Aw, Shoot!

By Melvin Maddocks

THE TENDER CARNIVORE AND THE SACRED GAME

by PAUL SHEPARD 302 pages. Scribners. $9.95.

Drastic times call for drastic solutions, doubtless. But surely the last thing poor, beleaguered 1973 man expected to be told was to go dig up his old bow and arrow. That, more or less, is the advice of Paul Shepard, lately professor of something called environmental perception at Dartmouth College, and a man variously trained in zoology, ornithology and tropical biology.

Stubbornly, obsessively, Shepard insists that pretty much everything wrong with modern man can be traced back to the day his ancestors stopped hunting. And pretty much everything would be put right again if only he would become a hunter once more. "The male of the species is genetically programmed to pursue, attack, and kill for food," Dr. Shepard blithely explains. "To the extent that men do not do so they are not fully human."

Cranky and ingenious, exasperating and entertaining, The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game may not quite make it as the gospel of salvation of the season. But it is as hard to put down as a caveman's pet club. Shepard scants no claims for his cureall. Hunting will end war--because hunters "do not make war." Hunting will stamp out heart disease; the anxious jogger is only miming the chase. You can bet that the hunter has no trouble with his sex life either. Shepard goes lyrical about the connection between the kill and the orgasm.

On the other hand, hunting is a sine qua non for the intellectual as well: "To hunt for an idea can never be fully understood--or fully practiced--by those who have not hunted game."

The villain of Shepard's piece is the farmer. The history of civilization, as he reads it, consists of "ten thousand years of eradication of hunters by farmers." He does not hesitate to call this "genocide." Farmers, in his book, are a "fellowship of slaves" leading "the dullest life man has ever lived."

Far more than technologists, farmers have polluted the earth--by impoverishing the soil, contaminating the water. Worse, they have polluted the soul. They first introduced the corrupting concept of proprietorship into society. They "degraded sexuality" by connecting it to "productivity." So much for the agrarian idyll.

Are there any other minorities Shepard has not offended in glorifying the hunter? He accuses pet lovers of "neurotic zoophilia," adding that history's "more fully mature men" have always tended to eat dogs "whenever they can." Antivivisectionists take note:

"Squeamishness about taking creatures apart ... is a measure of the extent to which parents and society try to isolate themselves and their children from life." As for vegetarians, they are the victims of "a fantasy of compassion."

Shepard's back-to-the-tribe ethic may make young commune dwellers think their generation has an ally.

Wrong. Setting up the hierarchy of his field-and-stream Utopia, Shepard writes: "The conception of both society and the future would be returned to the hands of elders--of adults --where it belongs."

It should be clear by now that Shepard is less of a scientist than a poet. He dreams of a future in which cities of no more than 50,000 people are located on continental perimeters. No farms, of course. One meets one's needs with microbial food (yeast plus two tons of petroleum equals one ton of pure protein). The heartland becomes a kind of hunting preserve. From earliest years, children are sent into this wilderness to be truly educated about their nature and their relationship to nature. Reading, at first, is "circumscribed and limited."

Math, chemistry, physics--the abstract sciences--are postponed till almost 20.

Shepard's best points are side effects. No matter how narrow, his case for the relevance of man's past makes history--that neglected tense--seem important once again. And Shepard's argument that there is "no hope of knowing ourselves individually until we know ourselves as a species" may help with our galloping identity crisis. Even the farmers should be grateful for these small favors.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.