Elizabeth Roy - The Tender Carnivore, via the Doubting Game

In the course of our discussion of Shepard’s The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game, I’ve decided that I’m not convinced that Shepard’s ideas are something I agree with. Much of what Shepard says is based on fact and also makes sense, but that does not of course make it right. I’m even more skeptical because some of what he says is blatantly not true (according to other sources I’ve found). For example, when talking about heart attacks, he says that women are less prone to them than men – which, according to the CDC and AHA, isn’t true at all. Shepard takes an evolutionary standpoint, saying that men are meant to and created to hunt, thanks mostly to evolution. He believes that in deference to that, we should still be hunters. However, why shouldn’t we go the opposite direction? If Shepard is right, many times in the past we would have ‘decided’ (whether consciously or not) that we want to hunt. Because we hunted, our bodies changed. Now, however, it seems as though we’ve decided that we don’t want to hunt. What’s wrong with deciding not to hunt and changing our bodies using technology in a way that will fit more with not hunting? We’re already doing that to some degree with heart and blood pressure medications, not to mention surgery. And much though Shepard and others would say that we shouldn’t use those, at a certain point almost everyone agrees that they’re good for society and individuals. So what’s the benefit of going backwards, and going back to hunting society? Shepard argues that our violence, aggressive crimes, and teenage-parent disagreements are all because of our innate hunting aggression. But why go back to hunting instead of trying to weed out and get rid of our aggressive tendencies? All of the organized efforts to do this seem to have been terrible human rights violations (anything from our eugenics movement to fictional portrayals like the Pax in Serenity) but if Shepard is talking about a complete overhaul of society anyway, why not create a society in which there isn’t any need for aggressive crimes instead of trying to go back to being hunters? People with aggressive tendencies kind of take themselves out of the gene pool anyway; those with hostile Type A personalities (which unfortunately includes me) are much more likely to get heart attacks and have other health problems. I just don’t see why Shepard thinks that hunting is necessarily the answer.