The chosen limit

An essay from 1949

In the summer of 1949 a magazine of the California Academy of Sciences printed an essay by Aldo Leopold, “Wildlife in American Culture”. It had first appeared in a specialist journal in 1943, and it is one of the essays in A Sand County Almanac.

Leopold’s essay says that our tools for the pursuit of wildlife improve faster than we do, and that sportsmanship is “a voluntary limitation in the use of these armaments”. Its purpose: to enlarge the part played by skill and shrink the part played by gadgets.

A page further on he describes duck shooting, “model 1949”: a man loaded with equipment who opens up at seventy yards because the advertisements have told him his shells have a long reach, and a couple of cripples that go off to die elsewhere. Then he writes that not all sports have degenerated to the same extent, and that perhaps the bow-and-arrow movement and the revival of falconry mark the beginnings of a reaction. The bow is named, by name, in the essay on ethics itself.

It was no passing remark. In the 1947 foreword, which was never used, Leopold tells how he and his family had become “enthusiastic hunters with bow and arrow” and needed a shack as a base camp from which to hunt deer. That is why he bought, “for a song”, an abandoned farm on the Wisconsin River. It is the farm of A Sand County Almanac.

Lisbon, 1942

A few years earlier and with no connection at all, José Ortega y Gasset was writing, in Lisbon, the preface to an old friend’s hunting book — he who, in its opening lines, calls himself “hardly a hunter”. Ortega’s prologue usually travels as a single sentence. In the edition we read, it runs: “no se caza para matar, sino al revés, se mata para haber cazado” — one does not hunt in order to kill but, the other way round, kills in order to have hunted. He says it of sport hunting, which he sets apart from hunting for food. And on the next page he adds something the internet quotation no longer carries with it: this does not resolve the moral problem of hunting.

The argument that concerns us is elsewhere. As the weapon became ever more effective, Ortega writes, man chose ever more limits for himself before the game, to leave it a chance and not to tip the balance between game and hunter too far. Beyond a certain threshold, hunting is no longer hunting: it becomes quite simply a slaughter. The most important intervention of reason, he says, is precisely to restrain itself. Man must enter the game “with a handicap”. There is, in hunting as a sport, “a wholly free renunciation by man of the supremacy of his humanity”.

Ortega is not sentimental. He writes plainly that leaving the game its chance is no courtesy of a Knight of the Round Table: whoever wants to hunt has no choice. And that it is not essential to hunting that it succeed — if the hunter’s effort came off every time, it would not be hunting, it would be something else.

The same idea appears, more simply, in the people we wrote about in “A short history of bowhunting”. Pope’s book, from 1923, says the killing of game has become too easy, that game preservation “demands a limitation of armament” and that we should do well to revert to the bow. Half a century before, Thompson’s book mocked the shotgun that slings hundreds of pellets at a bird: “See what a margin for successful inaccuracy.” But Pope also has the honesty to end differently: these are not the reasons why we shoot the bow. We do it because we love it, “and this is no reason”.

The idea is not only the archers’ and not only American. The German hunting federation’s position calls for the hunter’s “self-restraint” and writes that what is technically feasible must never let hunting degenerate into mere shooting at live targets. And the Hungarian chamber code quotes Kálmán Csathó: if all the chances are on the hunter’s side, success brings no joy.

No gallery

There is one more thing Leopold and Ortega both say, neither knowing of the other. The pairing is ours.

Leopold: a peculiar virtue of wildlife ethics is that the hunter ordinarily has no gallery to applaud or disapprove his conduct. Whatever he does is dictated by his own conscience, not by a mob of onlookers. Ortega: the hunter who accepts the sporting code keeps its commandments in the greatest solitude, with no witnesses but the peaks, the cloud, the oak and the passing animal.

It is a fine idea, and it has an answer. Erica von Essen’s article of 2020, from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, writes that hunting uses a public resource, wildlife, and that the rules of conduct therefore cannot be left entirely to hunters: they “need to be held publicly accountable”. In her 2018 study, built on thirty-nine interviews with Swedish hunters, she argues that any hunting ethic has a collectively agreed grammar that goes beyond one person’s morality in one moment.

Leopold would perhaps not have disagreed. On the very page where he praises the absence of a gallery he also writes the reverse: voluntary adherence to an ethical code elevates the sportsman’s self-respect, but voluntary disregard of the code “degenerates and depraves him”.

He takes his example from home. A common denominator of all sporting codes, he writes, is not to waste good meat. Yet Wisconsin deer hunters, in their pursuit of a legal buck, kill and abandon in the woods “at least one doe, fawn, or spike buck for every two legal bucks taken out”. In other words, half the hunters shoot any deer until a legal one is killed, and the illegal carcasses are left where they fall. Leopold calls this “a demonstrable fact” and does not show in the text where the figure comes from. Such deer hunting, he concludes, is not only without social value but is actual training for ethical depravity elsewhere. From this he draws a conclusion: unlike the other two kinds of value the essay speaks of, ethical experience may have a minus value as well.

Leopold does not himself tie the example to the absence of a gallery. The link is ours. But the two sentences stand a few lines apart: conscience without witnesses is a virtue where it exists, and where it is missing, no one finds out.

Fairness to whom?

The hardest objection to the idea of the chosen limit does not come from the opponents of hunting. It comes from a philosopher who defends it.

Lawrence Cahoone, in a 2009 paper arguing that hunting is a moral good, notes in a footnote that fair chase and minimal suffering can conflict: reducing the hunter’s probability of success can increase the possibility of wounding. The goal, he writes, is a balance between the right kind of inefficiency — the challenge of achieving a makeable shot opportunity — and the right kind of efficiency: shots resulting in a quick death.

The sociologists say the same thing more sharply. Von Essen and Hansen ask: fairness to whom? From the animal’s point of view, they write, a high-powered rifle at close range may mean less suffering than a hunt that takes fair chase to an extreme, “by perhaps using a bow-and-arrow”. The code seems at times to have detached from concern for the animal and to centre instead on skill and on respect among hunters. The bow is, for them, an example in an argument, not a result: the study rests on twenty-eight interviews with Swedish firearm hunters. Von Essen and Allen place the compound bow among the “cold weapons” that “might otherwise prolong” an animal’s suffering — again a supposition, taken over from another author.

And it is the position of some members of the Danish Animal Ethics Council. In the Danish statement of 2017 the council splits: some members are opposed on principle to the sporting element of hunting, and see the bow as the form in which that element is most prominent. We wrote about the statement in “What was read before the decision”. Here only one thing needs noting, and the observation is ours: what Ortega and Leopold call a virtue is exactly what these members call the problem.

The second objection concerns the bow itself. For Erica von Essen’s article of 2020, the compound bow may appear primeval but is “a sophisticated piece of carbon fiber gadgetry”, marketed to hunters who want the latest technology; bowhunting is, in her word, an “atavism”. McTee and colleagues, writing in 2026 about rifle shots at hundreds of metres, note that the concern does not stop at the rifle: archery equipment, sometimes labelled primitive, allows skilled practitioners ever longer shots. Cahoone replies that almost all technical advances address convenience and safety rather than effectiveness; that is his view, not a measurement.

Leopold had seen the question and did not claim to have the answer. He does not pretend to know, he writes, where the line is between legitimate and illegitimate gadgets; he uses many factory-made things himself. And yet there must be some limit.

What the welfare literature has actually assessed

Those who judge killing methods by what happens to the animal have an instrument. The Australian model, published by the agriculture department for methods of pest animal control, scores each method on two axes: the time to insensibility and the level of suffering until then. Where there is doubt, the benefit of it goes to the animal. The first axis is the first of the two criteria that the Danish council and the Swedish report each reached on its own road.

Hampton and colleagues, in a 2021 review of how shooting at free-ranging wildlife is tested, write that shot placement may weigh more than any other variable, and that a shooter who cannot consistently group tighter than the anatomical target at a realistic distance is ill-advised to shoot at live animals in that manner. They also write something scientists rarely say: the threshold at which a method is “acceptable” is a value judgement. One person may find it enough that three quarters of the animals lose sensibility at once; another asks for ninety-five per cent.

The bow is not in the review. Hampton and colleagues set it aside openly, saying only that some similar principles apply to it.

Where this literature does mention the bow, it does so in passing. The Australian model names it once, as a term of comparison — “a method that is considered to be less humane than shooting” — with a single reference, to a 2005 paper that we hold only as an abstract. A Danish-American paper of 2020 writes that bowhunting “seems to increase the risk of a slow and painful death”, with a single reference, to a paper from 1979, and on the same page that data on wounding are still insufficient. Three texts, counting von Essen and Allen’s; none with data of its own on the bow.

That does not mean they are right or wrong. It means the question has not been properly asked. What has really been measured, and how little, we set out in “What Denmark measured, and what it did not”. And the Swedish report adds something easily forgotten: firearms were not legalised on ethical principles either, but through tradition, and direct comparisons between weapons are not possible, because the studies are missing on both sides.

Our reader

In a 2020 paper on hunting tourism, Lara Tickle and Erica von Essen describe a hunter we know. The paper goes through the tourism literature and names seven “sins”: seven situations in which people away from home allow themselves what they would not do at home. The authors say from the start that they are not judging hunting. Their concern is with practices that hunters themselves object to.

One of the sins bears the name of the proverb: when in Rome, do as the Romans do. At home, they write, hunters are no relativists at all. They are quick to condemn the customs of other hunting cultures, from the use of dogs to killing practices. On holiday that strictness relaxes. Hunters try techniques that are “unethical or illegal at home”, and the authors give a single example, in brackets: bow-hunting. Not knowing the local customs and the local wildlife, they may cause the animal more harm than they expect. Someone unused to a weapon who takes it up to fit in with local custom widens the margin for mistakes. With an animal whose anatomy and behaviour are unfamiliar, the principle of a quick kill is at risk “when one is lacking in training and knowledge”.

Tourists, they go on, are disconnected visitors. They are not responsible for how the land and the wildlife are managed; that task falls to the outfitter they pay. The paper’s conclusion is simple: however set apart the holiday space may seem, hunters are subject there to the same moral responsibilities as everywhere else, and each hunter is, unwittingly, an ambassador for hunting.

It is a risk named, not measured. The paper is a review with no data of its own, and it does not say how many hunters do this, or with what results. It is also fair to say where it was written: Lara Tickle signs from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Erica von Essen from the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, and the research was funded by the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency. In both Sweden and Norway the bow is prohibited, so for them “illegal at home” is a plain statement of fact.

But the passage describes exactly the situation of a hunter from Romania, where the bow is prohibited, who hunts with a bow in another country: a weapon they may not hunt with at home and, perhaps, game they do not know. The condition in the authors’ sentence is worth noting too. The danger is not laid at the door of the weapon, but of the lack of training and knowledge.

What people think

Leopold wrote that the hunter has no gallery. There is one; it just sits somewhere else.

In the Danish study of motives, eleven hundred and thirty hunters and a sample of the public were given the same list of thirteen motives. The hunters said how much each mattered to them; the public, how much they thought it mattered to hunters. On a scale of one to four, the public gave “the sport” 3.19 and the hunters 2.20. “The trophy”, 2.77 against 1.75. “Excitement”, 3.00 against 2.43. For slightly more than half of the public the hunter’s motive changes little; but among those with a very negative attitude to hunting, more than a third say the motive matters very much. The study asks nothing about the bow or about any method.

Method is what the American surveys ask about, and they have to be read with care, because they are commissioned by organisations of the sector. In the American report of 2019, built on three thousand telephone interviews, hunting “for the meat” is approved by 84% of Americans, “for the sport” by 50%, “for the challenge” by 41%, “for a trophy” by 29%. Hunting with a bow is approved by 80% — but the firearm was not on the list of methods, so the figure says only that the bow is the best regarded of the seven methods asked about. In the 2023 report the firearm appears: the bow has 69%, the firearm 66%, and the report itself notes that approval of the bow has fallen.

In Europe we found no survey that asks about the bow. The two large polls of recent years come from opposite camps — a poll commissioned by the European hunters’ federation, in five countries, and one commissioned by animal protection organisations, among rural residents of ten countries, Romania included — and neither mentions the bow.

What we think

What follows is our opinion, not a finding.

The two halves of this article do not contradict each other, because they are not about the same thing. Ortega, Leopold and Pope are talking about the hunter: about what the limit hunters set themselves makes of them. The ethics councils and the veterinarians are talking about the animal: about how long it takes and how much it hurts. A bowhunter who answers only the first question has answered nothing of what is held against the bow.

We think Cahoone’s footnote is where the two meet. The chosen limit can be defended only if it is carried all the way through: the difficulty lies in reaching a shot that can be made, not in making a difficult shot. The handicap is the road to the animal. At the end of it, either the shot is sure or it is not taken. What that looks like on paper, where someone has written it down, we showed in “What the codes say”.

And we think it is worth knowing how little is known.

The literature that judges the bow most harshly does so in three sentences. The Australian model mentions it once, as a term of comparison, with a reference to a paper from 2005. The Danish-American paper of 2020 has one sentence, resting on a paper from 1979, and admits on the same page that the data on wounding are insufficient. The third is a supposition taken from another author. None of the three texts has measured anything about the bow. And the review that deals precisely with how shooting at wild animals is tested leaves it out.

The literature that defends it most beautifully dates from 1923, 1942 and 1949. Pope, Ortega and Leopold write about the hunter, not about the animal. They measure nothing, and none of them claims to. Whoever quotes them in answer to the question “how long does it take and how much does it hurt” is answering a different question.

Between the two stands the little that has been measured, which we wrote about in “What Denmark measured, and what it did not”. Between them too stands the observation of the Swedish report that a direct comparison between weapons cannot be made, because the studies are missing on both sides. Nor did we find any survey of what the European public thinks of the bow.

None of this shows that the bow is cruel, and none of it shows that it is not. The lack of data is an argument for no one. And the day the data exist will not close the discussion: Hampton and colleagues say plainly that the threshold at which a method is “acceptable” remains a value judgement. Figures can say how much. How much is enough is for people to decide.

Whoever says today, on one side or the other, that the matter is settled has not read what has been written.

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