This article is from the source 'guardian' and was first published or seen on . It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.

You can find the current article at its original source at http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/04/cruel-hunting-images-big-game-bloodsport-taboo

The article has changed 2 times. There is an RSS feed of changes available.

Version 0 Version 1
Modern hunting images are morally repugnant. Better to look away Modern hunting images are morally repugnant. Better to look away
(about 1 hour later)
Everyone is complicit in a bloodsport when it comes to getting angry about images of hunters posing with slaughtered animals. That bloodsport is the pursuit of outrage, the greatest game of all in the digital age. It is so thrilling to close in on your first really horrifying image of wanton cruelty to animals, and after that you want another. The death of Cecil the lion has unleashed a riotous thirst for images of slaughter that is currently being satiated, or more likely aroused further, by a woman posing beside a “dangerous” giraffe she bravely killed.Everyone is complicit in a bloodsport when it comes to getting angry about images of hunters posing with slaughtered animals. That bloodsport is the pursuit of outrage, the greatest game of all in the digital age. It is so thrilling to close in on your first really horrifying image of wanton cruelty to animals, and after that you want another. The death of Cecil the lion has unleashed a riotous thirst for images of slaughter that is currently being satiated, or more likely aroused further, by a woman posing beside a “dangerous” giraffe she bravely killed.
Related: The hunter who killed Cecil the lion doesn’t deserve our empathy | Rose George
It is a tainted sport, this hunt for something to condemn, because both sides are drawn to the shock of it. Clearly, in today’s world, someone who goes looking for giraffes to shoot and then poses proudly beside the carcass of one of the most beautiful animals on earth is not attempting to win a popularity contest. There’s a manifest appetite here to disgust and shock, a sadomasochistic pursuit of the monster in oneself. If, as Tony Blair has claimed, many of the values of the left have won in the 21st century, a general repugnance for hunting and hunters is certainly one of them. All over the world, bloodsports have become the preserve of self-consciously unpleasant rich people who take pleasure in the taboo.It is a tainted sport, this hunt for something to condemn, because both sides are drawn to the shock of it. Clearly, in today’s world, someone who goes looking for giraffes to shoot and then poses proudly beside the carcass of one of the most beautiful animals on earth is not attempting to win a popularity contest. There’s a manifest appetite here to disgust and shock, a sadomasochistic pursuit of the monster in oneself. If, as Tony Blair has claimed, many of the values of the left have won in the 21st century, a general repugnance for hunting and hunters is certainly one of them. All over the world, bloodsports have become the preserve of self-consciously unpleasant rich people who take pleasure in the taboo.
We would be better off ignoring these people. To feast on our outrage at something as obviously grotesque as a trophy picture of a giraffe is to give hunters the notoriety they so plainly crave. The moral repulsiveness is a part of modern hunting.We would be better off ignoring these people. To feast on our outrage at something as obviously grotesque as a trophy picture of a giraffe is to give hunters the notoriety they so plainly crave. The moral repulsiveness is a part of modern hunting.
Anger about such acts and horror at the glorifying images misses something more significant. Surely the real question is why modern hunting produces such cruel images. They are far nastier than most hunting scenes in the art of the past. What has changed?Anger about such acts and horror at the glorifying images misses something more significant. Surely the real question is why modern hunting produces such cruel images. They are far nastier than most hunting scenes in the art of the past. What has changed?
But in refusing to see anything human in bloodsports perhaps we who hate hunting have made it more evil?
Sabrina Corgatelli may vaguely think that by posing triumphantly beside a murdered giraffe she is emulating the hunters of the past, who posed in similar triumph for oil paintings. Many of her critics may assume the same. Yet this is not so. There is not a great tradition of such brutal art (except, perhaps, for the British Museum’s ancient Assyrian reliefs of a lion hunt that makes Cecil the lion’s death look gentle). Hunting has been ritualised throughout human history and is widely represented in art but it has often been seen in a more ambiguous and even sensitive way. The 18th-century artist George Stubbs for instance created an extraordinary monument to English aristocratic hunting in his painting The Grosvenor Hunt. This painful scene of the hounds closing in shows hunting not as simple fun but a bloody, tragic drama. And Stubbs was not alone in seeing the dark side of the hunt. Velazquez in his great painting Philip IV Hunting Wild Boar reveals with cool irony the strangeness of a royal ritual for which boar were captured and enclosed in a fenced-off arena to be speared by the king. In another disconcerting work he portrays a stag on the Spanish royal land, giving dignity to a beast as it waits to be hunted.Sabrina Corgatelli may vaguely think that by posing triumphantly beside a murdered giraffe she is emulating the hunters of the past, who posed in similar triumph for oil paintings. Many of her critics may assume the same. Yet this is not so. There is not a great tradition of such brutal art (except, perhaps, for the British Museum’s ancient Assyrian reliefs of a lion hunt that makes Cecil the lion’s death look gentle). Hunting has been ritualised throughout human history and is widely represented in art but it has often been seen in a more ambiguous and even sensitive way. The 18th-century artist George Stubbs for instance created an extraordinary monument to English aristocratic hunting in his painting The Grosvenor Hunt. This painful scene of the hounds closing in shows hunting not as simple fun but a bloody, tragic drama. And Stubbs was not alone in seeing the dark side of the hunt. Velazquez in his great painting Philip IV Hunting Wild Boar reveals with cool irony the strangeness of a royal ritual for which boar were captured and enclosed in a fenced-off arena to be speared by the king. In another disconcerting work he portrays a stag on the Spanish royal land, giving dignity to a beast as it waits to be hunted.
It would be tempting to see these as “anti-hunting” works of art but Velazquez painted his sublime stag for the Spanish royal hunting lodge. The truth seems to be that in the past, in times when no one questioned the existence of hunting, the hunters themselves were able to respect and love their prey, and even to acknowledge guilt. The medieval legend of St Eustace tells of a hunter who saw Christ crucified between the antlers of a stag: in Pisanello’s 15th-century painting of this vision, animals fill the forest in a loving image of the natural world.It would be tempting to see these as “anti-hunting” works of art but Velazquez painted his sublime stag for the Spanish royal hunting lodge. The truth seems to be that in the past, in times when no one questioned the existence of hunting, the hunters themselves were able to respect and love their prey, and even to acknowledge guilt. The medieval legend of St Eustace tells of a hunter who saw Christ crucified between the antlers of a stag: in Pisanello’s 15th-century painting of this vision, animals fill the forest in a loving image of the natural world.
Related: The hunter who killed Cecil the lion doesn’t deserve our empathy | Rose George
Is it perhaps the very contempt for hunting that is so widespread today that has shorn the pastime of the range of emotions such paintings reveal? Once hunters could admit the ambiguity of what they did – they even imagined it as a crucifixion. There was a sense of pathos. Today’s trophy photos look by comparison utterly psychopathic.Is it perhaps the very contempt for hunting that is so widespread today that has shorn the pastime of the range of emotions such paintings reveal? Once hunters could admit the ambiguity of what they did – they even imagined it as a crucifixion. There was a sense of pathos. Today’s trophy photos look by comparison utterly psychopathic.
But in refusing to see anything human in bloodsports, or at least to acknowledge their long place in history, perhaps we who hate hunting have made it more evil. We call it cruel so it becomes crueller. We pour out our revulsion online and by doing so invite and goad the most twisted and callous characters to further shock our delicate sensibilities.But in refusing to see anything human in bloodsports, or at least to acknowledge their long place in history, perhaps we who hate hunting have made it more evil. We call it cruel so it becomes crueller. We pour out our revulsion online and by doing so invite and goad the most twisted and callous characters to further shock our delicate sensibilities.
Better to look away, or to reclaim hunting as a strange and ambiguous dramatisation of humanity’s complex relationship with nature, the search for the cross in the forest.Better to look away, or to reclaim hunting as a strange and ambiguous dramatisation of humanity’s complex relationship with nature, the search for the cross in the forest.