Closer to Home (6)
Concluding Thoughts
Experiencing Rustic Living & it's Benefits
Another fading heritage we have is ‘Rustic Living.’ This
includes cooking, I do not mean the ability to cook which is rather handy these
days, but the type of rustic cooking that includes everything, from hunting,
butchering, meat preservation, conserving water, gathering wood for fuel to preparation etc. Rustic living is a means of
reconnecting ourselves to our food sources that involves killing, for most
consumers these days have made it possible to think that meat from the grocery
does not involve this seeming cruelty. This also involves the kind of
comradeship that is embroiled in it, so that as a whole, it nestles not only
true art and science but more notable is the purposeful activity and a
meaningful experience. Rustic living is filling our life with experiences not
filling it with belongings; it is to have stories to tell and not materials to
show. This is precisely the reason why many are getting back to camping,
hiking, mountain climbing etc. It is the idea to pause and reflect after being
in the majority side; it is to go off-the-grid. In essence, it is an attraction
of a more evocative environment and not what is the ‘in thing’ or ‘what’s out
there’ in our consumer society today. It is to post those long hours just to ‘keep
up with the Joneses’ which leaves us with less time for the things that really
matter in life like friends, family, or community engaging in an activity to
obtain the basic necessities in life like food, clothing and shelter. Besides, the best way to fix our fragile
ecosystems is to stop our sickening hunger of over consumerism, for by and
large, everything we consume basically comes from nature itself, and all our
consumer wastes will eventually end up there also.
Hence, for people who love dogs, there is no better retrieve
to the charm of rustic living than to go hunting with our dog, to start to
train them to recapitulate their instinctive traits. It is also to get involved
in this emerging social movement to help our next generation to have a taste of
a simpler form of life beyond our consumer culture. A direct life instead of an
obscure one. It is to patronize in thought and deed, a more sustainable shift
in conservation strategy and the potential viability of a permitted hunting
system here in the Philippines rather than advocating to destroy our heritage. Besides,
studies have proven over and again that ‘habitat loss’ through industrial
innovation and urbanism is responsible for more imperil and extinction of
species than hunting itself. In addition, who else would want to care about dog
utility, handling the land and its habitat than the very people who want to
preserve this legacy? Yes, action matters but it must primarily be a matter of
one’s frame of mind and a set of attitudes.
This article is not an advocacy that we become hermits, neither
is it masking the potentiality of hunting’s adverse impact towards our
environment when abused, but it is endorsing ‘recreational hunting’ as a means of
not only a tool kit to make people savor a more viable makeshift against the complexities
of our contemporary society in a more expressive manner than any other
recreational activity, to thus allow us to
understand how this role has changed, as rural societies become urbanized and so
consumer oriented and its down side effect. It also means, hunting not for
subsistence, not as commercial harvesting akin to our intensive agricultural
practices, or commercial harvesting of wildlife for profit, but facilitating a well-managed
habitat as a more doable solution to our depleting forestry in exchange of the massive land urbanization of our native
land.
