Did you ever hear the phrase “Write what you know about?” Well the text below (in italics) is from a blog that I recently stumbled across. I won’t identify the blogger here because there is no need to do so, but for people that love the outdoors, (and for many of those people hunting is an activity that is included with a love of the outdoors) there is a need to stand firm against the spread of negative propaganda by possibly well-intentioned but obviously uninformed individuals.

Ernest Hemingway’s .577 Westley Richards double rifle was auctioned off some time ago, and the buzz created by the impending sale apparently spurred this blogger to write his piece. (The bloggers words are italicized)

Ernest Hemingway, considered one of the greatest modern writers of the Twentieth Century. His prose has been accused of creating a whole new way to write novels, or a whole new way to ruin them. Either way, Papa Ernie is a literary giant.

Ironic that the writer would start out by praising Hemingway as a writer but then launching into a poorly thought-out and unfairly one-sided diatribe on hunting. Like most things in life, hunting has positive and negative aspects, and it is unfortunate that sometimes the actions of the people who participate in the activity genuinely create the negativity, but while the general perception of the sport is greatly affected by the diversity of the individuals involved, uninformed non-participants are probably the greatest cause of a poor image. The true hunter is a committed conservationist while the consumerist hunter seeks to shoot the most animals for the least cost, and it is patently unfair to tar them both with the same brush. If you are willing to lionize Hemingway the writer then you owe it to Hemingway the man before you start judging the actions of Hemingway the outdoorsman.

Hemingway kept an elephant gun on his mantle, and he wasn’t afraid to use it.

Let’s begin with the term “Elephant Gun.” To simplify, beginning with the pre-colonial period and into the nineteenth century, ivory hunting expanded from a historical means of exchange for the slave trade into an economic base of multinational commerce. To service the resultant demand, soldiers, adventurers, and sportsmen going afield found that the large bore weapons necessary as regards the ability to kill dangerous game such as elephants were also limited by the velocities obtainable with the black powder propellants in use at the time.

And it wasn’t just elephants that gave concern, as the list of dangerous creatures that might be encountered by these adventurers turned entrepreneurs included buffalo, hippo, lion, leopard, crocodile and rhino to name a few. There was always of course the odd hostile human to be encountered, and in any and all cases the larger the weapon the better the perceived killing ability. Remember that this was during the nineteenth century, and much of what is taken for granted today was little more than a dream back then. Technological limitations required that simple approaches solved problems, and when it came to things like guns, bigger was in fact usually better.

This is no longer necessarily the case. Modern rifles and extensive studies in ballistics have shown that accuracy of shot placement is more beneficial in assuring a quick kill than an oversized bullet. W.D.M. Bell, a well known elephant hunter during the golden age wrote pioneering works about the ability to kill elephants with relatively small caliber weapons given correct shot placement.

Nevertheless, phraseology produced to satisfy the demands of a population hungry for tales of adventure probably led to terminology including wording such as “Elephant Gun” [which might have been coined around the same time as the common descriptive “Dark Continent,]” a phrase typically attributed but to my knowledge not verified as coined by Henry Morton Stanley sometime around 1878.

Anyone who has spent any time under the African sun will tell you that the continent is anything but dark. Similarly, the term “Elephant Gun” probably was and certainly remains little more than literary candy for the marketplace sweet tooth, and most shooters and sportsmen retaining any level of knowledge  do not engage in such pedestrian language. If you casually use the term “elephant gun” to refer to a large bore rifle in any capacity beyond a comical reference, you probably don’t know what you are talking about. This particular rifle was used by EH on his second safari, while during his first safari he used a double .470 Nitro, which, (if you read Green Hills of Africa), he apparently couldn’t shoot well and resultantly didn’t like very much. In any event, the idea that this rifle marked time above the mantle between killing sprees is ludicrous. Historical documentation suggests that he obtained it from a friend to augment his submarine hunting battery on board the Pilar during WWII.

In fact, one of Hemingway’s favorite pastimes was visiting exotic locales and shooting large animals;

Hemingway is well documented to have been a lifelong sportsman, but he wrote of fishing and hunting in the Americas as much if not more as anywhere else in the world. Places like Idaho and Michigan are not typically described as exotic. Hemingway’s love affair with Spain seems never focused on hunting but more on the wine and the culture and the bullfighting, and while his love of big game fishing is concentrated in the deep blue of the gulfstream which may in fact be correctly described as exotic, fishing, to most people at least, is not the same as hunting. This may have to do with the difficulties involved in anthropomorphizing a fish as opposed to a terrestrial mammal, but nevertheless most non-hunters typically practice a double standard in their judgment of fishing as opposed to hunting, made easier by the fact that all that water conveniently washes the blood away so that we don’t have to see it.

Hemingway wrote about hunting sheep, lion, buffalo, and many other animals, but if you take the time to read his writing, he does not seem to ever revel in the killing of any animal. He frequently declared his love of hunting, but also often made references to the periods of poignant reflection brought on by the death of any animal, which to me is an extension of his lifelong obsession with the subject of the inevitable.

creatures we now consider endangered and in need of protection. One of these animals is the African elephant.

African elephants face their greatest pressure from loss of habitat and poaching to fuel the continued demand for ivory. While numbers continue to shrink and overall range has diminished, today in many regions surviving herds are considered overpopulated. To claim they are endangered is a false statement if made solely in reference to hunting. Elephants may in fact be endangered on a macro scale, but they face their greatest threats in the form of human overpopulation and the subsequent loss of habitat.

Indian or Asian Elephants are numerically considered endangered, but for the same reasons, and to my knowledge there is no commercial market for the trophy hunting of Asian Elephants aside from the comparitively minimal ivory that they carry.

Hemingway killed himself in 1961 with a gun.

“With a gun.”

Isn’t this detail rather superfluous? If you kill yourself does it really matter how you do it? Isn’t the tragedy that a man or woman feels that this is their one best option?

And is it just me or does anyone else detect the insinuation that had EH not had access to a gun he might not have killed himself? For a man that spent his life hunting and shooting, in what manner would a rational person reasonably expect him to kill himself? Would it be better if he had poisoned himself? Would we personify him as the ultimate Alpha male if he had weighted himself down and walked into the lake? No, probably not. Killing [anything] with a gun is a brutal thing. Let’s keep the dream alive by emphasizing that not only did he do it but that he made a mess at the same time.

In his day, there wasn’t such a huge stigma about shooting rare animals.

EH killed himself in 1961. Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962. The Land Fellowship, a group based in Ontario and one of the earliest organizations formed to promote sustainable agriculture was established in the early 1950’s. Aldo Leopold published A Sand County Almanac in 1949. Overton Price published The Land we Live In – The Book of Conservation in 1911. The Boy Scouts of America were founded in 1910. The Sierra club was founded in 1892. The Boone and Crocket Club was founded by Teddy Roosevelt and George Grinnell in 1887. Thoreau published Walden in 1854. Pliny the elder finished his Natural History in 37 Books in 77 AD.

Conservation of wildlife and wild lands has a long and deep history.

Hemingway liked to pose with his recent trappings. He would crouch down, bend at the knees, prop himself against his large-caliber gun, and smile while the animal lay bleeding and dying behind him.

First of all, no hunter poses for photographs with an animal that is still alive, much less a dangerous one. Even the most ethically barren dumbass knows to make sure the quarry is dead when approaching it. This sentence is little more than sophomoric drivel, obviously penned by someone with more interest in a playground level argument than in rational discourse.

Things have changed. Hemingway knew this. He may have naturally lived another 20 or 30 years, but he knew his era had come to an end.

This is speculation at best. Most discussions concur that Hemingway, suffering from lifelong depression well as numerous physical ailments later in life, and that he chose to end his time on earth rather than live in a state of little more than declining existence.

Some see this as a cowardly exit while others take the position that he was the ultimate bad-ass, to the level that even death would be on his terms. Whatever his reasons, rare is the circulated opinion that attributes his suicide to so vague an observation as that his era had come to an end.

Today, it’s almost universally condemned to shoot and kill an elephant. These large, graceful animals are quickly becoming extinct.

No they’re not. At least not African elephants. And what pressure elephants face from hunting is minimal compared to that from poaching for the elicit ivory trade and loss of habitat due to exploding human populations. Western civilization claims a lot of high ground regarding human rights and conservation, but these demands dare not encroach upon the cheap material goods supplied to our markets by the same geographic and cultural regions that consume more and more ivory every year. The unsustainable demand comes mostly from China, Thailand, Vietnam, and much more of what we know as the orient, but nowhere is it “universally condemned” to continue to shop for the lowest prices.

And what the writer glaringly fails to mention is that EH never killed an elephant. For that matter he never smoked cigars either, and yet popular culture makes constant reference to Hemingway and the archetypal Cubana.

It is in only two stories that Hemingway makes reference to the actual killing of elephants, both are posthumously published novels. Under Kilimanjaro, and The Garden of Eden. In The Garden of Eden , the story of the killing of the elephant is told with clear reference to a significant level of reservation.

Individual readers may interpret the words and their meanings differently, but there is certainly no glorification or machismo involved. In Green Hills of Africa, Hemingway speaks (in character) with the plantation foreman Kandisky about his willingness to kill an elephant, “If it was big enough.” The character of Kandisky, interestingly enough, is well presented with an alternate viewpoint on hunting, demonstrating the value in discussion amongst individuals with diverse opinions.

By expressing (with no apologies) his willingness to kill and elephant given certain conditions, specifically no less the size of the tusks, Hemingway seems to affirm his general position on hunting in that man as an apex predator hunts as an inevitable fact of life, and that such hunting has little impact on the balance of nature by the individuals engaging in such pursuits.

Ultimately, people for whom the idea of killing is unfathomable while vegetarianism is an unrealistic option are only afforded the choice not to hunt or to kill because of the efforts of those that are willing to do so, and while this is not an unreasonable compromise it provides no foundation for claims or morality based on principals.

Humans who once hunted these animals are now charged with protecting them.

Hasn’t this always been the case? If we go as far back as the bible doesn’t it say that man was given dominion over the earth? Okay, so let’s say you don’t believe in the bible, some Indian texts from 1000 BC or earlier list references to names of flora and fauna. For most people, especially in this country, we take for granted the availability of food, but it’s only about a day or two before you’ll eat just about anything you can get your hands on. If you want to claim that you won’t kill an animal as a trophy then be prepared to justify killing it for food. The animal is just as dead.

GoDaddy Founder and CEO Bob Parsons posted a video on the web in late March, 2011, showing himself killing and posing with the body of an African elephant.

It didn’t take long before protests erupted. Blogs railed against Parsons. Animal rights organizations put out information on how to boycott or cancel subscriptions to GoDaddy within hours of the posting.

Now, I truly believe Parsons is an intelligent man. He must be to create an easy-to-use and successful internet product such as his.

The strange part is he was not able to predict the backlash against his company. I’m sure GoDaddy will survive the incident, a little tarnished. This occurrence demonstrates a larger truth. Having intelligence does not mean you have foresight, but lack of foresight is never intelligent.

Why does the writer equate a successful company with the intelligence of one individual? There are plenty of stupid people in the world that have money. Some may have inherited it, some may have worked for it, some married it. Parsons may in fact be intelligent, but then again maybe he’s stupid and just got lucky. Why does the writer truly believe it? What are we missing here?

By the way, Hemingway’s elephant gun is up for sale. I would encourage its new owner to keep it on the mantle and not point it at any endangered species.

The gun in question is a Westley Richards .577 Nitro that sold at auction in 2011 for over 300,000.00. That’s a lot of money, especially for a rifle that should have valued at the time for about 100K or less. We can only attribute the additional cost to the intangible value associated with someone’s deep seated desire to get a little closer to the man, or possibly for investment purposes but ultimately the presumed potential return would be seated in the same logic.

But if you take the time to really read Hemingway, you’ll find a very complex individual who didn’t seem to covet many material things. The Pilar might have been at the top of that list, but Hemingway is known to have bought and sold guns, received them as gifts and given many away. The story of his favorite shotgun, a Winchester Model 12 that he is purported to have shot so many shells with as to have worn it out, making numerous references to the speed and smoothness of action, then disposed of it by selling it, doesn’t seem to indicate a man with a deep seated sense of sentimentality for guns.

Guns, like musical instruments, can be mass produced products or works of art, combinations of wood and steel brought together by the finest craftsmen, but for most individual’s purposes they are tools of the trade. The difference of course is that a cheaply manufactured musical piece still has to perform with reasonable sound quality, but a shotgun that sells for 50 thousand dollars doesn’t necessarily shoot ten times better than one that sells for five. It may not even perform as well to begin with. The skill of the shooter or the musician always plays a part, but maybe less so with regard to weapons.

This particular double rifle is equipped with a single trigger, which (to educate the unfamiliar) seems to be a paradox of gunmaking. The purpose of a double rifle is essentially a combination of reliability, safety, and killing or stopping power. By essentially holding two guns in your hand, you have the quickest availability of two shots combined with absolute reliability. Should you encounter a malfunction or misfire with the first barrel you have a fail-safe backup with the second, but a single trigger mechanism negates this all-important purpose. A purpose-built double rifle will have two triggers. Anything else is a tarted-up fake.

I personally have a favorite shotgun. It’s not the nicest one I own but it’s the one with which I shoot best, and because of this I hope that it means something to someone one day, maybe one of my children or maybe a grandchild. But beyond family ties there seems little that transcends from one person to another through ownership of a material object. I doubt that a person like Hemingway would ever want to own a rifle or shotgun because of its historical connection to someone famous. If he were alive today he would probably tell the buyer of this rifle to stop being such a pussy and get his own goddamn rifle and make his own goddamn history with it.

The question for many of Ernest Hemingway is that he may have truly been the epitome of the alpha male or little more than a braggart and a bully with a deeply seated sense of insecurity. The details of history mostly get clouded over more with every passing year, and today Hemingway’s persona is as large as ever so we as citizens of the 21st century will never know for sure. We only know as truth that which we choose to believe.

I think that EH struggled throughout his life trying to prove more to himself than to anyone else, and in today’s culture of self-promotion through things like reality TV, where the individual that bought that rifle and was featured using it on a hunting program is a reflection of the (sadly) diminishing integrity of humanity that so populates current trends which showcase the manifestation of this minimized ability for finding value in oneself by vicarious means and material items. I believe EH once said something to the effect that there is little to the killing of an animal, and since I certainly would take this as an axiom then there certainly must be less in the glorification of the killing of anything because the weapon involved once belonged to someone famous. People in history are only famous because we choose that they will be. Historical figures mean nothing to the geese, or the tigers, or the viruses. They will survive for good or bad only as long as we do. The catch-22 here is that you might strive to live your life in such a way that you become the ideal man (in your own mind) that other people want might to emulate, but at the same time it proves so much the better as regards the individual contribution and worth of those people that go out into the world on their own terms and create their own impact. The one thing that the writer got close to correct (if you ask me) was the idea of putting this rifle on a mantle. EH’s rifle should be put on display, if only to serve as a reminder to all of us to live our lives while we can, because all too soon it will be over, one way or another.