In John William's novel Butcher's Crossing, there is a memorable passage about a bison massacre, when a young man from the city becomes so unnerved that he cannot help the others in his group with killing and skinning them. Gradually, as the hunt gets longer by days, he becomes desensitized to the art of butchery, toughening his ability to extract from the buffalo herd what people need to survive: meat, skin, etc. Alluding to the title, butchery becomes a nostalgic intersection of past and present, between the modern practice of mechanical, alienated slaughter and the prehistoric practice of hunting and skinning animals to survive. Originally, violence was a natural way to consume what we needed to survive as a species, which you can't fault us for, since most others do the same.
This seed of desensitized violence is buried deeply in the subconsciousness of humans. When civilization started, transforming prehistoric villages into cities, the nature of violence also transformed, as there is hardly any evidence for warfare existing prior to the urban revolution. War and pillage became the new norm for channeling violence as cities competed with one another for resources- something their ancestors didn't need to worry about. Agriculture and the inherent rise in population demanded submission from places abroad, places that usually had an abundance of what was needed to sustain the cities.
A second transformation occurred after the Industrial Revolution. As slaughter became even more mechanized, so did war. Tanks, planes, and other advanced weaponry meant that violence had to be channeled in new ways. The subconscious urge to hunt, destroy, to take life for sustenance, was squeezed into outlets that could only be found in the consumer culture of service economies. Television and film violence came in higher demand as war receded. Violent contact sports gained appeal. Private gun ownership skyrocketed. Video game violence became a primary outlet for young aggression needing to escape, if not literally then at least figuratively. In a literal sense, the rise in gun violence and mass shootings over the past 50 years is a prime symptom of our detachment from "natural violence"- the form we inherited from prehistory, when food and clothing weren't served to us on a silver platter, so to speak. Big game extinction has also been an unfortunate side effect; bison are an example of a species we hunted to near extinction, to serve all these needs.
According to the National Park Service, bison were the most important ecological force on the Great Plains of North America for millennia, fertilizing the vast and fertile frontier with their grazing habits, which we ignorantly capitalized on*. That's one reason I wasn't able to stomach reading about the massacre in Butcher's Crossing, which is a book of fiction. When we consider the decimation of our bison population, what happens in the novel isn't far from the truth. And this is happening all around us, all the time. It seems we are not only becoming desensitized to uncivilized violence, but the violent extinction of keystone species as well.
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| A bison extermination map, nearly matching the geographic range of the Great Plains. From Wikipedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Extermination_of_bison_to_1889.png |
To combat this new society of consumer violence, I suggest rather contentiously exposing children to natural butchery when they are young (10-15). It should desensitize them early on, not fester an innate desire to see blood as they reach adolescence. Integrating farming and butchery into the classroom, or deprivatizing farming itself, would ideally allow for a more natural exposure to violence that is consistent with our biology. A beneficial side effect would be some much needed regulation on slaughter farms hosted by big corporations, which pack animals into tight spaces and fatten them up for consumption. Organically raised, pasture-based farming would better demonstrate to children the need for a more localized supply chain that reduces pollution, global warming, and shows more concern for animal rights. Vegetarians or highly sensitive children could opt out, as most women and children did in prehistoric villages. Finally, such a shift would help future generations understand the need for preserving species instead of violently eradicating them for profit. If children see the practical value of hunting, they will be less likely to do it for recreation.
*National Park Service. https://www.nps.gov/articles/bison-bellows-8-18-16.htm
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