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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.