March 6, 2018

One of the reasons I tend to abhor Britain – not the British – can be summarized in the doves in my yard: the upper classes turned hunting into a shooting sport, into skeet with live animals killed not because they were needed for food but because they made decent targets when dogs drove them into the air. Using live things for sport. Fox hunting is not quite the same: it’s more the ritualization of ‘pest control’ into an upper class event for horsemanship. The class system. It’s also why so many British are animal lovers past all cares about people: the way the upper classes treated animals, the way they treated them as part of their upper class rituals and not as living, sentient things, the more some in the other classes saw them as living, sentient things whose rituals should be respected. It is that last which is key to understanding: the lack of respect for ritual and the respect for ritual inherent in a class system express in specific ways in the upper classes versus the lower but they both express. In this example, respect for ritual can mean placing animals first, the ritualization of the rituals of animals, or it can mean ritualizing animals into upper class rituals. Rituals spreads into ‘respect for animal ritual’ across to ‘treating animal as part of human ritual’, meaning the layer unfolding of respect for animal ritual in a class system will tend to shift them into a preserve maintained for those rituals. Things like this in Britain have obviously changed substantially but the class system’s effect is still massive. One effect is a continuing inability to understand how that is true, which is what I abhor about Britain.