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For the last few
centuries, hunting has been the exclusive right of the nobility, a privilege not
formally abolished in Germany until the revolutions of 1848. Since then the
right has been linked to the land, and anyone who owns a small plot of forest
or a field may also shot deer on it. While this is still the case in Sweden,
for exemple, in the German-speaking world a new law was supposed to replace
this right just two years after 1848. According to the revised law, the right to
hunt applied only to contiguous areas of land of over 0.75 square quilometres.
But which smallholders or individual farmers owned that much land at the time?
All smallholdings were forcibly merged into cooperatives, which leased out
hunting rights back then as they do now. And who could afford the expensive
lease? Rich nobles, who returned through the back door as the only ones with
the right to hunt, having momentarily lost the privilegie in the revolutions.
In principle, there has been very little change to this status quo.
(p. 61)
This brings us back to
the basic argument asserted by the hunting lobby: hunting is an old tradition.
That may be true for a tiny fraction of the population, but it has never been
for the overwhelming majority. For thousands of years, our traditional method
of feeding ourselves has been farming, not shooting woodland animals. Many of
the customs of German huntsmanship, whit its ornate and glorifying language
(blood, for exemple, is called ‘sweat’), have only been widespread since the
Third Reich, when the Reich Master of the Hunt, Hermann Göring, decreed every hunter had to follow complicated rites
and horn-blowing rituals. (…) And nowadays? Unfortunately, not much has changed
since the Nazi era. The laws and regulations still reflect the old ideas about
breeding, focussed mainly on winning something impressive with which to
decorate your living-room wall. Each to his own, you might say; after all, it´s
probably not the strangest hobby out there. Meanwhile, the number of large
herbivores has increased to levels that are, as already mentioned, up to fifty
times higher than natural population densities. The impact of this can be seen
in our forests, which are being ravished, especially the young saplings of native
deciduous trees. The buds of cherries, oaks, beech or ash trees all get
devoured, along with seeds such as beechnuts or acorns; everything disappears
in gigantic quantities into the hungry stomchs of wild game animals. As a
result, fewer and fewer deciduous trees are growing, and many forest owners can
only keep the forest going by planting spruce and pine. Deer don´t like to
graze on them, because of the bitter taste from the resin and essential oils,
not to mention the prickly needles. But with the help of these tree species,
foresters can at least build up their tree stocks and create the illusion of
a forest.
(PP. 62-63)
VER:
LIVRO
WOHLLBEN, Peter. 2019. Walks
in the Wild – A Guide Through The Forest. London: Rider.
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