standing your ground before a massive charging two-ton brute and putting a bullet between his eyes at 50 meters.  He preferred big cats - somehow the affair seemed more equal, and fair play and equality were all part of the hunt. 

An American associate residing in Delhi who had gone to Manipur to hunt tiger; but the hunt was anything but fair. His Indian guides tethered a bleeding goat to a stake while the American sat in a high blind in a a mango tree, waited for the tiger to approach the goat, and then shot him. It galled and angered Reed to see the trophy - the head of a magnificent Bengal tiger shot from the treetops at close range. 

Hunting animals caused Reed no particular moral concern  There was no difference between a lion and a Texas longhorn or a chicken, slaughtered in the tens of thousands every day.  Higher order, intelligent animals like pigs, dogs, and monkeys were killed, grilled, and enjoyed in Africa, Asia, and the Americas without a hint of remorse. 

Animal rights activists cry foul, and say that sentience exists up and down the phylogenetic ladder, and that vegetarianism is the only moral option. If fish can feel pain when hooked, and that every fish from Johnny roaches to marlins suffer needlessly, then anglers are certainly cruel to their prey.

Gary Varner in his book “Which Animals Are Sentient” (2012) developed a list of criteria; and those animals which met all or most of them felt pain.  Fish met all the criteria (nociceptors, brain, nociceptors and brain linked, endogenous opioids, response to damaging stimuli similar to humans).

Sneddon  et al (2014) elaborated on Varner’s classification, dividing fish into different phylogenetic categories and adding more behavioral criteria.  According to their research, bony fish (the ones commonly caught by recreational and commercial fishermen), met all standards for pain.

Commercial fishermen might claim that netting of fish is painless; and while such techniques avoid spearing or hooking, those hundreds of bluefish, mackerel, or sardines flipping and flopping around on the deck of a trawler are actually going through the agonizing death throes of asphyxiation.

In other words there is no painless way of killing fish except by drugging them in fish farms.

Given this recent, extensive, and exhaustive research, one might well conclude that fish do indeed feel pain and if animal rights activists are right, then all fishing which causes pain should be stopped.

There is no real humane way for Aleuts to kill whales because no one harpoon thrust can be a coup de grace and no bullet always and unerringly finds its way into the animal’s cerebellum for a quick and painless death.  

Earlier tribal hunters on the African veldt wounded a wildebeest or gazelle and then tracked it for miles until, after hours, it died a painful death.  Only skilled and practiced hunters can bring down an elk or antelope with one deadly shot; but there are far more amateurs out there than professional marksmen, and thousands of animals, legally hunted, die bloody and painful deaths.

This killing-animals-for-food argument would have to hold for lobsters.  Throwing them into a pot of boiling water and watching them bang around the pot until dead would have to count.   Sushi lovers in Japan would have to forgo their passion for fresh sushi (slices taken from still live fish).

What about oysters? All oyster-lovers know that the way to tell if oysters are really fresh is if they twitch a bit when you squeeze lemon on them.  They have a nervous system and they respond, but they have no brain; so is feeling pain without making any sense of it still feeling pain?

All well and good say animal rights activists, but culling for food is different from killing for pleasure; but why exactly?  One animal is the same as every other regardless of end use, so shooting tigers and lions for trophies should have no moral opprobrium attached. 

Again animal activists object.  These beautiful creatures should remain in the wild for human beings to see, appreciate, and love.  A zoo, simply an inhumane, torturous way to preserve the life of formerly wild animals, is no answer. 

 

However, argued Reed, we have entered a new, radical, revolutionary period of human evolution.  Virtual reality and the eventual replacement of the 'real' by its computer-generated images will change human perception, experience, and ethics.  The technology is in its infancy, but when brain-computer interface is made possible, then the virtual world will become the real world.  There will be no difference in the two, and the participant will 'be' on the savannah with tigers, lions, and gazelles. 

There will be no need for actual wild game to roam the veldt and the African plains can be opened for more productive human activities - agriculture and cattle raising - and big game hunting.  The reason why poaching remains a problem in Tanzania is because poor Africans are hungry - park preserves have limited their well-being. 

Ahh, say naysayers, nothing will ever replace 'the real thing'; but the new technology will create the smell, the feel, the sound of a light breeze in the grass, the entire experience.  To deny this is simply whistlin' Dixie. 

Reed's big game hunting days are over.  Paying over a million dollars for the privilege of a 'cull', an organized, orchestrated hunt of an overpopulated prey, is not what hunting is all about.  Better to retire in a trophy room filled with good memories.  

Of course there were still plenty of deer, elk, antelope, and moose to shoot and few restrictions in the West, but that was but a diluted, uninteresting replacement for the real thing. 

As virtual reality becomes more advanced and accessible and especially when a seamless interface exists between mind and machine and the whole, vast, immeasurably rich environment of virtuality becomes ordinary, no one will bother going to game parks which will reopen for hunting  Reed would be an old man by that time, so hunting will be for his grandchildren - who, as often happens in families, might well find something else do in the new, changed world.