Abstract
This article makes a case for the inclusion of sport hunting in studies of consumer culture. This argument is advanced through an analysis of “the hunting industry” in North America. The hunting industry comprises a vast commercial network, exemplified by specialty retailers and advertiser-supported media involved in the marketing of hunting-related merchandise. The analysis contrasts environmental and cultural conservation, on the one hand, with consumerism and commercial media, on the other. These themes are situated historically and theoretically and then examined empirically by focusing on cable television channels devoted to hunting and on Cabela’s, an international retail chain that sells branded hunting and fishing equipment and sponsors media productions. Based on consideration of these venues, including a description of Cabela’s stores, which are renowned for their size and spectacular attractions, it is argued that a commercial industry built around hunting manifests contradictions between conservationism and consumerism. Connections between hunting culture and other aspects of consumer culture – such as food systems, environmental concerns, self-reliance, and authenticity – are also elaborated.
“Is culture fed by our present forms of outdoor recreation?” Aldo Leopold (1949: 179)
Hunting in most parts of advanced capitalist societies is divorced from necessities of subsistence and is instead a leisure pursuit motivated by thrill- and trophy-seeking, kinship bonding, personal fulfillment, and the inheritance of tradition. Cultural habits surrounding hunting have a long history and can vary by region, class, and quarry (Cartmill, 1993; Dickson et al., 2009; Franklin, 1998). Today in the United States this site of human/nature interaction is mediated by symbolic systems of social distinction, specialized consumer markets, and commercial means of communication – especially advertiser-supported broadcasting and publishing. Many people still rely on hunting for the provision of food, but given the US$33.7 billion in consumer expenditures on travel, licenses, and hunting instruments in 2011 (US Fish and Wildlife Service, 2012), as well as the outlays on the manufacture and marketing of branded hunting products, including the financing of television shows and magazines that advertise these products, hunting in the United States is a commercial, industrial activity. Typified by complex codes, rituals, lifestyles, and market relations, hunting culture is consumer culture (cf. Slater, 1997).
These social and economic formations are not without precedent. For more than 150 years the culture of sport hunting in the United States has been the province of middle class and elite urbanites captivated by literary paeans to frontier folklore (Herman, 2001). In the 19th century, as one historian reports, “Americans who took up sport hunting lived most of their lives amid all the luxury they could afford,” and apart from discrete forays into the wilderness, they experienced nature vicariously “by reading sporting literature in the comfort of home or office” (pp. 136–137). Strangely, few scholars have appreciated the profound connections among sport hunting, entertainment media, and consumer culture.
It may be appropriate to speak of a social imaginary of hunting. By that I mean a set of shared values, commitments, experiences, and expectations that bind a community dispersed in space and time (Taylor, 2002). More accurately, we could identify multiple co-existent social imaginaries of sport hunting (Littlefield and Ozanne, 2011). The observable expressions of these imaginaries I refer to generally as hunting culture. This article addresses what I perceive to be the dominant social imaginary of sport hunting as expressed in the commercially mediated venues of entertainment and retailing. Keystones of this shared cultural vision derive from two forms of conservation: on one hand, an active concern in managing habitat to sustain robust wildlife populations from which to harvest game (Dickson et al., 2009), and on the other hand, the maintenance of hunting values and traditions inherited across generations (Bronner, 2008; Dizard, 2003). The first component is an active “concern” in that habitats and animal populations are threatened by human land development and environmental degradation and also in that there exists a bureaucratic apparatus – and more than a century of legislative precedence – for funding, promoting, and executing conservation projects (Dunlap, 1988). The second “conservationism” advocates for the rights of hunters to enjoy nature and “live off the land,” enacting ancestral lifestyles. Often this is posed in defense of sport hunting – a way of life with a proud legacy which has been eroded by the social and cultural institutions of industrial and post-industrial modernity (Franklin, 1998). Amidst modernization, hunting is seen to engender “bedrock American virtues” (Dizard, 2003: 22).
This, too, has a long history. Since the late 19th century, men seeking renewal of the masculinity and authenticity depleted by modern living have retreated to the wilderness for visceral experience (Herman, 2001; Loo, 2001). Lisa Fine (2000) notes that the endorsement of hunting “as an antidote to … domesticity and the new factory system” (p. 812) persisted in the postwar era. Reclaiming masculine and individualist rites continues to motivate hunters as the United States has embraced an information economy oriented around service sector jobs and knowledge work (Holt and Thompson, 2004). Throughout the 20th century that began with moral panic about how involvement in consumer markets corrupted a man’s “character” (Calder, 1999), people disaffected by the commercialization of culture have sought “self-reliant” and “authentic” modes of consumption (Campbell, 2005; Cross, 2000).
Ironically, as the hunting imaginary has rejected modern luxuries, the state of the art has developed to favor convenience, efficiency, and style (Cain, 2009). Companies market a bewildering stock of implements for deceiving and ensnaring animals, many of which mediate experiences of nature and offload onto new (or newly applied) technologies skills and tasks that require and hone outdoor acumen. These include disposable heating packets, scent masking garments, plastic and mechanical decoys that resemble wildlife and imitate their movements, digital game calls that mimic animal sounds with the push of a button, and surveillance cameras that perform the work of “scouting” territory to learn about geography and animal habits. With a hunting industry, “woodcraft becomes the art of using gadgets” (Leopold, 1949: 166).
Again, hunters’ fascination with gadgetry is not new. Already by the Civil War, when surging arms production fortified a mass market for gun ownership, “ad campaigns and salesmanship [were] lubricating the engine of consumerism” (Herman, 2001: 146). But today “hunting and firearms equipment” represents the most lucrative category of sporting goods (National Sporting Goods Association, 2014), with support from dedicated research, design, and marketing enterprises. The manufacture, packaging, and transportation of these goods – as well as the fashion accessories and folksy bric-a-brac that clutter hunting’s material culture – require vast resources of synthetic materials, labor power, and fuel, generating pollution and non-decomposable waste. This article examines contradictions within the social imaginary of sport hunting: between the values of conservation (both environmental and cultural) on one side, and the logics of consumerism, commercial media, and marketing on the other.
After situating sport hunting within the study of consumer culture, the article compares conservationism and consumerism and then illustrates their contradictions with evidence from hunting entertainment and retailing. Close readings of publicly available documents, including promotional materials, publications by lobbying and consultancy groups, and reports to shareholders reveal aspects of the hunting imaginary outlined above nestled within strategic missives designed to encourage and celebrate market growth. All annual public filings pertaining to Cabela’s (2005–2015) and the Outdoor Channel (1997–2013) were consulted. Press releases and other corporate communications were collected as available, with relevant materials retrieved from company websites, internet archives, and subscription databases. Interpretation of this documentary evidence is supplemented by information from newspapers, trade publications, and official statistics published by government agencies and industry associations. Concluding with observations recorded during visits to Cabela’s stores, which were selected by geographical convenience, this portion of the article uses case studies of entertainment and retailing to analyze the industrial production of hunting culture. The final section identifies additional connections to theory and research on consumer culture and introduces some questions toward further inquiries into the hunting industry. We will see that hunting culture interconnects with contemporary issues about food systems, self-reliance, and authenticity.
Why study hunting?
Historians have documented the politics of hunting and conservation (Herman, 2001; Hull, 2006; Jacoby, 2001; Warren, 1997), but sport hunting entertainment and retailing are rarely glimpsed in critical media and cultural studies. Cultural studies of gender associate hunting with masculinity (Kalof et al., 2004; Kheel, 1996; Moisio and Beruchashvili, 2014), and a few scholars have investigated similar issues through empirical fieldwork (Bronner, 2008; Dahles, 1993; Littlefield and Ozanne, 2011). A small literature addresses hunting-related media content. Outdoor magazines are the principal focus of this work (Hirschman, 2003; Kalof and Fitzgerald, 2010; Kelly and Rule, 2013). Film and television materials are studied occasionally (Agee and Miller, 2008; Hastings, 1996). And one recent article examines hunting arcade games as venues for strategic communicators to intervene in “the dominant discourses of environmentalism and capitalism” (Sawers and Demetrious, 2010: 244). Debates about the ethics and moral stakes in hunting have been rehearsed at length (Cartmill, 1993; Dizard, 1994; Varner, 1998). But few studies put hunting into the cultural context of a consumer society (Bourdieu, 1984; Dizard, 2003; Knezevic, 2009; Littlefield and Ozanne, 2011), and almost none consider marketing and media – excepting Loo’s (2001) historical treatment of “commodity environmentalism,” Bronner’s (2008) sketch of how retailers have built “a modern consumer culture” (pp. 231–235) for hunters, and Cain’s (2009) critique of “mediated and commodified” hunting activity, or “blood culture.”
Although sport hunting is by its nature consumptive, and hunting culture connects many facets of private and public life, the dearth of scholarship on the topic seems to demand a warrant for my interest and approach. Hunting entertainment and retailing are securely among the “cultural industries” (Hesmondhalgh, 2007), and they belong within the purview of critical media and cultural studies. To describe the hunting industry, however, is not only to match the parlance of its participants but also to imply an affinity with the culture industry, as theorized by Horkheimer and Adorno (2002 [1944]) in a foundational critique of mass-mediated consumer culture (Schor, 2007). This association is not meant to ferry their depiction of feckless consumers obedient to standardized rhythms of mechanical production; but, much as Horkheimer and Adorno recognized in the concept of “enlightenment” the application of technical rationality toward deception and domination, with the hunting industry I aim to capture the contradictions between conservationism and consumerism. Industrial modernization has precipitated affluence and environmental destruction (Jhally, 2000). A critique of the hunting industry points to the dialectical tensions – between preservation and consumption, sustainability and growth – inevitable in an industrialized model of outdoor recreation. The strategic application of cutting-edge science – in chemistry, biology, manufacturing, and marketing – toward efficient harvesting of profits and trophy animals fits uneasily with an avowal of heritage, stewardship, and anti-modern authenticity. Conservation, both environmental and cultural, is at odds with dynamic industrial growth, the mutable tastes and limitless desires that animate consumer markets in neoclassical economic theory, and the ongoing (re)construction of self-identity in a society of consumers (Babe, 2006; Bauman, 2007; Büscher and Igoe, 2013; McCracken, 1990).
Technical rationality pervades the consumption of nature. For example, hunting-goods marketers do a brisk trade in products for cultivating specially engineered “food plots.” 1 But humans have always managed and exploited nature. By the time Europeans reached the Americas, indigenous peoples had built sophisticated civilizations that relied on strategic uses of natural resources, including the clearing of forest land for hunting (Varner, 1998: 126–127). “Millions of people over thousands of years changed the evolutionary and ecological trajectories of North America,” writes environmental scientist R. Bruce Hull (2006: 13). In the 20th century, the wilderness was shaped into a “sportsman’s paradise” (Loo, 2001). An “anti-modern” imaginary constructed the outdoors as a respite from the malaise of bourgeois society; yet, this “paradise” was “the product of rational planning and marketing,” curated “in response to the market demand for a particular kind of encounter with the wilderness – one that could be had through sport hunting” (pp. 93–94).
At issue, then, is not a pure state of nature preceding human corruption. As Aldo Leopold (1986) apprehended in 1933, “Every head of wild life still alive in this country is already artificialized in that its existence is conditioned by economic forces” (p. 21). The point is to interrogate, in historical context, the values, technologies, and institutions that mediate our relationships with natural resources. In the contemporary hunting industry, I argue, human/nature interactions are mediated by branded technologies, advertiser-supported entertainment, market relations, and consumerism. The hunting industry engenders exigencies and cultural forms that contradict the stated aims of conservation and heritage, creating a dangerous situation in which environmental exploitation parades as its opposite.
A modern sport hunting imaginary: Conservationism meets consumerism
Moral philosopher Gary Varner (1998) defines sport hunting as “hunting aimed at maintaining religious or cultural traditions, at reenacting national or evolutionary history, at practicing certain skills, or just at securing a trophy” (p. 101). He contrasts this with subsistence hunting (for food) and therapeutic hunting (controlling a population of animals that unchecked will degrade its habitat and its own well-being). In presenting environmental arguments for and against hunting, Hull (2006) catalogs more specific motivations, including meditation, exhilaration, education, family bonding, and traditional rites. In addition to fostering “ecological literacy” and knowledge of animal habits and habitats, “Hunting provides people a primary source of identity and purpose in life” (p. 175). As an outlet for acquiring trophies and possessions that preserve memories, evoke heritage, and communicate achievement, status or affiliation, hunting contributes to what Russell Belk (1988) calls the “extended self.” 2 In my usage, sport hunting can comprise all of these elements; a sport hunter may enjoy venison, mitigate overpopulation, covet a trophy, honor responsibilities, and derive personal or cultural meaning. Herein, sport hunting is defined not only by these motivations but also and importantly by a contiguous reliance on wages, commodities, and general consumer markets. Firmly embedded in consumer culture, sport hunters are modern subjects with “many-sided” needs, as Marx put it.
From interviews and ethnographic research, Littlefield and Ozanne (2011) organize “competent hunters” (p. 340) into four categories according to their values and criteria of success. Efficient traditionalists pursue the “pragmatic goal of provisioning.” Rational gearheads privilege “acquisition and mastery of knowledge and equipment.” Eco-buddies seek “a good hunt with friends.” And compassionate transcendentals enjoy “experiencing nature and closeness with family.” Littlefield and Ozanne provide a useful typology, capturing much of the sport hunting imaginary and illustrating that hunters approach their craft in various ways. However, these categories should not be mutually exclusive. Rather than accepting them as ideal types of hunters, we can instead think of them as repertoires from which hunters draw in defining and performing their culture. In hunting entertainment and retailing, all of these values are mobilized in discourse and intersected in practice. Hunting culture in consumer capitalism tolerates significant contradictions in its underlying social imaginaries – perhaps the deepest being between conservationism and consumerism.
Conservationism
Conservation entails a complex political economy. Certain values, interests, and institutional formations both influence and result from decisions about what and for whom to conserve (Dizard, 1994; Jacoby, 2001). In the late 19th century, hunters in the United States rehearsed British debates about whether to reserve hunting for the privilege of wealthy elites or to make it free for all. At stake in the contest between the “traditional culture” of rural farmers and the “dynamic, commercial culture” championed by “chivalric hunters” was the power to define and consume nature (Herman, 2001: 11–12). As in Canada, middle- and upper-class “sportsmen” held that nature’s bounty was too precious and too important to human fulfillment and economic stimulus to be left to unregulated harvest by market hunters and subsistence (or “pot”) hunters (Loo, 2001). While conservation regulations and ethical sporting codes remedied many unsustainable conventions of market hunting, they dispossessed people of land and rights in order to accommodate consumptive recreation (Warren, 1997). As “conservation consumers,” “humans construct the very natures that in turn influence their own (material and discursive) realities” (Büscher and Igoe, 2013: 284).
How to exist with nature has occupied American minds from the country’s foundation (Buell, 1995). Before Theodore Roosevelt claimed the distinction of the “conservationist president,” Thomas Jefferson articulated a political philosophy that gave pastoralism primacy over an urbanized industrial economy (Press and Arnould, 2011). For Henry David Thoreau, “the comforts, conveniences, and concerns of a modern industrial lifestyle” undermined an American culture adequately sensitive to its ecological connections to wilderness (Hull, 2006: 198–199). In the context of hunting culture, perhaps the most sophisticated and influential statement of conservationist values is Aldo Leopold’s (1949) A Sand County Almanac. Against capitalism’s treatment of nature as an economic resource to be exploited efficiently for industrial growth, Leopold advocated a “land ethic” that assigned to all organisms membership in an ecological community. For Leopold, community guarantees the privilege to enjoy resources held in common, but it also demands of members a commitment to satisfy obligations and respect certain values. Community is defined as much by shared responsibilities and expectations as it is by assembly or ownership; members must act in good faith to service the common good. What Charles Taylor (2002) calls a “social imaginary” is in a sense a more anthropocentric version of “community.” Both concepts contend with the moral and material commitments that maintain relationships in everyday life. Within Leopold’s land ethic, though, community implies profound interdependence between humans and wilderness.
Puzzling over problems of modernity, Leopold also confronted the conservation of tradition. He gestured toward issues salient among cultural critics (cf. Slater, 1997: 66–67) and social theorists (e.g. Giddens, 1990). Beyond a concern with how mechanization threatens historical thinking (Leopold, 1949: 184), Leopold apprehended that “modern transport and industrialization” influence “the world-wide hybridization of cultures” (p. 188) and enable economic relationships in which resources are relocated across the various stages of extraction, refinement, consumption, and disposal (p. 217). As communities and their members disperse across time-space, more interests and contingencies are implicated and more media are required to maintain relationships (Giddens, 1990). The conservation of nature requires trust in expert systems to define problems and remedies, while the conservation of tradition can benefit from (or be attenuated by) media through which people negotiate the values, rituals, and symbolic environments underlying a community. Through mechanization, Leopold (1949) asserted, humans inflict on the ecological community “changes of unprecedented violence, rapidity, and scope” (p. 217). Although he conceded that social-economic life implies some pragmatic compromises, essentially Leopold set the land ethic against market-oriented values and instrumental rationality: We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. There is no other way for land to survive the impact of mechanized man. (p. viii)
Although hunters’ environmental politics arise, at least in part, from an interest in protecting game species and hunting grounds for human enjoyment, many hunters are deeply invested in conservation. According to Jan Dizard (2003), “had the conservation ideal been as thoroughly embraced by farmers, commercial fishers, and our extractive industries as it was by hunters, we would not be facing anything like the environmental disasters that now loom” (p. 22). Perhaps the loudest and most verifiable boast is that hunters finance conservation through taxes, license fees, and donations – a potent and underappreciated instance of “commodity activism.” Since the 1937 Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Act gave the Department of the Interior authority to divert revenue from an excise tax on firearms and ammunition to States’ fish and game bureaus, consumption by hunters and anglers has reportedly contributed more than US$14 billion to conservation efforts (US Fish and Wildlife Service, 2012: 6). In 2013, it was estimated that conservation funding from taxes, licenses, and donations by hunters totals more than US$1.6 billion annually (Southwick Associates, 2013: 6). Lobbyists are quick to point out that “Hunting has been an integral part of the American experience since its beginning,” adding that hunters fuel “one giant economic engine, providing the financial support to create thousands of jobs directly involved in the manufacture, sale or provision of hunting and outdoor products and services” (p. 1). Ignoring that manufacturing, commercial land development, and pollution from tourism and waste disposal contribute to the degradation of animal habitat, the conventional wisdom holds that, through consumer spending, hunting culture “bankroll[s] conservation” (Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation, 2013).
Claiming responsibility for conservation and wildlife management has become increasingly common as public opinion has demanded hunters justify apparently violent recreation (Dahles, 1993; Fine, 2000; Franklin, 1998; Littlefield and Ozanne, 2011). Some critics accuse hunters of disingenuousness, alleging that stewardship makes a convenient disguise for an indefensible desire to kill (Kheel, 1996). While Thorstein Veblen (1973 [1899]: 170–173) acceded some truth to claims that “a love of nature” motivates sport hunting and angling, he perceived the “chief incentives” to derive from vestiges of predatory culture preserved in habits of a pecuniary leisure class. Preoccupied with excesses of the Gilded Age, Veblen ignored nuances in the hunting imaginary of his time (Herman, 2001: 252–253), but his comments illustrate the long-standing tension in how hunters think and act. “It is,” he asserts, “the most noticeable effect of the sportsman’s activity to keep nature in a state of chronic desolation by killing off all living things whose destruction he can compass” (Veblen, 1973 [1899]: 171). Hunting represents a “sportive battle” against a wilderness which must never be fully vanquished (Cartmill, 1993: 30–31).
Hunting and conservationism are deeply entwined. However, the hunting industry thrusts moral and material commitments to an ecological community into conflict with consumption and commodification. The next section elaborates these tensions through a discussion of consumerism.
Consumerism
In consumer culture, markets and consumption mediate social organization, interpersonal relations, and identity formation (Slater, 1997). Zygmunt Bauman (2007) posits that consumer culture has overseen a shift in modern existence. Absent the “solid” continuity furnished by institutions in a society of producers, consumer markets have come to substitute desire for need as the “principal propelling and operating force of society” (p. 28). Consumerism is defined not just by the speed and scope of individuals’ consumption but by the recasting of consumption as the very linchpin of social organization. The “society of consumers,” Bauman argues, “stands for a peculiar set of existential conditions” that establish a consumerist lifestyle as the primary mode of existence for most people (pp. 52–53).
Consumerism and media are intimately bound. Mica Nava (1987) writes, “The consumer society, as a distinctive form of advanced capitalism, relies to an unprecedented degree for its perpetuation upon the media, advertising, spectacle, fashion and the image” (p. 204). Bauman is vague on the periodization of consumer society, and some view the seeds of consumerism germinating throughout the modern era (McCracken, 1990; Slater, 1997). Many historians in the United States have focused on a period of five or more decades starting around 1880, which witnessed expansion and commercialization of communications media and the ascent to power of advertisers and marketers (Leach, 1993; Strasser, 1989). Modern consumption norms matured during this period – alongside a national hunting culture. Another medium institutionalized in the second half of the 19th century was paper money, valued by custom and lacking intrinsic worth (Calder, 1999: 74–80). At the same time as an urbanizing population consumed nature through more media (not just books and magazines, but modes of transportation and commercial lodging and guiding services), people fulfilled needs and wants through a more abstract system of market exchange. Wages and commodities succeeded reliance on the land, and modern marketing celebrated the abundance furnished by industrial capitalism. Gradually, Victorian controls based on family and thrift gave ground to the freedoms and coercions of a consuming life (Cross, 2000).
Consumption is an institution, shaping habits of thought and action within a public culture. Consumerism, as a mode of consumption, entails the continual and rapid acquisition and disposal of goods in accordance with ever deferred desires. Similarly, modern sport hunting is unbound from subsistence needs and responds to potentially insatiable yearnings – there is always hope for a bigger trophy or a better hunt (Hirschman, 2003). However, hunting culture maintains “solid” components, and its avowals of conservation, tradition, and restraint fortify bulwarks against consumerism and its consequences (Knezevic, 2009; Peterson et al., 2010). Indeed, Elizabeth Hirschman (1985) shows that modern economies accommodate many “primitive” consumption behaviors, including spiritual treatment of possessions and ancestral inheritance of rituals – both of which apply to hunting. Yet, it is important to appreciate that consumerism does not describe just individual behaviors but a social and cultural arrangement – “a way of life” (Miles, 1998). Sport hunting, therefore, exists within (and sometimes against) consumerism. This is significant because “desire,” in Bauman’s usage, points to the social nature of needs (Slater, 1997: 2–3). One needs to consume certain things in certain ways to maintain social relationships and to construct an identity. Sport hunting is by definition a particular type of consumption (pursing certain quarry with certain tools, techniques, and motivations), and consumption of its cultural accessories – such as hunting television and camouflage apparel – helps hunters delineate and perform allegiance to this lifestyle. But for most hunters, modern life requires additional forms of commodity consumption in order to conform to the norms of other institutions and to relate to people outside of hunting culture. Hunting is necessarily consumptive, and hunting culture is already mediated by consumer markets; even as hunters value conservation and tradition, existence within a society of consumers constructs needs according to prevailing cultural forms. Privileging “speed, excess and waste,” Bauman (2007) insists, “a consumer society cannot but be a society of excess and profligacy” (p. 86). Furthermore, as Juliet Schor (2007) notes, and as we see in the next section, “even those who choose to live as anticonsumers cannot escape the fact that theirs has become an advertised and marketed lifestyle” (p. 25).
Hunting and/as consumer culture
According to the latest survey by the US Fish and Wildlife Service (2012), hunting expenditures in 2011 totaled US$33.7 billion, with US$14 billion spent on equipment, US$10.4 billion on trips, and US$9.3 billion on other items, including US$100 million on magazines, books, and DVDs (p. 23). One assessment figures that hunters’ consumption contributes an economic “ripple effect” of US$86.9 billion, including US$3.2 billion spent just on food and drinks during hunting outings (Southwick Associates, 2013: 8, 11). After a 30% increase from 1991 to 1996, hunter spending increased modestly in 2001 and declined in 2006 (US Fish and Wildlife Service, 2012: 32). Yet, while the number of hunters increased by only 5% since 2001, up to 13.7 million (the first increase since 1991, and part of a decades-long decline), hunting expenditures grew by 22%. The trend toward fewer people spending more to consume the outdoors reflects demographic shifts. Most hunters report household incomes of US$50,000 or more, with hunting participation highest among households earning US$75,000 to US$99,999 (US Fish and Wildlife Service, 2012: 30). As mentioned above, however, hunting and consumer culture have long been acquainted, and media have been in the middle of the relationship.
The social imaginary within North American sport hunting has come to exist largely through popular media (Dunlap, 1988: 53–54; Loo, 2001: 102, 121). A national hunting culture took root in the United States as communication and transportation infrastructures connected dispersed markets for commerce in industrial manufactures – including print publishing (Herman, 2001: 98–100). That a community of hunters should cohere around values and not social status was a modern invention. The ideologies operative in pre-industrial America – including Protestantism and Enlightenment political economy – awarded no pride of place to either “backwoods hunters” or aristocratic “gentlemen-hunters.” While settlers asserted dominion over nature, and many subsisted by harvesting wild game for food or sale, ambivalence and opportunism, rather than stewardship or cultural heritage, defined hunting for most people. It was in the output of 19th century authors writing for a popular press, later amplified in magazines, film, and television, that a relatively coherent imaginary was assembled selectively from mythologies of heroic and self-sufficient frontier hunters, intrepid hunter-naturalists, and conservation-minded “sportsmen.”
By the end of the 19th century, as industrialism, urbanization, and immigration urged (and responded to) transformations in economic and social conditions, an appetite for reclaiming a mythologized hunting heritage had spread among middle- and upper-class professionals who enjoyed sufficient political leverage to designate the outdoors for consumptive leisure. 3 Ironically, given this nostalgic impulse, modern techniques of management and marketing science helped to replace consumptive practices more typical of pre-industrial cultural and economic forms with a consumer culture that nurtured hospitality industries and a burgeoning retail sector serving the specialized needs of urban – dwelling sport hunters.
Watching these developments intensify, Leopold (1949) wrote derisively of “the gadgeteer, otherwise known as the sporting-goods dealer”: “He has draped the American outdoorsman with an infinity of contraptions” (p. 180) that substitute for outdoor aptitudes. Allowing for moderate use of store-bought implements, and acknowledging movements to restore a less technologically mediated hunt, Leopold conceded that the “net trend … is clearly toward more and more mechanization, with a corresponding shrinkage in cultural values” (p. 181). Even then he glimpsed the hunting industry “moving the factory to the woods or to the marsh,” while the “sporting press” became a “billboard for the gadgeteer” (pp. 181–182). Leopold struggled to set the threshold of “excessive” mechanization, and he scrutinized his own use of contemporary devices; yet, he groped toward a critique of how consumerism was penetrating the culture and social imaginary of sport hunting.
Historian Tina Loo (2001) finds, similarly, that hunting magazines coupled “anti-modern ideas” with a consumerist disposition in which “nature was a commodity, something to be engaged and understood through consuming other commodities” (p. 121). Selling marketers a venue to reach customers is a primary function of sporting periodicals, which have been “remarkably resilient and popular,” even as the population of hunters has declined (Kalof and Fitzgerald, 2010: 112). Television and film afford more exhilarating presentations of hunting adventures. From 1965 to 1986 ABC’s The American Sportsman showcased celebrity athletes and entertainers hunting and fishing around the world. In the 1980s, hunting-goods manufacturers financed programs for direct-to-video markets and cable and satellite distribution, which aimed to educate, entertain, and inform hunters about new products. Starting in the mid-1990s, this content came to sustain an expanding menu of specialty cable channels dedicated to hunting and outdoor programming.
Established in 1993, and available to 20 million households by 2000 through carriage deals with cable systems, C-band satellites, and recently established direct broadcast satellite services (Global Outdoors Inc., 2000: 5, 17), the Outdoor Channel was the first channel devoted primarily to hunting. From early on it promised “entertainment, education, [and] consumer values” focused “exclusively on the traditional outdoor lifestyle” (pp. 5, 9). Today it claims “the most authentic personalities in the outdoor industry,” and touts its “commitment to conservation” – of both hunting habitat and “the country’s cherished outdoor heritage.” The Sportsman Channel, founded in 2003, “embraces the attitude of ‘Red, Wild & Blue America’ – where the American spirit and the Great Outdoors are celebrated in equal measure.” Wild TV was approved by Canadian regulators in 2004. Its stated mission is “To provide the most entertaining hunting, fishing, and outdoor programming that informs, engages and promotes conservation and the tradition of the Outdoorsman lifestyle.” Finally, in 2008, the Pursuit Channel debuted, promising “to create a permanent home for the outdoor industry.” 4
Distributed by major multichannel video providers, these stations reach 30–40 million subscribers in North America. With an “affluent and influential” viewership, this genre is highly prized by media companies and marketers (Dorsey, 2007). While the Outdoor Channel and the Sportsman Channel claim modest prime-time ratings (0.1 and 0.06, respectively), their gross advertising revenues (US$65 million and US$29.9 million in 2014) reflect the value attributed to hunter-consumers. According to SNL Financial’s calculations of “cost per mille” (CPM) rates, in 2013 advertisers paid 72% and 82% above the industry average to reach viewers on the Outdoor Channel and the Sportsman Channel – placing both among the top six US cable channels by CPM rates (Robson, 2015). Consequently, the hunting entertainment market has been consolidated. A year after purchasing the Outdoor Channel for US$268 million in 2013, Kroenke Sports & Entertainment bought InterMedia Outdoors, whose holdings include the Sportsman Channel, 15 outdoors magazines, and 17 websites (Farrell, 2014). More famously, A&E network has exploited hunting culture with enormous success. Since debuting in 2012, Duck Dynasty, which follows the proprietors of Duck Commander (a producer and marketer of game calls, outdoor apparel, and hunting entertainment), generated US$120 million in advertising revenue and US$400 million in merchandise sales by October of 2013 (O’Connor, 2013; Steinberg, 2014). A&E’s Country Buck$ adheres to a similar formula, featuring “the family behind a multi-million dollar wildlife sporting empire.” 5
The expansion of hunting entertainment has coincided with a declining population of hunters, in part, because of the ability of marketers to capture and exploit information about consumers. Investments in data collection and analytics have helped marketers sort their customers into categories that reflect presumed affinities (Turow, 1997). In its first annual filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the former parent company of the Outdoor Channel recognized that hunting television would “benefit from the trend in advertising strategies toward greater market segmentation” and offer a “cost effective means” of targeting “the outdoor life-style market” then valued at US$190 billion (Global Outdoors Inc., 1997: 5–6). Niche content has become increasingly viable as augmented transmission capacity and refinements in audience measurement have altered norms for financing and evaluating television shows. The Outdoor Channel attributes the growth of its subscriber base, and its success at courting national sponsors, to its “affinity group marketing initiatives” and its delivery of a “targeted and valuable audience to advertisers” (Outdoor Channel Holdings, 2005: 6–8). The development of the hunting industry has depended on mutually reinforcing relationships between retailing, marketing, and entertainment media.
Cabela’s, a multichannel retailer and direct marketing pioneer, is a fixture of hunting entertainment. It currently sponsors seven television shows, four web-TV series, a magazine, and (for more than 10 years) a weekly prime-time program block on the Outdoor Channel (p. 7). It markets almost 40 video game titles, facilitating cross-channel branding and synergies. For example, Cabela’s Big Game Pro Hunts, a game released in 2014, features celebrity hunters famous for hosting television programs and endorsing hunting gear. Beyond simulating excitement and instructing viewers about the state of the art, these cultural products tell stories – about what hunting means, the value of nature, and the place of tradition in modern society. Cabela’s uses multimedia spectacles to animate a social imaginary in vivid detail.
Cabela’s
From the ranks of distinguished hunting retailers – including Abercrombie & Fitch and L.L. Bean – Cabela’s stands out as the most spectacular monument to the contradictory values of conservationism and consumerism. Dick and Mary Cabela founded what would become “The World’s Foremost Outfitter” in 1961, selling fishing flies by mail before establishing the original Cabela’s outpost 2 years later in Sidney, Nebraska. The company distributed more than 140 million mail-order catalogs in 2007 (Cabela’s, 2008: 3), before circulation declined because of more precise customer targeting and increased emphasis on in-store and online retailing (Cabela’s, 2009: 45). In 2013, Cabela’s (2014) claimed US$1.56 billion in gross profit from revenues of US$3.6 billion – increases of 148% and 131%, respectively, since its IPO in 2004 – with 62% of revenue coming from its retail business, 27% from direct-to-consumer marketing, and 10% from its financial services, “The World’s Foremost Bank,” which issues branded credit cards from Visa. Nearly half of its merchandising revenue derives from hunting equipment, and it maintains approximately 225,000 stock keeping units. An evangelist for database and direct marketing, it uses all available contrivances “to increase the amount each customer spends on [its] merchandise” (p. 18). Although Cabela’s does not disclose itemized expenditures on media sponsorship, in 2013 it reported US$1.2 billion in selling, distribution, and administrative expenses (p. 40). Most of its US$13 million increase in advertising and marketing costs that year, it attributes to promotion of its stores (p. 41).
Maintaining a single retail location until the mid-1980s, and expanding beyond Nebraska only in 1998 (Cabela’s, 2005b: 16), 64 stores dotted North America at the end of 2014, with 20 more in development (Cabela’s, 2015: 4–5). Guided by strategic insights mined from its “extensive customer database” (Cabela’s, 2005b: 7), Cabela’s (2015) has increased its retail space by almost 425% since 2004 (p. 20), up to 6.9 million square feet (p. 4). Its trademark “large-format destination retail locations” span as much as 246,000 square feet, and in 2013 Cabela’s (2014) outlets claimed US$385 in sales per square foot (p. 36). “Designed to communicate an outdoor lifestyle environment” (Cabela’s, 2005b: 6), these stores are ornamented like amusement parks, with creatively displayed inventories, shooting ranges, cafeterias serving exotic meats, synthetic reproductions of natural habitats, aquariums stocked with sport fish, and necro-menageries of taxidermied game. Like the department stores that emerged in the United States in the late 19th century (Leach, 1993), these emporia excite the imaginations and appetites of hunter-consumers (Bronner, 2008: 239–243). Cabela’s describes its stores in the vocabulary of entertainment and tourism: “Featuring museum-quality wildlife displays and large aquariums, our destination retail stores reinforce our outdoor lifestyle image and provide exciting tourist and entertainment shopping experiences for the entire family.” 6
Cabela’s (2014) claims to stimulate the broader economy, as its stores “often attract the construction and development of hotels, restaurants, and other retail establishments adjacent to these stores” (p. 4). With the promise of commercial land development and regional stimulus, its expansion has been catalyzed by economic incentives. Cabela’s has enjoyed tax relief, direct subsidies, and targeted infrastructural support to augment its outlays of up to US$80 million on new stores (Murphy, 2005). According to one analysis, Cabela’s received US$551 million in state and local assistance from 1997 to 2012 (Reeder, 2012).
Cabela’s first “catalog showroom,” opened in 1991, was “conceived as a monument to sportsmen/conservationists worldwide.” 7 In its first annual report to investors, Cabela’s (2005a) called its retail facilities “a testimony to America’s rich outdoor heritage” (p. 7). Observations recorded during visits to stores in Delaware, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, and Texas illustrate Cabela’s conformity to the discourse and iconography of conservation amidst a consumerist paradise. Traveling to accessible locations, I documented design features and analyzed the ways in which these venues tell stories about hunting culture in America. A large-format destination store in Nebraska provides the main point of reference – though all stores share standard core features with only minor variations and regional flourishes.
Welcomed by employees in blaze-orange hunting vests, shoppers enter the aesthetics of a hunting lodge, with lights imitating candle chandeliers and trophy heads adorning the walls. The store’s centerpiece is “Conservation Mountain,” a diorama showcasing exceptional specimens posed to animate a view of nature “red in tooth and claw,” with a grizzly bear menacing a wolf away from a caribou carcass. Marked by a plaque crediting hunters for the continued abundance of American wildlife, this and other exotic necro-menageries recall the imagery and ethos of hunter-naturalists who appointed themselves “custodians of the continent” in the 19th century (Herman, 2001: 88–92). In Pennsylvania and Texas, a similar sentiment, attributed to Theodore Roosevelt, accompanies displays of record-class trophies: “In a civilized and cultivated country wild animals only continue to exist at all when preserved by sportsmen.” And at each store, patrons exit past a mural promoting Cabela’s Outdoor Fund, a 501(c)(4) organization supporting lobbyists such as the National Rifle Association and the Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation. “It has long been known,” the mural reads, “that there is no greater conservationist than the outdoorsman.” Through this organization, Cabela’s funds the “protection and promotion of this world that we all cherish so much.”
The wall above the entrance in Nebraska is decorated like a marsh, with stuffed Canada geese suspended as if alighting before mannequins hunting from a waterfowling blind. The mannequins’ clothes, equipment, and boat match mid-20th century technologies, contrasting starkly with the cutting-edge devices and scientifically enhanced textiles crowding the shop floor. Other accents mounted on the walls, such as antique game-bags and black-and-white photographs of hunters and their catch, summon the legacy of ancestral heritage, of self-reliant men making do with meager implements. At stores in Pennsylvania and Texas a “talking” mannequin on a hardscrabble camp site says he needs only “a campfire, a trusty rifle, and a good pair of boots” to happily live out his days. As Cain (2009) argues of Cabela’s, “the past serves as a trove of images: the idylls of hunting and fishing that your father or even grandfather knew” (p. 52).
Other installations evoking the conservation of American tradition include a “General Store,” simulating a late 19th century layout, stocked with fudge, syrup, and other snacks. The likewise provincial “Home & Cabin” area for modern interior decorating displays camouflage upholstery, faux-rustic fixtures, wildlife-themed art, and other paraphernalia for communicating a hunting identity. The store also features a cafeteria, the “Conestoga Café,” framed by a large mural of a covered wagon traveling the open plains. Distillations of an imagined past stand in sharp relief from video arcades, laser shooting galleries, and aisle-upon-aisle of consumer electronics. The in-store pageantry distracts from the reality that Cabela’s is a “palace of consumption,” penetrated by market logic and saturated with media (including television screens, interactive graphic displays, and video games). With “its elaborate and enthusiastic project of simulating and retailing every possible aspect of hunting,” Cabela’s “represents blood culture in the high summer of maturity” (Cain, 2009: 52).
Conclusion: Toward consumption studies of hunting
This article has critiqued the establishment of an industry – a sociotechnical system oriented to profit and growth – around sport hunting. The conservative influence of certain salient aspects of hunting culture, such as the conservationist imaginary codified in sporting literature, contends with the transformative forces of consumer capitalism, which urge development of new products, markets, and marketplaces. As industrially produced entertainment and retailing spectacles package tradition with consumer goods, stories about conservation and heritage are mobilized toward economic development and commodification. Like the conventional wisdom in neoclassical economics, which advocates expansion and acceleration, the norms and values of consumerism and the commercial logic of media and marketing are in opposition to a “culture of ecology” (Babe, 2006). A culture of ecology requires that the orthodoxies of business enterprise, as well as the images of well-being that circulate in media content and in our imaginations, are held to account for how people, as individuals and collectives, encounter and affect ecological systems. Leopold (1949) afforded hunters a place in the “biotic” community on the belief that it benefits from the particular disposition toward nature cultivated through hunting: a “perceptive faculty” that nurtures sensitivity to ecological intricacies and contingencies (pp. 173–179). Practiced with restraint, careful attention, and a view to both the past and the future, hunting reinforces moral and material commitments to a community of interdependent organisms and elements.
Rather than condemn hunting, a consumer culture critique might find common ground with Leopold’s directive to appreciate the complexity and scope of the ecological networks in which human culture and economy are embedded. The “perceptive faculty” perhaps offers a needed corrective to fetishistic relationships that define food systems in advanced capitalist societies, epitomized by supermarkets where branded packages conceal product origins. Showcasing abundance and sanitizing production processes, the modern grocery is at once sterile and animated with garish media. If we accept “the idea that alienation between humans and nature is one of the most basic obstacles to sustainability,” Peterson et al. (2010) propose, “hunting has the potential to link humans with natural processes and objects imprecated in food production” (p. 136). By asking of people greater responsibility over their consumer choices and honing a perceptive faculty about food systems, hunting could potentially demystify some of the magic conjured by commodity production (Knezevic, 2009). As Littlefield and Ozanne (2011) report, “hunters are far more intimately linked to their food production than those of us who buy our meat tidily and conveniently packaged in plastic” (p. 356).
Eating meat harvested from nature is one “traditional” value frequently invoked in defense of hunting. Portraying their diets as authentic and unmediated, hunters claim a moral victory over detractors. Deriding non-hunters for ignorance of how packaged foods reach market and for dependence on industrial food systems, hunters dress their pursuits in frontier rhetoric of self-reliance (Dizard, 2003: 90, 203–204). Ostensibly living off the land, hunters are closer to nature and further from markets and modernity. They position themselves against what Leopold (1949) called a “true modern,” “separated from the land by many middlemen and gadgets” (p. 224).
However, this portrait may capture potential as much as reality. In certain circumstances, game meat will require less processing, packaging, and transportation. Attentive hunters might appreciate their place in an ecosystem and cause minimal disruption. However, sport hunters and “true moderns” may differ only superficially, and they mingle in the consumerist culture that Bauman (2007) sees defining society today. Hunters using advanced technologies – weaponry, optics, clothing, lures – cannot claim independence from mass markets and modern industry. In addition to the solid waste from gadgets’ plastic packaging, in some situations game meat may require more per-unit fuel consumption than commercially produced meat. A claim to being more in tune with nature by hunting will be undermined if the practice contributes to despoliation of plants, soil, water, and air. Without considering the deep connections binding an ecological community, conservationist claims of the hunting industry are unworthy of Leopold’s land ethic.
The issues at stake in the consumptive aspects of hunting dovetail with themes more commonly explored in research on consumer culture. We should include hunting in intersecting discussions about food systems (Bossy, 2014; Press and Arnould, 2011; Sahakian and Wilhite, 2014), authenticity and self-reliance (Campbell, 2005; Portwood-Stacer, 2012), and the environmental impacts of consumerism (Soper, 2007). Hunting culture also exists through distinctions of taste that signal social and cultural status (Bourdieu, 1984; Holt, 1997) and the shared values, rituals, and commitments that comprise a social imaginary (Taylor, 2002). These issues offer countless research opportunities. While exemplary studies examine how hunters interpret their activities (Dahles, 1993; Dizard, 2003; Littlefield and Ozanne, 2011), many questions remain about the broader consumption practices of sport hunters. What do hunters eat apart from wild game? How do their shopping patterns compare with other consumers? Are they concerned about environmental sustainability in the production and consumption of hunting equipment? There is much more to know about how sport hunting fits into the culture and political economy of consumer capitalism.
As Leopold’s work demonstrates, hunting and conservation are compatible, and their attendant values and practices can help us understand and respond to aspects of consumer culture. Economic and cultural conditions have conspired, however, to aggravate contradictions in this relationship. The hunting industry has officiated the marriage of sport hunting and consumerism. Putting commerce before community, this is a marriage for money.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.