{"id":5761,"date":"2018-04-11T07:00:32","date_gmt":"2018-04-11T07:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fightfastvideos.com\/blog\/?p=5761"},"modified":"2021-03-31T15:23:21","modified_gmt":"2021-03-31T15:23:21","slug":"you-are-a-hunter-predator-warrior-by-mark-hatmaker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fightfastvideos.com\/blog\/2018\/04\/11\/you-are-a-hunter-predator-warrior-by-mark-hatmaker\/","title":{"rendered":"You Are a Hunter-Predator-Warrior"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A Fact of Nature<\/h4>\nWe are all hunters, predators, and warriors. Every one of us. I do not care whether you are a card-carrying member of PETA, a strict vegetarian, an avowed pacifist, or have never laid a finger on a hunting rifle or compound bow, let alone fired a bullet or bolt into an animal.\n\nWe are all hunters by the sheer dint of historical and biological forces. We are all the offspring of forebears that hunted for millennia and thrived because of that evolved prowess for hunting. Let\u2019s toss all the contemporary arguments pro or con hunting aside, the titled observation is not telling anyone to abandon whatever moral precepts they possess regarding hunting, animals, and any perceived cruelty to animals.\n\n[dfads params='groups=292&limit=1&orderby=random']\n

It's A Biological Imperative<\/h4>\nTo declare human beings as a hunting species is not a value judgment but a statement of fact. Evolutionary biologists, paleo-ethologists, and anthropologists from Robert Ardrey<\/strong> to Richard Wrangham<\/strong> have gone so far as to say that what makes the human species so distinctly different from its simian brethren is this very penchant, this evolved drive to hunt.\n\nOther animals can and do hunt, some solitary and some in packs, but no animal exceeds the human animal in applying technology to the solo hunt or the exceeding depths of cooperation in the human-pack hunt.\n\nDolphins may work together to \u201cbubble-net\u201d a school of fish but this is in no way a match for the hauls fishermen made off the coasts of New Foundland even 400 years ago. Wolves may hunt in families (the pack idea is a bit of a myth) and bring down prey larger than themselves, but the wolf is still no match for our forebears who brought down mammoths and other gargantuan prey that we just may have hunted to extinction.\n\nThere are many authorities in the field of human development who surmise that our ability to communicate and cooperate so successfully was borne out of this evolutionary group-hunting path. There is also some very convincing evidence (from Dr. Richard Wrangham particularly) that the combination of meat and fire, i.e., cooked meat, is what led to the relatively sudden growth spurt in the neo-cortex.\n
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It's In Our DNA<\/h4>\nRobert Ardrey surmises that the birth of the individual began with the mastery of the bow and arrow, that is, hunting technology that allowed one to break free of the pack.\n\nNow, whether we hunt or not in our own personal lives matters not a whit to the fact that you, me, every human you meet is here because ancestors who put millennia into developing the skills and attributes that make a good hunter survived and passed along some of those successful hunting attributes to you.\n\nThe human brain is wired to be alert to patterns, to clues, to solving. Why? To better track prey. To better understand whether this sign means good foraging or that sign means \u201cUh-oh!\u201d\n\nOur modern hunting selves have little need to hunt or forage for ourselves anymore, we allow the market to provide but that does not mean that these hunting bits of our selves lie fallow.\n\nIt has been surmised that this inherent \u201csolving\u201d is part of the reason we enjoy puzzles, mystery films, suspense television, thriller novels to the degree we do. We are looking for clues, paths, tracks.\n\nIt is also the reason we abhor spoilers, our intellect craves the hunt, the tracking and even this weak tea of trying to out-guess the third act of \u201cLaw & Order\u201d fulfills some inherent need.\n\n[dfads params='groups=292&limit=1&orderby=random']\n

The Danger In Abandoning Our Nature<\/h4>\nIs there any danger to being a hunting species that perhaps never hunts? Possibly.\n\nConsider this, hunting animals are keen and alert to their surrounding environment. This is, of course, necessity. Flagging attention may mean missing a meal, or missing the signal that a larger or smaller but venomous predator has you in its sites.\n\nFlagging of attention is not rewarded with full bellies or long lives, let alone the passing along of your unsuccessful hunter genes.\nHunting animals must be reflective animals, that is reflecting and adapting to the external environment they are currently in.\n

External Reflection<\/h4>\nThis is key. I repeat \u2014 This is key. Why?\n\nPhilosopher John Gray (the real philosopher and not the \u201cMen Are from Mars\/Women Are from Venus\u201d guy) states (and I simplify) that the human animal has gone from being a reflective being for the most part to a self-reflective one and this is the cause of many self-inflicted woes.\n\nThis is that key difference. Successful hunting animals are keen observers of their environment well aware of signs of prey, signs of good foraging ground, and also signs of potential upper-apex predators. Hunting animals must reflect on all that is before them, all the sights, sounds, scents, tastes on the air, the shift of wind signaled by the fluttering of the hairs on your arms.\n
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The Effects of Technology<\/h4>\nAs we progressed technologically, civilization was and is able to do more and more of our actual hunting and gathering for us, but this mere 40,000 year blip of agriculture is nothing in the scale of millennia when the hunting attributes were key.\n\nWe can no more minus out the seeking and the solving of the hunter mindset than we can minus out familial affection. Hunting instincts are part and parcel of who we are as a species.\n\nBut, with the hunting prowess left with little to nothing to work on it has, in many cases, turned inward. Our powers of reflection have turned from reflections of the external\/actual world, to self-reflection.\n\nWe spend far more time pondering the fallible recreations of the real world inside our skulls than what goes on in the actual world. John Gray and others say that is a bit of a problem.\n\nAnd we can\u2019t turn that off. Reflection, that is.\n\n[dfads params='groups=292&limit=1&orderby=random']\n

Final Thoughts<\/h4>\nIf we do not reflect, we are no longer human. The key is whether we embrace the hunter\u2019s reflection of the world, the external reflection that allows us to see and recognize patterns, tracks, make real associations, the day to day concrete observations that make up a sort of personal science, a pragmatic mechanistic understanding of the world comprised of the real and not the imagined.\n\nOr, we mull and chew over only our own thoughts and the phantoms inside our skulls. Looking for dubious patterns and tracks in the words and acts, the perceived slights of others that may, in fact, be indicative of nothing.\n\nAll the while keeping in mind, that being lost in thought also means being lost in the world. It is inescapable that we will hunt and track whether self-reflective or outward reflective, this is a symptom of being a hunting being. I wager that one form of reflection is of far more value than the other.\n

\n Click here for more training by Mark Hatmaker!<\/a><\/p>\n\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Fact of Nature We are all hunters, predators, and warriors. Every one of us. I do not care whether you are a card-carrying member of PETA, a strict vegetarian, an avowed pacifist, or have never laid a finger on a hunting rifle or compound bow, let alone fired a bullet or bolt into an Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9542,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,1],"tags":[140],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fightfastvideos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5761"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fightfastvideos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fightfastvideos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fightfastvideos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fightfastvideos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5761"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/fightfastvideos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5761\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12795,"href":"https:\/\/fightfastvideos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5761\/revisions\/12795"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fightfastvideos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fightfastvideos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fightfastvideos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fightfastvideos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}