What's so great about hunting?

Staking out the hunting expo HuntEx 2016, Oliver Roberts finds a moral minefield - and way, way too much camo

The night before attending HuntEx 2016, I eat two lamb burgers for supper. When I eat meat, I normally don't think, or even care, all that much about where it came from and/or how it ended up here, sandwiched between two halves of the ciabatta heading towards my mouth.

But tonight I do think about it. I think about a lamb, or a field of lambs. I picture them small and white and still unsteady on their feet. I picture their faces and the way they go "baaa" and run to keep up with their mothers.

 I try to imagine them being trucked off to an abattoir and queued up for slaughter, standing there confused and scared, yes, but probably with no real inkling of what's about to happen to them, or why.

There are many intricate reasons why I choose to emotionally disconnect myself from the particular meat that I'm eating, and they're reasons that almost every meat-eater understands. The majority of us believe that we're kind people and that we treat animals well, so knowledge of any kind of cruel treatment towards them is awful and shocking and upsetting to us.

Then there's the sense of guilt/confusion we feel while being aware that we feel this way and yet still rather casually delight in the consumption of animals of all kinds, animals that have in all probability - no matter how regulated the abattoir - been kept in less than ideal conditions and slaughtered in ways that do not always ensure the quick, painless death we convince ourselves they experience.

So we push away thoughts of the latter as much as possible and continue to tell ourselves that (a) we love animals very much and (b) human beings are meant to eat meat and doesn't it say somewhere in the Bible that God gave us dominion over animals or something like that?

And please don't think I'm moralising or making the argument for vegetarianism, because I'm not. I've done that thing where you watch a documentary about where our meat really comes from and how they de-beak chickens with no anesthetic et cetera and I felt really, really guilty for like a day or two but then gobbled down a hamburger at the first opportunity.

 I like eating something's flesh, and I have no intention of stopping, but isn't it true that any meat-eater with even the vaguest conscience sets his or her own moral standards in order to indulge in the undeniable deliciousness of a fillet steak or chicken schnitzel or duck à l'orange?

The reason all of this became so pertinent to me the night before attending HuntEx 2016 at Gallagher Estate in Joburg was because, from the start, I was pretty much determined to go there with the mind that hunting is largely abhorrent and that people who kill animals for sport are callous brutes and I'm not like them. If I was a vegan I'd be allowed to think this way.

Maybe I'd wear scratchy hemp pants and grow annoying Caucasian dreadlocks and picket and swear and throw fake blood on people at the entrance to the expo. But I won't because as someone in the process of digesting a lamb that someone else killed for me, I'd be a real asshole to object to hunting.

OK, so it seems there's a general type that enjoys hunting and it is the type that wears camouflage and drives a f**k-off 4X4 fitted with snorkels and monster-truck wheels. Seriously, the parking lot was full of them and there was so much camo attire (pants, shoes, caps, couples dressed in matching camo) that there were times when I completely lost sight of the camoed person I was following.

There were two occasions when I witnessed the strange and terrifying illusion of a man seemingly emerging from the general scenery as of a spectre, or as someone who's discovered that multiple universes do exist and has figured out how to move in and out of them with total ease.

Considering the astonishing abundance of camo, I did wonder whether the people wearing it wore it pretty much all the time or simply because they were at a hunting expo and therefore took it to be appropriate dress code. If anything, they had the right idea. I looked silly walking around in skinny black jeans and a plain T-shirt, flinching slightly at the sight of guns.

(This, the flinching, happened fairly regularly. I'd walk past one of the stands where firearms were being sold/demonstrated and see someone pointing a rifle right at me, tracking my movement. It was very unsettling. And for a fleeting moment it made me feel like prey. Not at all pleasant).

Of the 48,000 people who attended the four-day expo, I would say 99.9% were white. Furthermore, I'd say that at least a quarter of that 99.9% were wearing said camo. It's therefore not unreasonable to say that hunting and wearing camo outfits are overwhelmingly white activities.

So if you don't own any camo and/or drive a 4X4 with extra-huge wheels or actually know what a calibre means or is, you, like me, are probably not the hunting type. But this doesn't mean we shouldn't try to understand why this group enjoys killing animals.

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It's actually important that we do understand because it goes some way to rationalising issues we may have with hunting, and humble us somewhat with regard to our conflicted moralising about the meat we eat.

For instance, Bradley Matthysen, a bow hunter, says it's the hunt itself rather than the kill that gives him joy. He says it's about the thrill of being in the bush, looking for tracks, listening to the birds, feeling the fresh air.

Unlike rifle hunting, with a bow you have to get really close before taking a shot so you have to be super quiet and super patient. We're talking many, many hours or even days or careful tracking, of reading the bush, knowing your spoor. You could say that bow hunting is the purest and most ancient form of hunting.

The ethics of bow hunting dictate that the hunter takes a broadside shot. The place to aim is the shoulder, "where the bone makes a 'V'", says Matthysen. This is known as a heart/lung shot. Done right, in five, 10 seconds the thing is dead.

"You want to cut the arteries and heart for blood loss. If you shoot one lung, the animal can run for hours. They're tough, I tell you."

Matthysen shows me a picture of a Cape buffalo he once shot. When I ask, he says he does feel remorseful after killing an animal, but also "happy and glad" for the privilege of being able to hunt it.

The meat, he says, is "utilised" in that when you hunt on tribal trust land in places like Mozambique and Zimbabwe, communities are invited to come and skin the animals and take the bulk of the meat. This is true of most hunting operations.

There is also the job creation that goes with hunting in rural and/or disadvantaged areas. Annually, the hunting industry is worth between R12-billion and R16-billion.

But what of the animal that gets shot in the lung and runs for hours and hours in a haze of adrenaline? It's tracked, sure, the kind hunter will follow the leaking blood until he finds the animal again and shows it mercy with another arrow, but a non-hunter will ask: why make it suffer in the first place? And what if it gets dark and you can't keep tracking any longer and the animal is left to fade away, confused and in pain, shivering under a strange moon?

It's convenient for not only the hunter, but us, the non-hunters, to turn to Cartesianism and tell ourselves that only humans have true consciousness and that animals merely experience pain and suffering in an instinctive way.

But it's a loose argument for a number of reasons, one being that René Descartes often came off as a bit of a dick, another being the question of why, if we believe animals have no emotional capacity, do we love our pets so much and mourn their passing? And we do not know what animals "feel" because they can't talk, and even if they could we still could not tell exactly what they were thinking; we can converse with other humans but it's impossible to know what's really going on in their heads.

Studies show that many animals experience joy and love and grief just like we do, and while it's the kind of evidence we cite when we're being good to an animal, it's also something we choose to ignore when we're tearing the flesh off a golden-brown rotisserie chicken or telling a waiter how we want our steak done. That's when it works for us to see animals as mere "things".

And it's all well and good to talk with disgust about that time you saw dog or cat meat strung up somewhere in Asia, but what makes the killing and eating of, say, a pig or a baby sheep any different?

 How, when we still know so little about them, do we decide which animals have more human value than others and which ones are OK to kill for the thrill of it?

Stephen Palos, chairman of the South African Hunters Confederation, a regulatory body that oversees the practices of 25 associated regions, believes hunting is a basic instinct.

"We are all of us intrinsic hunters but it's been suppressed in terms of society. I've got a saying: 'I hunt because I'm human.

' My eyes are not stuck on the side of my head like a prey species, they're forward-facing like all the predators, so it's a natural instinct, almost an imperative ... When you have a hunt and succeed you get a sense that if the chips are down you can do this thing. It's insight."

Palos says he's seen hunters tearful after killing an animal, "crazy with remorse". Others, he says, will shoot an animal, throw it in the back of the bakkie and go looking for the next one.

 He compares his post-kill emotions to attending the funeral of a friend who lived a good, full life. He says the main emotions he feels are respect and gratitude, which is what bow-hunter Matthysen said.

I never quite understood what they mean by "gratitude". Gratitude for what? For the idea that the animal existed and let you hunt and kill it? Isn't that another way of softening our blow?

Tharina Unwin is the CEO of the Professional Hunters' Association of South Africa, another regulatory board dedicated to responsible hunting and conservation (taking public stances on things like captive-bred lions et cetera).

 Unwin is kind of unique in that she hunts but her husband does not. Most of the couples I spoke to at the expo hunted together, the man usually introducing it to the woman.

Like Palos, Unwin believes humans are made to hunt. She also relates to Matthysen's sentiments about being in the veld, "at one with nature", the cold on your skin and dew on your legs. Unwin reiterates the importance of being a skilled shooter, to do it "properly" and "humanely". You don't want the animal to run around in pain, she says.

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(But of course, this happens).

Unwin, as with the other hunters, keeps referring to the "privilege" of killing an animal, of the immense "appreciation" for the beast in your crosshairs. "And then a bit of sadness," she says. "Anybody who tells you it doesn't bring about sadness is doing it for the wrong reasons.

If you just look at a little springbok and it pulls that plume up and you smell their scent - it's like a honey smell - and that beautiful, beautiful creation that is absolutely perfect. I mean there's nothing that God created so perfectly as an animal."

Unwin invited me to go on a "media hunt", to get a better idea of what the whole experience is about. I asked if I'd have to shoot an animal she said yes, I should, to experience it.

But I don't know. I think the privilege I feel after all this is the fact that there will always be someone else out there willing to kill my animals for me. Maybe it's cowardice, or maybe it's something more complex, something few of us really understand. I don't need to have an animal in my sights to know that I couldn't pull the trigger.

Some are hunters and some are not. Hemingway said that, and he should know - he shot a shitload of animals (and was kind of a jerk).