“Behind the ban on hunting, militant antispeciesism”

Renaud Large is communicative.

He is the author of

The clash of species - man against animal until when?

FIGAROVOX.

- The Greens have tabled a text aimed at abolishing this practice on weekends, public holidays, and during school holidays.

They also want to put an end to the hunt.

How do you view this proposal?

Renaud LARGE.

-

I am very skeptical about the prohibition of a cultural practice.

The preservation of human unity in the defense of cultural diversity is a foundation of our society.

It is found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Each culture must be defended in its specificity, when it respects human integrity.

The Greens have been indignant, often rightly, at the effects of globalization on certain cultures on the other side of the world;

but why would it be any different down there?

It seems incoherent to me to fight for the culture of the Indians of Chiapas and at the same time to want to drastically restrict hunting in the Nièvre.

The fate reserved for animals in our society is obviously iniquitous.

However, of

other human activities generate far more suffering than hunting.

The Greens' proposal therefore does not aim to improve animal welfare.

No, the prohibition of hunting is primarily dictated by an antispeciesist principle, positive animal law.

This does not exist and is not desirable since it would amount to establishing legal equality between species.

The enforceable right to housing for pigs seems to me to be a sufficiently grotesque example to warn us of this temptation.

For my part, I invoke the rights that exist to preserve responsible hunting: human rights.

first dictated by an antispeciesist principle, positive animal law.

This does not exist and is not desirable since it would amount to establishing legal equality between species.

The enforceable right to housing for pigs seems to me to be a sufficiently grotesque example to warn us of this temptation.

For my part, I invoke the rights that exist to preserve responsible hunting: human rights.

first dictated by an antispeciesist principle, positive animal law.

This does not exist and is not desirable since it would amount to establishing legal equality between species.

The enforceable right to housing for pigs seems to me to be a sufficiently grotesque example to warn us of this temptation.

For my part, I invoke the rights that exist to preserve responsible hunting: human rights.

Read also“The risk of extinction in hunting has never been greater”

Is hunting also singled out today for not being able to reform itself and listen to certain demands of civil society?

Hunting has evolved with society.

It's undeniable.

For example, safety rules have been drastically tightened over the past two decades to reduce the number of fatal accidents by five.

It's still too much, but the hunters have taken into account the demand for cohabitation with other nature enthusiasts.

There's still much to do;

nevertheless, the practice is reforming.

I think, on the other hand, that the animal question has been radicalized in recent years.

This polarization is attributable to the rise in power of antispeciesist thinking and the reactions it engenders.

Antispeciesism has become a potential cultural hegemony.

Let us think of the progression of animalist literature or cinema with blockbusters like

or

We no longer tolerate killing an animal for any reason.

The dominant cultural thought has become completely antagonistic with the practice of hunting.

Anti-speciesism does not want to negotiate a more rigorous framework for hunting, which is undoubtedly necessary.

Activists seek to ban hunting altogether.

The shock is frontal and can only be brutal.

The Greens' proposal is symptomatic of anti-species activists.

It aims first of all to move forward, step by step, towards the establishment of positive animal rights.

Renaud Large

Are the representatives of the hunters not, in a way, disconnected from the hunters?

I don't believe there is a disconnect between hunters and their representatives.

Hunting is a very heterogeneous activity that brings together very diverse political sensibilities and social categories.

Hunting is a subway train at rush hour.

The activity brings together communist agricultural workers from the Bourbonnais to right-wing Parisian executives and radical farmers from the southwest.

On the other hand, the protagonists of the animal question have caricatured themselves in recent years, to the point of becoming “cartoons”.

We are witnessing a ridiculous and grotesque guerrilla war on a yet fundamental philosophical subject.

It all became as removed as a bachelor party in Pattaya.

On the one hand, we have Hugo Clément, the Instagrammable Largo Winch of the animal cause and the

another side Papacito and Baptiste Marchais, visitors to the country of the bidoche, in streaming.

In this pugilism in search of ratings, the hunt and the hunters are ranged, reluctantly, in the camp of the reaction and the evil conservatives.

The reality of hunting and its representatives is much finer and more complex.

Beyond the issue of hunting, should we see behind the Greens' proposal a broader project to dismantle ancestral cultural practices?

If the Greens' proposal consisted of a dismantling of traditions, that would not be a problem in itself.

A tradition is not a label of immutability.

The existence of an ancestral practice can be scrutinized by reason, and

, to be reformed, but never wiped out with the stroke of a pen.

Rather, I think the Greens' proposal is symptomatic of antispeciesist activists.

It aims first of all to move forward, step by step, towards the establishment of positive animal rights.

This is the salami tactic of the Hungarian Communist Party.

It is a question of erecting, slice by slice, a global citizenship mixing animals and humans.

The prohibition of bullfighting then calls for that of hunting, then slaughterhouses and breeding.

The ultimate goal is to lower the legal barrier between species to bring animals closer to humans.

Would a ban on hunting, or almost, open the way to the criminalization of our immemorial relationship to domestic or wild animals and to nature?

In reality, this incrimination is already underway.

Society has gradually built up an animalistic superego.

In it, hunters are invited to repent of a supposed original fault: they kill sentient beings.

I find this trial completely unfair.

Hunters become the scapegoats for a problematic relationship our society has with death.

Death is unbearable inequality.

She has taken loved or admired beings from us.

She is unbearable.

We therefore want to hide death and why not ban it, as in the case of hunting.

Unfortunately, death is the essential condition of our life, but also of that of animals.

This terminal gives its value to our existence.

Limits are a necessary condition for happiness.

In eternity, life unties,

it loses its flavor, it is no longer this subtle mixture of graces and dramas, disgust and desires, desires and rejections.

It gradually becomes a continuum of déjà vu.

Read alsoWhen the animal cause puts the man on trial

Paradoxically, the penetration of collapsology and decreasing theses collide with this animalistic superego.

In the collapsology imaginary, the hunter-gatherer is a relatively valued figure as a new man, detoxified from thermo-industrial society.

As surprising as it may seem, we may be witnessing the return to favor (and therefore the moral decriminalization) of hunting under the influence of decremental thinking and eco-anxiety.