Does the wolf worry over the mooses anxiety when he howls in the darkness? Does the hawk change his path because the mouse hides in fear at a mere glimpse of his shadow?
These discussions always remind me of a quote from The Outermost House by Henry Beston. After serving in WWI Beston returned "spiritually shaken" and decided to spend a year living alone in a cabin on a remote part of Cape Cod, a much less crowded place in those days. He is considered by some the "spiritual father" of the modern environmental movement, but he is noticeably silent on the subject of hunting in his most famous work, despite describing encounters with hunters in the book. Personally I find it hard to believe he didn't harbor at least some ambivalence towards hunters.
"When the Pleiades and the wind in the grass are no longer a part of the human spirit, a part of very flesh and bone, man becomes, as it were a kind of cosmic outlaw, having neither the completeness and integrity of the animal nor the birthright of a true humanity.
We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth."
