Here is a video of a Masai "persistence hunt," where the animal is pursued and hunted until it collapses from exhaustion, and then the hunter closes in and kills the animal.
I think one could make a moral argument that the loss of such a cultural activity--along with the attendant human knowledge and skills that it requires--would be a tragic cultural loss in many ways. Here is one example where the philosophical arguments of animal rights, environmental ethics, and cultural preservation collide.
It is interesting to note that in Australia--which resembles the Anglo-American philosophical "scene"--aboriginal rights and customs have been assiduously protected and honored. Not perfectly, I suppose, but on an institutional scale that I believe isn't found in many other countries.
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There is an interesting corollary to this within the hunting practices of the animal kingdom. In Komodo island in Indonesia, the Komodo dragons use similar attacking strategies to get at their preys which are typically water buffalos, much too big for the Komodo dragon to attack directly.
ReplyDeleteThe video is from the BBC Life series and can be found here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDWSmQsvRSE&feature=related
After the attack the cameramen tracked the buffalo for weeks as it weakened slowly and finally collapsed with the dragons waiting around it.