willnever said:
Your activities involve searching for people or toys. None of them involve chasing an animal and killing it, which is what this thread is really about if you read the OP.
Children play at what adults do.
willnever said:
As well, you are presuming to know the minds of people who existed since long before you were born, who performed activities that you have become rather disconnected from. That doesn't really fly.
That would be your assumption.
No, I am presuming that our ancestors were generally similar to us in the fundamentals of how their minds worked, child and adult - people who enjoy things are better at them than people who don't, because they focus and remember and learn better, because they play at them. You are claiming that people were much different, fundamentally, in how they learned and lived, in a past that is not at all distant - we have written records of the European pioneers of the US, and the European life they left, and their experiences with stone age tribal peoples in the Americas, and so forth.
There is no record anywhere of people not enjoying hunting, of having to be coerced or pressured by hardship, of giving up hunting for farming at the first opportunity with expressions of relief, of the lower status people in a hierarchical society being forced to do the hunting while the nobles sat around the castle, or any other indication that hunting was a disliked or onerous chore.
Hunting was so far from being a chore as to be a privilege of the rich, in feudal and otherwise impoverished societies. Among the white poor in early America, the temptation of going to live with the reds included the temptation of a life of hunting, widely viewed as a self-indulgent or irresponsible way to live. Among the poor today, frequent and serious hunting is well known to be an activity of those who are - how to put it - less diligently employed, in general, than their harder working fellows.
There are no societies in which hunting is held to be more onerous, less desirable, than any other way of producing food.
willnever said:
The definition of hunting for the purpose of this thread involves killing. What are you describing is a wholly different activity with a differing purpose as well.
People who have failed to kill anything often say they went hunting. Deer hunters sometimes fail to kill a deer for two or three consecutive years - they still claim to have gone hunting.
I don't think you will find many people who cannot tell the difference between hunting and killing - and even fewer who would prefer killing to hunting, given a mutually exclusive choice. Employment on the kill floor of a slaughterhouse, for example, is not envied, privileged work. Hunting guide - a job which often, or even ideally, involves no killing of one's own at all - is.