Popular Culture Review Vol. 4, No. 2, June 1993 | Page 82

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to hunting. Rather, it attacked the inappropriate styles, especially
the so-called unsportsmanlike methods, and the attitudes of the
"other," the non-sport hunter. (2)
Theodore Roosevelt, who, taking a leaf from his uncle Robert
Barnwell Roosevelt's book--who had been instrumental in creating
the New York Fish and Game Conunission—and under the shadow of
his father—who had been among the founders of the American
Museum of Natural History—continued as a central figure in the turn
of the centuiy move toward an ethic of sportsmanship which called
for greater sensitivity to prey animals and care for habitat.
Eventually the demands of a public life made it difficult for the
politician to continue his activity in the development of a cerebral
form of sport hunting.
By two or two-and-a-half decades into this century the baton of
the spiritual ethic of sport hunting, as a feature of the Renaissance
hunter-naturalist life-style, was passed to such men as William
Homady and Aldo Leopold. They and their ilk either lead along or
acquiesced to changing social mores related to hunting. For example,
as recently as 1980, the English marksmanship authority Charles
Chenevix Trench noted the tainted feelings of unsportsmanlike
behavior associated with American weapons saying quite accurately
that "multi-shot pump and automatic guns are generally considered to
be implements of the pot-hunter" (Trench 67). A "pot-hunter," of
course, is one who hunts to eat rather than for sport, the cad.
For Aldo Leopold the evolution of these sporting weapons also
began to reprise the conditions of a market hunt with their undue
emphasis on harvest over process. The philosophical window of
sport hunting, on the other hand, seemed to gaze out upon a uniquely
human system of rule-bound activity