Reviews for The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game

The average rating for The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-03-24 00:00:00 Elishba Iturra Paul Shepard was an animal with a PhD who made the astonishing discovery that he really was an animal, and so was everyone else. This sort of thinking makes us sweaty and nervous, because we prefer to believe that we are the creator's masterpiece ' not the cousins of disgusting baboons and orangutans. It's insulting to call someone's kid a cute animal. Two-legged primates evolved as hunters and gatherers in healthy wild habitats, living in groups of a dozen or so. These highly intelligent animals were perfectly at home in natural surroundings, but today's two-legs are overwhelmed by the input barrage of modern life. For two-legs, industrial civilization feels like a loony bin. Could this be why we are frantically shopping the planet to smithereens? Shepard spent his life trying to solve this riddle. Historians have invented glorious stories of the incredible ascent of humankind, from hungry dirty peasants to futuristic cell phone zombies. In the process, they whited out ninety-nine percent of the human journey, the era before we went sideways. Restricted to this heavily edited history, our culture has "unwittingly embraced a diseased era as the model of human life." This has nurtured "a malignant self-identity." We can't know who we are if our past has been whited out. In his book, The Tender Carnivore, Shepard pulls back the curtains and presents readers with the 14 million year version of our story. Notably, the book leaps outside the wall of flatulent myths, and speaks from a viewpoint where wild people are normal healthy animals, and planet thrashers are not. His ideas provide an effective antidote to the trance, a charm to break the curse. The book includes a timeline of the human saga. By 40,000 years ago, we had 240 tools, and numbered 3.3 million. By 10,000 years ago, we had domesticated sheep, goats, and cereals, and there were 5.3 million. By 6,000 years ago, we had irrigation, pottery, metal, war, states, wheels, trade, ideology, and writing ' and there were 86 million. The human enterprise was getting dangerously out-of-balance. Tree monkeys are relatively safe from predators, so males and females are about the same size, and the troop is sexually promiscuous. Ground monkeys, like baboons, are far more vulnerable to predators, so they are larger, and live in tight groups. They kill and eat other animals. The males are much bigger and stronger than the females, and they are hot-tempered. Ground monkeys are "the most aggressively status-conscious creatures on Earth." High-ranking males have primary access to females and food. They are constantly watched by low-ranking males, who wait for signs of aging and weakness, and opportunities to drive the big boy out of the harem. They are high-strung animals who constantly adapt to a hierarchy that is always changing. Humans are also status-conscious critters, so it's hard for us to recognize that this monkey business is unusual in the animal kingdom. Monkeys are not our direct ancestors, but we share many genes with them. Like ground monkeys, every group of humans has a hierarchy of individuals, from ultra-cool to scruffy riffraff. In sedentary human societies, where personal wealth varies, the status game is amplified by hoarding status trinkets ' cars, televisions, and other valuables. Is it possible that the reason folks refuse to wean themselves from habitual car driving is because it would sharply reduce their social status ' something far more important than a stable climate? Shepard says that we are obsessed with immature goals and follow trends like a dumb herd. The ape family includes chimps and gorillas. They inhabit forests, and spend the daylight hours on the ground. Chimps live in groups of about 40, and use a few very simple tools. They are nice, mild mannered animals, Shepard says. But when Shepard was writing, Jane Goodall's chimp research was just beginning. It turns out that chimp groups are ruled by an alpha male, who aggressively dominates the females. They are also violent killers. Goodall saw one chimp group completely exterminate another group. Bonobos are their closest relatives, and they are strikingly different. Bonobo groups are matriarchal, extremely promiscuous, and far less violent. A number of anthropologists have reported that, among recent hunter-gathers, males are not dominators, with some exceptions. But many would agree that, during the civilized era, the status of women often got the shaft. Shepard's overview of primate history suggests that male domination and abuse was not invented by Middle Eastern deities. Evolution can get rough. When scientists raised chimps in their homes, along with their own children, the chimps were at least as intelligent as children, until the children were three or four, learned language, and left the chimps in the dust. Language promotes mental development, spurring reasoning and knowing. Yet, without language, lions and wolves are superior hunters. Intelligence is an evolutionary experiment. It allows us to better comprehend the complexity of the world, but it also enables us to better destroy it. When adolescence concludes with a successful initiation into adulthood, the youth becomes a confident fully human animal that is well integrated with the non-human environment. He clarifies his self-identity, moves closer to his peer group, and away from his parents. When initiation is botched or omitted, the youth remains trapped in adolescence, chronically narcissistic, enraged at humankind and nature for failing to help him become a complete human. "Everyone who fails will be intellectually, emotionally, and socially retarded for the rest of his life." Because humans evolved to be ground-dwelling wild omnivores, the hunter-gatherer way of life "is the normal expression of his psychology and physiology. His humanity is therefore more fully achieved, and his community is more durable and beautiful." When removed from a healthy wild environment, folks "live in constant crisis, stress, and poor mental health." Throughout the book, Shepard directs a fire hose of ideas at readers, and some are stronger than others. This one is false: "Hunters and gatherers, by contrast, do not make war." When Knud Rasmussen trekked from Greenland to Siberia in the 1920s, he reported several regions where warfare was common, in his book Across Arctic America. It is also false that all humans are inherently violent. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, Richard Lee, and Colin Turnbull all reported that Pygmy and Bushman hunter-gatherers were not warlike. People with adequate space and resources like to sing and dance. The Inuit described by Rasmussen lived in extremely low population density, but the lands they inhabited had an extremely low carrying capacity. Crowding is a social disease that causes frantic agitation. In the last chapter, Shepard looks toward the future. He presents us with imaginative, impractical, and sometimes daffy solutions. Rather than burning oil, we could use yeast to convert it into high-protein food. Agriculture and domesticated animals must go. Human settlements should be limited to a five-mile strip along the coasts, returning the interiors of continents to nature. In the wild lands, only foot travel would be allowed. Only hand weapons could be used for hunting, no guns or dogs. And so on. The book was written in the good old days of the early 1970s, when there were fewer than four billion, and the future seemed fairly stable. Peak oil and climate change had yet to walk onto the stage. We seemed to have time to repair things. This is a 40-year old book, with a few rough edges, but well worth the time.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-09-29 00:00:00 Kurt Berlin Shepard here presents an analysis of humanity's relationship to the other great apes, both in terms of origins, development and differentiation. Shepard certainly believes humanity's trajectory since the neolithic period is one that has put undo stress on human individuals and societies, as well as on the ecology as a whole. While this may seem like a no-brainer, Shepard focuses on the effect of domestication on previously wild organism, and the evolutionary consequences: traits beneficial for adaptation are weeded out in favor of traits that are harmful to the long-term survival of that species. As humans progress towards the domestication of the whole world, this certainly has wide-ranging consequences for the survival of the planet. In terms of human beings, most of what we consider to be unique features of human life are share by other great apes, and in the chapter "On the Responsibility of Being an Ape" shows how the evolutionary development of our hominoid ancestors has bequeathed humans with such things as specialized (polychromatic, stereoscopic) vision, acute pain resistance, tool use, coordinated hunting, and sexual promiscuity. This is probably the best chapter in the book, which is followed by "Hunting as a Way of Life," the most questionable. Shepard looks at the role hunting plays in the social organization of cynegetic humans, both in terms of structuring activities, rituals, and ethos, and in terms of the relationship of the human "tender carnivore" to the rest of nature. Shepard utilizes Ortega y Gasset's Meditations on Hunting for his analysis, and his declarations would certainly put off vegans and the critical animal theory crowd. While I find the ethics of eating animals a complex one, Shepard does not separate the ramifications of hunting, killing, and eating in a world where human populations accurately reflected our position as the top predator and resource consumer, and one where humans are too populous, immobile, dependent on the transfer of resources across the globe, and with virtually no prospects of moving towards a social organization like cynegetic society. Given the current situation, the ethical dialectic of "should we stop eating animals?" or "should we stop our dependency on world-wide resource allocation?" should probably be synthesized into something like "should we stop our harmful levels of consumption?" How you answer that would determine whether vegan/vegetarianism or flexiterian/sustenance hunting is ethically appropriate. While critical animal studies aficionados might disagree, claiming that such utilitarian claims misses the whole moral question of killing, Shepard himself reminds the reader that the vegan is still killing. If we are going to challenge the distinction between the human and the animal, it doesn't help that the human animal, like the rest of the great apes, is a carnivore. The more purposeful (if not more meaningful) question is what kind of comportment should we have towards the organisms we kill, especially in the context of what we choose not to kill? Or to put it in more succinctly: how are we going to relinquish our domination over the Earth such that it does not entail relinquishing our lives? The following chapter on "the Karma of Adolescence" deals with human development in hunter/gatherer cultures versus agrarian and industrial cultures, and the last, "Industrial Agriculture or Techno-Cynegetics" envisions a restructuring of our current society to one that is more in harmony with our evolutionary roots. While the current thinking among primitivists (who theoretically have much in common with Shepard) is in opposition to technology, throughout the book Shepard argues that cynegetic societies thrive on technological development and refinement. Shepard believes that the continuation of this process is in humanity's best interest, and believes future survival depends on a move away from complex industrial farming towards chemical food-synthesis. The biggest gripe I have with the book is that not only lacks internal citations, but Shepard tends towards the dogmatic. A simple statement replaces the consideration of opposing views which could potentially grant the reader a deeper understanding the issues at hand. Still, the book is a brief one (at under 300 pages) and geared towards the layman.