Some people call hunting a sport. I don’t understand that. As far as I’m concerned, for an activity to qualify as a sport it must meet all of the following four criteria:
- It must have predefined rules. Hunting qualifies as a sport under this criterion. The objective of hunting is to kill non-human animals. You aren’t allowed to hunt endangered species. And you can’t hunt certain other species out of season. Shooting other humans is severely frowned upon. Although, it garners only a minor penalty if the target looks like a moose or the shooter has poor eyesight. Those are rules. So hunting passes this test.
- Luck may play a part in a sport, but skill must be more important. Hunting passes this test as well. A nimrod* will be more successful at killing non-human animals than a wannabe hunter with no hunting skills. An adept hunter will also accidentally shoot humans less frequently than unskilled hunters.
- It must involve at least a moderate degree of physical activity. I’ve never hunted, so I’m not completely sure about this one. Nevertheless, I’ll give hunting a passing grade. Sitting in a duck blind waiting for birds to pass by doesn’t impress me as being terribly active, but I imagine that flushing out birds or tromping through the woods in search of deer or moose would be.
- Rhetorically speaking, the playing field must be reasonably level. True, in other sports, a superbly skilled team will almost always triumph over a bumbling team. But, even then, because all sports contain at least a modicum of luck, even the worst of teams occasionally wins. And, here’s the point, in a true sport, if their skills are matched, both sides have a roughly equal chance of winning. (Or of losing, depending on whether you’re a glass half-full or glass half-empty sort of person.)
Hunting doesn’t qualify here. Not even close. The best that the hunted animal can usually hope for is a draw, i.e, both the hunter and hunted leave unscathed. An animal might get the better of a hunter occasionally, but that’s extremely rare. Rifles can be employed from a distance. Claws and jaws can’t.
Thus, hunting fulfills only three of the four criteria. Hence, it does not qualify as a sport. At least, not in my books. (Then again, to date, and likely forever, I’ve had only one book published, so that’s not as high a benchmark as it might otherwise be.)
Level the Hunting Playing Field
I’d be willing to consider hunting a sport if we make just a few common sense changes. First, give the animals guns and train them to use their firearms expertly. Of course, the guns would have to be modified to compensate for the fact that most hunted animals don’t have opposable thumbs. And most don’t even have fingers, or hands, for that matter. But gun-makers are clever. I’m sure they can come up with something.
However, that probably would still not level the playing field sufficiently. I don’t want to be insensitive here, but let’s face it. Most non-human animals have less intelligence than even NRA members. Sporting hunters of the human persuasion should award the other species a handicap. Let them fire, say, three shots before the human hunters can enter the play.
Once that’s worked out, assign the participating humans to one team and the participating members of the non-human species to another.
Points
The question is, short of the death of the opponent, what defines winning? Just killing a non-human animal or it killing a human is far too simple an objective for a sport. Let’s assign points.
Your team gets 10 points if you kill a member of the opposing team, five points if you maim your opponent badly enough to force him to drop out of the game, and three points if you inflict a minor injury on one of the other team’s members. Deduct an equal number of points if you do any of those things to members of your own team.
Shooting one of your team member’s member or an opponent’s member clear off his crotch results in negative or positive bonus points, respectively. Of course, this works only for male players and only for species with members.
Shooting a non-participant incurs a penalty of three points and the forfeiture of five rounds of ammunition.
The team with the highest point total at the end of play wins.
The only thing I haven’t decided is whether we should, to maintain a “level playing field,” force the non-human species to wear those incredibly dorky hunting outfits that some human hunters wear. I’m not much of an animal rights activist, but I think that would be going a bit too far on the cruelty to animals scale.
* I know “nimrod” sounds like I’m insulting hunters. I’m not. The definition of “nimrod” is “a skilled hunter.” Don’t believe me? Look it up.
Or, if you’re too damned lazy to look it up, look at the screenshot to the right. That’s the definition that the dictionary bundled with my Mac provided for “nimrod.” Well, there is that second North American definition of “an inept person.” But I was referring to the “skillful hunter” meaning. Honest.
