Elites tried to monopolize hunting

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/when-elites-tried-to-monopolize-hunting/

by diodorus • 4 years ago

108 49 4 years ago

thereader.mitpress.mit.edu

jakear• 4 years ago

They succeeded in Europe, no? Any public land hunters over there?

collegeburner• 4 years ago

i mean that by itself is not conclusive. in Texas it's almost all private hunting land but it's plenty egalitarian.

MandieD• 4 years ago

It’s become less egalitarian over my lifetime. When I was a kid, my working class dad and a few buddies would rent a deer lease each year, doing maintenance work in the summer and fall, then going out over the weekend in season. These deer leases were usually part of a ranch.

They lost their last one because the heirs were uninterested in ranching and sold to someone much wealthier in Dallas who wanted it just for hunting. They weren’t able to find a similar situation because ranches were getting bought up by other wealthier hunters.

paganel• 4 years ago

Any public land hunters over there?

France is an infamous example.

Over here in Romania there are still pockets of "common people" going hunting, but they're on their way out, it has slowly become a rich person activity.

weberer• 4 years ago

In Finland you can hunt wherever you want, even on someone else's property. It's called "everyman's rights".

EdwardDiego3• 4 years ago

NZ is filled with mammals (and a few fish) that have a deleterious impact on native flora and fauna because the predominantly UK derived colonists wanted to build a more egalitarian society, and apparently the restriction of hunting or fishing for certain species to the wealthy in the UK was a key part of that.

So we got red deer, fallow deer, whitetail deer, samba deer, rusa deer, sika deer, chamois, tahr, salmon and trout.

And indeed, hunting them on public land is very egalitarian indeed, as is fishing for them - no such thing as a private river, although some landowners are attempting to privatise prime trout rivers by stealth.

sidewndr46• 4 years ago

How does one go about privatizing a river? Does NZ not have laws around access to navigable waterways?

aliqot2• 4 years ago

install a large weir and call it a trout preservation area.

EdwardDiego3• 4 years ago

Well, we have bugger all navigable waterways, even if a Kiwi did invent the modern jet-boat to increase the potential to navigate our braided rivers (in a rather small boat). [0]

In terms of rights to access rivers, it's complicated. There's the myth of the Queen's Chain [1], which has a kernel of truth in it, in very specific circumstances, but people had assumed it was far more broad reaching than it is.

And then there's the Ad Medium Filum Aquae (AMF) concept from English common law:

By the common law, ownership of land adjoining a watercourse, which is not owned by the Crown, gives rise to the presumption that title extends to the middle line. It is a rebuttable presumption - that is, evidence to rebut (disprove) the presumption is always admissible.

That said, a lot of the riverbeds and banks of the larger (by our standards) rivers are owned by regional councils - we run three levels of government, central, regional, and local, and regional is the most focused on water allocations and flood management, so giving them ownership of the riverbeds and floodbanks around flood-prone rivers is a no-brainer - so AMF doesn't come up too often, but if you hunt for rabbits or similar, which love the braided riverbeds, then knowing where AMF applies and doesn't is vital to not meeting a grumpy farmer.

Unlike (what I've been told about) the UK, no-one can actually own the fishing rights to a river, nor the fish in the river. But you can own the land neighbouring it.

And yeah, that's how you privatise a river - buy land on both sides of the river from farmers who had previously reached an agreement with the Department of Conservation or similar to allow angler access via specified routes, and then rescind that access.

Of course, you can claim that you're not privatising the river because _technically_ the prime trout fishing stretch that your land now surrounds can be accessed via a hike upstream from Crown land that only takes 3 days one way.

I mean technically, yes, it's not privatised, but realistically, it pretty much is.

That said, the Crown is getting smarter about this, and is focusing more on permanent easements instead of relying on the goodwill of land owners - especially when rich American celebrities start buying up large high country farms, they tend to be rather... ...private, and thus averse to the public continuing to cross their land.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Hamilton_(engineer)#Jet_b...

[1] https://www.herengaanuku.govt.nz/knowledge/rivers-lakes-and-...

lambertsimnel• 4 years ago

How does one go about privatizing a river?

In England, I think it can be a matter of buying the land either side of the river, but whether its owner controls navigation seems to be contested.

The UK Environment Agency says watercourses (including rivers) in England can be privately owned. [0]

British Canoeing seems to say that access to most navigable waterways in England is contested, including as trespass: "Of the 42,700 miles of inland waterways in England, only 1,400 miles can be paddled uncontested - that is a mere 4% of what is available. Paddlers are subject to challenge or dispute over their right to be on the water. ...If you are paddling on a river, lake or other waters where there is a disputed public right of navigation, then it could be alleged you may be trespassing." [1]

I think watercourses are a proper subset of waterways, with lakes being an example of waterways that aren't watercourses.

The right of owners to control fishing in England (and Wales) seems not to be contested in the way navigation is: "While the national rod licence gives a licence to fish anywhere in England and Wales, you might still need permission from the riparian owner to fish from her/his stretch of the river bank. The owner of the land adjoining one side of a natural river or stream owns the exclusive fishing rights (called, riparian rights) on her or his side of the bank. These rights extend up to the middle of the water. They can be leased or sold as separate property right (apart from ownership of the land itself). So, the owner does not necessarily have the right to fish from her/his side of the bank. An owner whose land adjoins a pond or lake has similar rights which extend as far as the middle of the water unless it encircles the pond or lake." [2]

[0] https://www.gov.uk/guidance/owning-a-watercourse

[1] https://www.britishcanoeing.org.uk/go-canoeing/access-and-en...

[2] https://www.inbrief.co.uk/sports-law/uk-fishing-rights/

captainoats• 4 years ago

Always been fascinating to me as an American to see how hunting and shooting gear is marketed and sold in Europe. It’s closer to luxury goods retail than the American experience where it’s all generally treated as sporting equipment no matter if it’s at a “luxury” price point.

aliqot2• 4 years ago

You can buy rifles and ammo in the same stores as milk and eggs here.

wil421• 4 years ago

The same country stores will also process your deer for you. Unless you mean Walmart.

bitwize• 4 years ago

Some things should be priced out of everybody getting to have one. Like cars.

chayesfss6• 4 years ago

according to you, I like cheap ammo, mostly .22 so I can practice. I do not have time (haven't) to even get into reloading. And who cares about the price or how hard it is. You know how easy it is to get a crossbow and spikes? Do you think you need a special license for that? More deadly, way more quiet, untraceable, I mean you can go on yet we talk about climate change now? Stay on point please

NullPrefix• 4 years ago

Would you say the same about houses instead of pods?

xyzzyz4• 4 years ago

This is not surprising at all. For most of our history, most humans societies were only barely able to feed themselves. All growth in food supply was quickly matched by population growth. The population densities of hunter-gatherer societies were orders of magnitude lower than that of prehistoric agriculturalist, which resulted in latter displacing the former, and replacing their hunting grounds with farms and pastures.

This happened in the blink of an eye: in the area of modern Germany, anatomically modern human hunter gatherers have showed up something like 45-50 000 years ago, but after early European farmers have arrived from the southeast 7500 years ago, they entirely displaced the hunter gatherers in just 2000 years, despite the former having 42 000 years of head start (which is 7 times longer than the entire recorder history).

The reason is simple: using agriculture, you can have much more humans occupy the same area. You quickly get population counts that are completely impossible to sustain by hunting. If you nevertheless allow them to hunt, they will very quickly hunt the animal population to extinction, especially when most of the land is already used for cultivation instead of being dedicated for wildlife. We know this, because this happened on multiple occasions. Human arrivals to Australia have hunted most of its megafauna species to extinction. Same happened when humans arrived to Americas.

Point is, if you allow everyone to hunt, and hunters are numerous and adept, soon nobody is able to hunt, because there is nothing left to hunt. This is also happening today, with overfishing.

LeftHandPath2• 4 years ago

Small counter-point: The theory that the Clovis people hunted megafauna to extinction has been challenged a lot by recent research. It looks like North-American megafauna were actually quite likely driven extinct by changes to the climate. Analysis of the prevalence of fungal spores from large herbivore dung suggests that megafauna began going extinct in the northeastern parts of North America, and did so long before the Clovis people - who arrived from the west - would've been there to affect them.

Here's a very well-written article from 2020, from the respected D. Meltzer, that breaks down the evidence really concisely and cites most of the other literature I would point to: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2015032117

All of that said, I agree with and want to add to your main point. We did see commercial hunting result in exactly the conditions you described in early American history. Actually, famous commercial hunters like Boone recognized that we were quickly losing the prevalence of wildlife (although it is likely that the prevalence was only there because of the recent demise of the majority of the Indian - and I use that word for the same reason as the author I'll cite - population that had been hunting them, see Charles Mann's "1491").

xyzzyz4• 4 years ago

I find these theories attributing mass megafauna extinction to changes in climate rather unconvincing, for very simple reason: it would be an extreme coincidence that dozens of species that lived there for literally millions of years all just happened to go extinct right around when humans showed up.

Now, I certainly believe that climate changes at the time also played a role: for all we know, these might have even been responsible for most of the animal population reduction, through shrinking the habitat etc. But without the humans killing off the rest, they’d have survived, just like they did during climate changes for previous millions of years — it’s not like the climate just suddenly became unstable recently, after millions of years of high stability.

But yes, the overall point is that humans have produced cultural technology that made us just too good at hunting for it to be sustainable source of calories for majority of population, and this has already been true for many millennia.

gsatic• 4 years ago

Probably why out of the writers minds come never ending (and boring imho) fantasies of humans hunting humans. I couldnt believe there was imdb tag for it - https://www.imdb.com/search/keyword/?keywords=human-hunting-...

Silverback_VII• 4 years ago

I for one think that it would be good for human psychology and evolution if there was a very different apex predator on par with humans.

littlestymaar• 4 years ago

While I agree to your point, there's one sentence that hits a pet peeve of mine:

For most of our history, most humans societies were only barely able to feed themselves. All growth in food supply was quickly matched by population growth.

This, like most clichés isn't strictly wrong, but it's not very true either, at least for agrarian societies. Almost since the beginning of agriculture, agrarian societies have experienced food surpluses, and that's what made the cities appear (as in a pre-industrial society the urban population feeds from the surplus of the countryside). And, at least in Western Europe, until the late middle ages there was a lot woodland completely fit for agriculture[1] that weren't exploited yet, leaving a huge margin for population to grow (and it did in fact, grow). So in most of the history of agriculture, again at least in Western Europe, population wasn't simply linked to the size of the potential food supply. It was probably much truer during the early modern period, when most woodland had been converted (even though the quick adaptation of the British agriculture during the continental blockade showed that there was again quite some margin there).

[1]: we know that they were fit for agriculture, because by the end of the middle ages, they were cultivated.

317070• 4 years ago

But "most of our history" was not agrarian. What you say is correct, but not in contradiction to who you are replying to.

ftrobro• 4 years ago

Technological advances during the middle ages made more land fit for agriculture.

> During the medieval ‘agricultural revolution’, new forms of cereal farming fuelled the exceptionally rapid growth of towns, markets and populations across much of Europe. The use of the mouldboard plough and systematic crop rotation were key developments and led to open-field farming, one of the transformative changes of the Middle Ages.

https://www.gresham.ac.uk/whats-on/agricultural-rev

xyzzyz4• 4 years ago

Almost since the beginning of agriculture, agrarian societies have experienced food surpluses, and that's what made the cities appear (as in a pre-industrial society the urban population feeds from the surplus of the countryside).

You are confusing an individual-level surplus with society wide one. It is true that a single farmer, with abundance of land, can produce great surplus of food, much more than he or his family is able to consume. However, on a society scale, there was very little surplus overall. In better years, food was quite sufficient for everyone, sure, but in worse years, people starved, especially children, elderly, and the destitute.

This is immediately obvious by looking at the population figures. The population growth everywhere was glacially slow by early modern standards, except when a group moved into previously unoccupied territory, or into territory occupied by groups with with worse food production technology.

Consider, for example, population growth in colonial America and in early decades of USA to population growth in UK. If UK population grew as fast as New England in years 1600-1800, by 1800 UK would have had something like 500 000 000 people (half a billion) living in it. Such rapid population growth was only possible in New England thanks to abundant land, very little of it has been previously used for cultivation by native Americans.

Or look, for example, at the rapid population growth in Africa today. Why hasn’t Africa ballooned to a billion people already in 1800, despite millions of years of head start? Simple: they simply couldn’t sustain populations so high with technologies available to them.

Given right circumstances, the population growth and fall are extremely fast on a historical scale, though it is hard to intuitively comprehend for humans due to us living on a single human lifetime scale.

snarfy2• 4 years ago

This is why I don't eat ocean fish.

Taek• 4 years ago

95% of the population could decide not to eat ocean fish and there'd still be enough natural demand to cause extinction. You can't solve this type of shared resource scarcity by asking individuals to abstain.

chayesfss6• 4 years ago

luckily I can still hunt where ever I am at, in Alaska, in CT picking off a bunny my daughter helped me skin, a fly in my palm or an idiot on the internet. How are they controlling anything about the way I hunt or pick ip roadkill to eat?

club_tropical• 4 years ago

And they will keep attempting to do so until they succeed or we have a circulation of elites. It will be a pincer movement between increasing prices for hunting gear and restricting access to licenses, parks, etc with the cherry on top of using media to pounce on hunters ala Walter Palmer & Cecil the Lion.

vintermann• 4 years ago

I always found that interesting about the opera "Der Freischütz". It's from 1821, but its portrayal of hunting is surprisingly egalitarian. The main character is a minor nobleman who is terrible at hunting, the opera starts with a commoner being celebrated for winning a hunting competition and ribbing the main character gently for it. The commoner talks about the hunting stories his grandmother told him, too. So commoners hunting couldn't have been implausible to German audiences in 1821, even in quite stratified society.

HyperSane• 4 years ago

Same way modern elites monopolize stock dividends.

Elites tried to monopolize hunting

Related Stories