Hunting & Shooting [antikvár]

IntroductionIn the sixteenth-century world the meaning of the word hunting was all-embracing: it covered hunting with horses, hounds, guns, cross-bows or spears, as well as with traps and nets. Shooting, whether with a cross-bow or a match-lock gun, was merely one of the many ways of hunting. Throughout a large part of the world today the word hunting has the same all-embracing significance and it is only in a few places, notably Britain, that the terms hunting and shooting differ radically in meaning. It must be made clear from the outset, therefore, that this is a book about hunting in the widest sense of the word.Apart from the breeding instinct, man's hunting instinct is probably the most primeval urge of all, and man is still basically a hunter. This book traces the development of that instinct from the earliest stages, when primitive man first developed a simple pit-fall trap, to the latest examples of electronic science relaying the mating calls of wildfowl through loudspeakers to decoy them to the waiting guns. As primitive man became more civilized, so his hunting methods were altered and improved; yet, surprisingly, some of the simplest methods remain the best and adaptations of primitive man's methods are still in use today with great effect.Inevitably primitive man was nearer to man the hunter than is modern man. He learned what he was about, or he failed to eat. He was also closer to his quarry. If he failed to kill it, frequently the quarry killed and ate him. Today the advantages of science weight the odds strongly in favour of man. The helicopter and jet propulsion bring the wilds within every hunter's reach and even if his instincts and abilities as a hunter are atrophied, the breech-loader and telescopic sights give him a vast advantage. Nevertheless a special relationship must always exist between hunter and hunted, tenuous and indefinable though this link may be.When man ceases to pit his wits against the wild on even terms and ceases to preserve his quarry in its wild state, allowing or even encouraging it to breed without fear of persecution during the appropriate season, but instead merely kills it whenever the occasion offers, frequently to its extinction, he becomes merely a butcher. It is interesting to note that the higher the state of development a society reaches, the more frequently the