by Dean Smith

Created on: October 15, 2008

I have contested for a long time what is a sport and what is not a sport. If a may use a paraphrase from the late George Carlin "Golf is not a sport. You hit a ball with a crooked stick, and you go look for it so you can hit it again." "This is not a sport," he exclaims, you are lucky you found the d@$m thing in the first place." I think Carlin narrowed it down to like two or three activities that he actually recognized as a sport. There had to be a ball, and there had to be contact. This is a very narrow-minded view of what a sport is, but it illustrates the stereotypes that people associate with sports.

Hunting is now a sport. It used to be a survival technique. But did not the majority of our Olympic Games derive from activities that were at least loosely based on survival. Boxing,fighting,running are these not things that were pertinent to survival at one time yet have evolved into a sport in many different fashions and variations?

Hunting is a sport now because it is mostly recreational. One must employ strategy, have a certain level of fitness, have a proficiency and training in various kinds of weaponry and be able to strike down ones opponent when the opportunity presents itself. Does Karate not have these same dimensions?

The only arguments against hunting as a sport would be those who hunt for necessity and from the animal rights activists who believe hunting is cruel and barbaric. The logical answer to the latter of these claims is quite simple: Boxing is cruel and barbaric, that does not exclude it from being a sport. If we are to exclude every sport that was cruel and barbaric, erasing all machismo from the sporting industry, we are back down to three sports -not even the same three George Carlin proposed as sports. So after our animal kingdom lovers are tired of watching croquet on television and decide to reevaluate what is a sport and what is not -ruling out cruel and barbaric so they can watch football during the debate-they assume that hunting can not be a sport because it involves killing. Two logical arguments come to mind here. Archery and the Javelin toss and hard-to-tell how many other sports in Olympic history, or sporting history, were derived to demonstrates ones accuracy with a killing weapon. Not just an animal killing weapon, with a human killing weapon. Is this still not a sport? Do we still not see these in the Olympic Games? And second of all, in all logic, while you are still dumb founded eating your soyburger may I remind you that plants are once living breathing creatures, and there is no game whatsoever in harvesting them. We give them life and we kill them. That is not a sport, that is a tragedy.

Off of my soapbox, I return to the debaters who claim it is not a sport because it is a necessity. If this is the reason one hunts, then there is truly no argument for it being a sport. If it is done for a matter of survival then hunting is no longer a sport, it is hunting. My rebuttalis, if you could survive by other means but are choosing to survive on wild game then it is still a sport. It is recreational and adds to the challenge of ones skills to try to survive off of their game, but it does not make it a necessity to do so -Wal-Mart is still a ride away.

There are no logical arguements that hunting is not a sport. It derived, as did many other sports, from a necessary skill into a recreational skill. Not losing those skills is crucial to the human race. All cultures have derrived ways of keeping essential skills for survival intact. We prefer games and sports to preserve our dearest protector -machismo.

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