Gernia vs RotE *spoilers all Hobb books*

[Chrischa]

Ok I guess I'm off topic, but that sounds like an interesting book. Is it saying that the solider is in direct conflict with nature, or the hunter? (or both)
Hard to think of a hunter in direct conflict with nature? (like, a lot of nature IS hunting.....)

I'll just slip off-topic with you. Hey, it's a very important theme in the book, so we're allowed!

I've mentioned this book before on these forums; An Unnatural Order by Jim Mason. I'm not going to put down a summary of the entire book here but I'd recommend reading it. I wouldn't know if everything he writes is true; I've not read a counter-argument so I don't know enough about it. But it all makes so much sense.

He claims that humans were not supposed to be hunters and that when we started, 40.000 years ago, it was to test man's strenght against the powers of nature who were at that point all around us. Before that, our religions focussed on nature and on the idea that everything around us had a soul. But when we started killing our - then - equals, animals, the resulting feelings of shame and guild had to be resolved in many ways. By hatred, disdain, passing the blame, rituals of being purified from blame, or rituals that god-appointed certain people to kill.
It's a theory closely tied in with Joseph Cambell's work on rituals, another one I'd recommend.
He says that the religions who followed this area focussed on shifting man from blame, by having a god who resides above the Earth giving man the right to rule over all other living things, and taking away the idea that animals have souls - thus diminishing guild.

The book has a lot more to say about man's resulting attitude towards woman and the effect all this has had on our way of thinking, but that's too much to go into now.

Basically, to answer your question; hunting is indeed part of nature but only if it's part of the circle of life. Meat-eating animals are meant to hunt, by doing so they in their turn have their place in nature. But humans stepped out of that circle when we turned our vegetarian bodies to learning to digest meat. (We've done that by now; man is an omnivour and our bodies have adapted to eating animal products.) And that is why human hunting is in conflict with nature and why warriors and soldiers evolved from hunters; their feelings of hate, rage, guild and shame eventually turned against their own species.
I know there are many people now who don't feel that way about animals at all, but you have to remember he's talking about the way of thinking of 40.000 years ago, when man first became "intelligent" enough to reflect on their place in the world, when nature was the only world they knew, and when animals were the closest related things to humans on this planet. To kill them, back then, was like kiling your own god.

Completely off-topic now: it's the thing that has always bothered me about eating meat... there's nothing wrong with it in itself, but humans have somewhere taken away the honour and dignity between hunter and prey. The way we treat animals is fundamentally wrong.

Anyway, to turn this back on-topic; I wonder if RH's discription of just how much food there is to be found in this forest is entirely possible. I'm sure she's done her research, but it seems like an awful lot of people to be sustained by not that much land, not to mention these Great Ones who just eat... and eat.
I know we'd probably be blown away by just how much food there can be found if you just gather and aren't too picky about taste, but still... .