A good article, interesting that in a narrative of Leopold's life Wisconsin appears only once.
A peculiar virtue in wildlife ethics is that the hunter ordinarily has no gallery to applaud or disapprove of his conduct. Whatever his acts, they are dictated by his own conscience, rather than by a mob of onlookers. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of this fact.
Aldo Leopold"One does not hunt in order to kill; on the contrary, one kills in order to have hunted...If one were to present the sportsman with the death of the animal as a gift he would refuse it. What he is after is having to win it, to conquer the surly brute through his own effort and skill with all the extras that this carries with it: the immersion in the countryside, the healthfulness of the exercise, the distraction from his job.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Leopold was a plinker who set up poor sparrows to kill. That’s not a Daniel Boone hunting record. Leopold has seen his dead body dragged across liberal Wisconsin as some kind of eco-fascist “hero.” On the contrary, Leopold never understood the prey-hunter relationship. In a word, Leopold was a commoner. He had no more insight of wildlife than a typical farmer or hunter in 1900 Wisconsin.
He’s been raised as a genuis “environmentalist” by the communists looking for a saint. Leopold is not that. I’ve seen better analysis of wildlife relationships by 10-year-old Boy Scouts trained by Robert Baden-Powell.