Word: sheparded
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...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...
...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...