Enjoying the task is a good thing

Stephen Newton, in article titled Underage Sex and Country folk says:

And thankfully, that’s a morality that says underage sex and inflicting animal suffering for fun are wrong, whatever your community elders told you.

He's talking about the Pitcairn island abuse case and fox hunting. Yes, in the same article.

He’s half right.

Pest control in the countryside is a necessary job and I would argue that most effective way of performing a job is to do so while enjoying it. Your productivity tends to be good, your job satisfaction is generally high and your stress levels low. Also, a job that is both undertaken with zeal and with joy contributes greatly to ones overall contentment. That’s no small thing.

The killing of foxes, rats, pigeon etc. are activities that will continue for some time to come for one reason alone; necessity. The people who perform these activities are varied, ranging from farmers to sporting shooters, professional pest controllers to traditional hunters and these people use different methods that tend to vary marginally in the level of cruelty involved and probably more significantly in the levels of enjoyment experienced by the person carrying out the task.

Often one method that is successful with (and not unusually cruel for) one kind of animal is not so successful when used on another. Shotguns for foxes, for instance, is not usually a good idea requiring, as it does, special loads and a good degree of luck or uncommon amounts of skill.

The tool needs to match the quarry. There’s a method/quarry matrix.

There are also great arguments and some confusion over the level of cruelty caused by any method/quarry combination. Even the issue of fox hunting is not as black and white as the anti-hunting brigade would like to think.

Lord Burns, author of the Burns Report on fox hunting commissioned by the government as part of its “legislate on evidence and principle” period (now sadly passed), states:

Naturally, people ask whether we were implying that hunting is cruel... The short answer to that question is no. There was not sufficient verifiable evidence or data safely to reach views about cruelty.

Cruel, here, needs to be taken in the context of ‘unusually cruel’ I think and not that there is zero suffering. It’s a comparison against acceptable levels of cruelty involved in any pest controlling exercise.

One can argue the cruelty vs liberty case, but I don’t think the issue of enjoyment is meaningful in the debate other than to say that enjoyment is a good thing in a task, particularly when it is a task that needs to be done, and that will continue to be done.

All that is going on now is a messing about with the method/quarry matrix. Foxes, rats etc will still be killed and will still often experience suffering and not a single one of us is qualified to say whether this overall level of suffering will be greater or lesser if traditional fox hunting stops.

But then again, it’s not about foxes really is it?

Posted by John at September 29, 2004 03:46 PM | TrackBack