Hunting

Hunting, pursuit and killing of wild animals for subsistence, profit, or sport. In Western Europe hunting means the pursuit and capture of a wild animal with the aid of hounds. In the United States and elsewhere the term means the field sport of shooting large and small game.

Hunting was an important source of food, clothing, and sometimes shelter for primitive people. Cave paintings in France and Spain indicate that these people hunted wild horses, prehistoric cattle, reindeer, and mammoths, often with the bow and arrow. Hunting as a sport was practiced by the earliest known civilizations, such as those in Babylonia and Egypt. Hunts full of pageantry and splendor were popular with kings and princes, who often gained status according to the number of animals they had killed.

With the exception of the Native Americans of the Southwest, the Southeast, and adjoining regions, the North American tribes lived almost exclusively by hunting. With the arrival of European colonists, hunting became important for the fur trade. As white settlers occupied increasing amounts of land, however, the wild game gradually disappeared; thus, in most areas of the present-day United States, game animals, especially the larger ones, exist in relatively small numbers and sometimes are even brought into a region to provide quarry for hunters. Game is also limited in variety, with rabbits and deer probably the most plentiful overall.

Western and northern Canada and Alaska are exceptions to this general scarcity; wildlife of many sorts still abounds there. Regulatory measures and the vigilant efforts of conservationists help to save game animals threatened with extinction through indiscriminate hunting. Certain African countries, mostly in East and South Africa, have also made ambitious efforts to save their often unique wildlife by establishing and patrolling enormous animal sanctuaries where the camera is the only “weapon” permitted.