“We all know hunters. But do we really know them? asks Luc Chartrand in a book, half essay, half report, entitled The Great Hunting Experience. A personal work in which, himself passionate about hunting, he wanted to communicate “a true vision of the world, that of many hunters who have reflected on their art and all that it implies for the human soul”.
“Hunting is easier to live than to explain,” admits Luc Chartrand straight away in an interview. And this little book was born from a desire to explain hunting as much to himself as to others. “I sometimes had difficulty making people understand why we do this, why we impose this discipline on ourselves to get our meat in the forest. »
For this journalist and novelist (Code Bezhentzi, The Myosotis Affair) born in 1954, dreaming of trout, partridge, hare and moose has always been part of his life. Hope, he believes, is a fundamental dimension of the hunt. “I’ve wanted to write about hunting for a very long time, but I didn’t want to pollute my hunting sanctuary with professional concerns,” confides this recent retiree from Radio-Canada somewhat jokingly. But this hunter “in the good average” did not have, he says, the pretension of writing a technical book on hunting.
In addition to drawing on his own experience, he wanted to give voice to many hunters, such as the well-known guide and columnist Michel Therrien, the young Huron-Wendat Émilie Gros-Louis or the chef and restaurateur Jean-Luc Boulay. So many hunters who are “far from resembling the somewhat grotesque caricature that is sometimes conveyed about them”, he warns.
Through them, Luc Chartrand approaches the killing of animals, respect for wildlife and the place of humans in the environment. It’s about ethics and worldview.
“A vision of the world that assumes that we have the right to hunt and kill animals, insofar as we are going to eat them, assumes the author for his part. It is part of the cultural and material heritage of humanity. It’s a vision of the world that integrates all that and also accepts the idea that we ourselves are part of the zoological world and that predation is part of our DNA. To hunt, adds the man for whom hunting is legitimate “only insofar as one maximizes the use of what one harvests”, one must accept these things as a reality.
A social activity since the dawn of time, an archaic or primitive residue of humanity, hunting — or predation — transcends species and eras. “The general lines of hunting are identical today to what they were five thousand years ago”, writes the Spanish philosopher and sociologist José Ortega y Gasset in his Hunting Meditations, which Luc Chartrand quotes several times. “In hunting, believes Luc Chartrand, humans are in symbiosis with their own zoological nature”.
“Even if animal husbandry has downgraded hunting in terms of food efficiency, recognizes the author of The great hunting experience, the desire to hunt is always present. We don’t need it, but there are people who think we don’t need livestock either. These are philosophical positions that come into play and which are all valid, in a certain way, without there being any rational, scientific truth, he believes.
But hunting also responds to a powerful call for freedom. “For me, it’s fundamental,” he continues. It is certain that the fact of being in the forest with oneself, free to go where one wants, to engage in an activity without bosses and without social structure, to return to a more animal state, is a freedom that many people are looking for in hunting. To paraphrase our philosopher [Ortega y Gasset]is taking a vacation from humanity. »
A follower of “fine hunting”, a type of hunting that often pays less than the more sedentary one that is practiced with bait and caches, Luc Chartrand likes above all to roam the forest trying to track animals. “A body of knowledge and observations combine: reading tracks, manure, grazing, attentive listening to all noises, strategic approach to certain sectors with high potential”, he writes, adding that it is largely partly the difficulty of the hunt which gives it its value.
Stalking is for Luc Chartrand the most fundamental aspect of hunting. He recognizes that there is an interesting parallel between hunting and the work of journalist which he practiced for a long time, in particular on the emission Investigation. In 2014, he even tracked down delinquent hunters in the Gaspé with his team for a report that caused a stir.
live the forest
Hunting, as we have said, carries an undeniable ideological dimension. Issues of morality and power are of course inseparable. And it seems inevitable to Luc Chartrand that hunting generates reflections and questions about death. To this end, he estimates that he has not met any hunter who takes pleasure in killing.
The experience of hunting, for him, allows him to feel part of the natural order. “It’s a way of realizing our place in the cosmos,” he writes.
Luc Chartrand is one of those hunters forming, he thinks, the greatest number, for whom the process is more important than the shot. “For me, it has always been the case, and I found that it was shared by everyone I interviewed. Nobody said to me: “we’re going there just to shoot [sur] animals”. »
Hunting is, according to him, a unique and privileged way of “living the forest”. “A way that has the advantage, compared to others, of forcing us to integrate into it. There are all kinds of ways to be in the forest, but hunting is a channel to enter it with a particular eye. It forces us to investigate, to put ourselves at the level of the animals, to think like them, to take into account the environment in a really very global way. Of course, it allows us to discover it and to feel part of it. »
In this sense, he sees nothing surprising in the fact that hunters and fishermen are nowadays among the most ardent defenders of the environment… as paradoxical as that may seem.