• Corpus ID: 147425003

The American Hunter-Naturalist and the Development of the Code of Sportsmanship

@inproceedings{Altherr1978TheAH,
  title={The American Hunter-Naturalist and the Development of the Code of Sportsmanship},
  author={Thomas Lawson Altherr},
  year={1978}
}

• T. Altherr
• Published 1978
• Education

During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a small but growing and vociferous group of environmentally concerned sportsmen arose in the United States in counteraction to the savage tendencies in hunting prevalent in their day. By 1900, a stylized, idealistic type of hunter called the “hunter-naturalist” developed. Combining respect and scientific and aesthetic appreciation for nature and nostalgia for what they considered purer, wilder hunting in the past with the moral imperatives of gentlemanliness, the hunter-naturalists championed and amplified the general code of sporting ethics called sportsmanship. The impetus behind this movement was largely elitist. Sportsmen from America’s upper class sought to dignify hunting for sport and check the savage hunting impulse. Even before the middle class rose up after the turn of the century to score several triumphs of regulation over large, unscrupulous corporations, patrician sportsmen embarked upon their own “search for order” by regulating themselves and their overly-rapacious colleagues, the commercial hunters. 1 Only a few of the hunter-naturalists grew to regret their hunting and to suggest abolition of that sport; the overwhelming majority proposed wiser usage of wildlife resources. The hunter-naturalists viewed hunting as the best mode of environmental perception, the truest appreciation and apprehension of nature’s ways and meanings. Most of them arrived at this philosophy through the combined influences of nature study and hunting experience. Preferring to look at the wilds scientifically and dispassionately, the hunter-naturalists had little sympathy for pastoral visions or anthropomorphic stories of animals. The hunter-naturalists evinced a thorough understanding of the ecological bases of natural existence. The appearance of the hunter-na