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The Moral Case for Hunting: Why the Hunter Cares More for Creation Than Any Activist w/ Sebastian Morello · Sword&Spade

• Jason M. Craig (03:31.96) Welcome friends back to the sword and spade podcast, the podcast that was born out of the world's best Catholic men's magazine, seven years in existence. If you're not a subscriber, please become one now. One of the things we often do is propose works that men ought to be reading that have depth and meaning for their work, specifically men, specifically fathers in bringing. Dominion back to their domain I eat to actually build a local culture worth Protecting and worth cultivating with the spade protecting with the sword cultivating with the spade and with us today is a guest I'm extremely excited about, Sebastian Morello, who's written a number of books and a college professor in England. And he wrote a book called The Woodland Philosophy, Meditations on Hunting, Hiking and Holiness, which I'm going to propose ferociously to our listeners that they pick this up. Sebastian, I'm to go ahead and tell you I had to go hunt this book down. And I use the word hunt on purpose because my son. Who is our resident hunter has recovered a family tradition? And I say recovered it meaning it wasn't long ago that the stories of my family revolved around fields in hunting and and like many of us Whether it was music or hunting or any other worthwhile act of culture. We're lost Just recently and just you know, the last generation and a half and he's recovering it. It's been beautiful I handed him your book And he said well, I skipped all the stuff in the beginning Jason M. Craig (05:14.04) The the intros and also I said no, no, no, no, you have to start back at the beginning I went to hunt it back down. I'm only about halfway through it But it is it's it's very important to our listeners especially because the recovery of culture particularly I think as men with our sons with our children We hear calls to do that and men will often respond rightly, well, what do you want me to do? What exactly do you want me to do? Because in our modern society, it's really the answer is, well, here's what you're supposed to purchase to do something worth doing. And you have a very different take on it and your experience with your upbringing in the wilds, as you said, and through hunting. But before that, I'd like to ask you, you dedicated this book to Sir Roger Scruton, the late. as your mentor and your friend. And one of the things you might not be aware of this magazine come from an apostolate, Catholic apostolate called fraternists, which is brotherhoods of men around the United States, mostly that see and understand their necessary duty of forming the next generation, which means not just giving them information, but initiating them into a culture. So mentoring becomes a big part of that. I'd like to just start by asking what, how did you find yourself calling Roger Scruton a mentor and what did that mean and What was it like to have him as a mentor? What do you what do you mean by that? Sebastian Morello (06:49.319) Well, I got to know Roger, I mean first, just thanks so much for the nice things you've said about my book and for having me on, it's really nice to talk with you. Yes, I got to know Roger when I was working, well volunteering really, for a project in London called the Benedictus Project, which was to encourage the study of Catholic liberal arts in London, which unlike in the US where you have a very impressive tradition of studying the Catholic liberal arts tradition, we don't really have that here. There were some excellent Catholic schools that are not so excellent these days, but they had a richer tradition of that. But that's largely fallen away. In any case, one of the main figures involved in that project was Roger Scruton. So I got to know him through that. And he at that time had been invited to found a master's degree in philosophy at Buckingham University, which is England's only private university. So which means that Buckingham has a history of, I suppose, permitting freer thought than a lot of the more institutionalised universities. So he invited me to do this Masters with him and I should probably explain that I was just completing my BA at that time because I left school in my teens, I never went to university, I went off and worked. And it was only much later on in my 20s when I thought I should go and get a degree. So I did one distance learning while I was working at a publishing house in London. And so I was completing this bachelor's degree in philosophy when I got to know Roger, he said, continue your studies, do a masters with me. And he conducted this master's degree from a private dining room. Sebastian Morello (09:16.511) in what's called the Reform Club, which is this private gentleman's club on Palmao in London, a great historical area. And he would have these tutorials, these seminars, over the course of a meal with lots of lovely Bordeaux red wine. And he kind of created this Platonic symposium. there in central London and we would attend these dinners and I did my master's degree with him and that was very successful and we developed a kind of I think it's not too much to say a friendship and he wrote a very nice endorsement for my first book on the platonic themes in the ontology of Thomas Aquinas and he said why don't you do a doctorate? as well under my supervision. So then I went on and did that. And it was during that period that he became very ill, so he was supervising me as his health was waning. yeah, in those final years, you know, a close bond was made and I really do deem him my mentor. And of course, I don't know what it's like in America, but A lot of field sporting writing here is, you it's fine, there's nothing wrong with it, but it remains at a kind of very superficial level. people write articles about the next impressive development in shotgun technology, people might write reflections about, you know, I caught this really great big fish over the weekend and it was very exciting or whatever. But very rarely do you find sporting writers going very deep into the reasons as to why, when the modern world doesn't necessitate it, why they would try to enter a wild environment and try to find themselves wild food and bring that back for themselves and for their families. Or indeed, you know, for those who are, we have a Sebastian Morello (11:43.872) long tradition here in the United Kingdom of game bird shooting. There's an argument to say these aren't really wild birds, know, French partridge or pheasant, for example, these birds are what are called put down, they're released into the wild and reared in the wild for the sake of being able to shoot them and bring home a brace and cook that meat. So it's a very contrived form of hunting, but then that raises the question, why would you want to try to contrive a situation in which you have this experience of being a hunter? And very, very rarely do sporting writers ask themselves these deeper philosophical questions as to, you know, now we are no longer hunter gatherers, we are no longer Bushmen, our lives and the lives of our little tribe, you know, does not depend. on a successful hunt, why am I creating these situations in which I go and do this at all? That's a very deep question about what it is to be fully human and how we relate to nature and what the landscape means to us and the kind of dangers that might be entailed by losing that connectivity. So what was so wonderful about spending time with Roger Scruton was that he was thinking about these questions all the time. And of course he wrote this wonderful book on hunting, it's called, which I quote quite a lot in my own book, where he's trying to philosophically reflect at a deeper and deeper level on the importance of hunting. And he had many of the fears that I have, that we're going to get a class of politician or a class of power holder that is going to emerge. with very, very little connection with the landscape, with the land, with knowledge of habitats, with the complexity of what the natural world is. And they're going to see hunting as something that they simply don't understand. They feel very uncomfortable with. It's some sort of club and they're not part of it. And the appropriate response to that is to just stamp on it repeatedly until it's extinguished from the world. And Sebastian Morello (14:08.222) You know, we're facing as a hunting community, we are facing a lot of challenges in that regard, particularly on this side of the Atlantic, I'm afraid to say. So I think there's an imperative on people who do have that connection and who do hunt and who do shoot and who have had those experiences and have been formed by them to find ways of articulating. So Roger made a very great attempt at that with that very important book on hunting. this is Woodland Philosophy as My Little Attempt. Jason M. Craig (14:50.572) Right. That's beautiful because it sounds like he maybe gave intellectual framework and experience in a form. And even as you just described it, he invited, I think that's the best act of a mentor is to actually invite them into a life, right? Instead of thinking, well, I'm going to go out and sort of impose something. I don't know. I'm going to do something to this raw material. My mentee, he invited you into something that you knew something of, obviously. In your experience, so that's a good segue then to my question because it was fascinating to read one your intro Letting me as an american know you have a lot more words to describe different types of hunts We just we just say hunting and you you have all sorts of other vocab. Well, what are you hunting? Where are you hunting? How are you hunting? Because each one of those has a different one but you Really spoke to me because I I was Sebastian Morello (15:30.367) Yeah. Jason M. Craig (15:46.06) I can say I became a man in the countryside of North Carolina, which I consider my, my home, but I was a boy in a city, Cincinnati, Ohio, but I lived, across the street from, you know, woods, acres and acres of woods. I lived in between two section eight houses, which I don't know if that means anything to you, but it's what we would call the hood, the ghetto. but then across those kind of this rough and tumble, but then right across the street was the wild and, I'm a convert to Christianity and Catholicism and I credit the time in the woods with making God obvious to me and not something I needed a whole lot of cajoling intellectually to understand that there's a God that is good, that loves me. It was obvious. And in the intro by Mr. Martin, he says, There is something in your book, I'm reading from the book here, Woodland philosophy. There's something about participation in the rhythms and works of the creation that inspires intuitions that are unmistakably spiritual in nature. For it is there that one can on occasion discover the wild of God. And then later you make that case multiple times. about just the need. You say here, then out in the wild, God's magical voice speaks in his emanated creation, the deceptive domain of intellectual idea play is banished and reality floods my soul in these aromidical ramblings, which. If anyone thinks that this is not esoteric at all, this is very on the earth reality. So maybe in your own upbringing and experience, and I know this later plays out in your philosophical work, which, you know, I know lots of men who would just, I don't, I don't need degrees in philosophy. That's, that's not real. And you, you're actually making the case. No, you're, probably a really good philosopher because you think that way. So. Jason M. Craig (17:51.818) Tell us more about in your writings and in your experience. What is it? You know your keen interest in realism. Why is it necessary in this age and to me that's an intuitive truth. It's necessary in this age of you know technocracy and and really being completely walled off from nature. Why is that such an essential? thing that we need not only to think rightly, even to be able to grapple with and grasp that there is a good God. Sebastian Morello (18:25.908) Yes, it's a very good question. I think that the modern world is almost defined by being a kind of great, tempestuous ocean of ideological thinking. And this is what makes it so dangerous. People are tyrannised not only by their own ideas and the ideas of others, but by this ongoing... battle that's going on in an arena of competing ideas and these ideas are very frequently detached from human experience, from reality actually. And it doesn't take a great deal of know, and intellectual history to realize why this would be the case. You know, you have, particularly in, what you might call the middle modern period with figures like Galileo and Descartes appearing. Galileo who retrieves Democrité and atomism and he reduces the entire world to colourless, scentless atoms and of course then it only takes half a generation before people start saying well then why do I see a world that is full of colour and beautiful scents and a world of light around me? So those, as Shaftesbury said, those are actually secondary qualities, they're not primary qualities, they're secondary qualities that don't inhere in the things they inhere in your mind, and you're just projecting onto the world of colourless, scentless atoms, all of the qualities that you would like to see in the world. Sebastian Morello (20:17.568) And so then the question is well then why are we all saying the same thing and the skeptical philosopher's answer to that is well maybe we're not. We wouldn't know. And so what this means we become more more insulated, we become more and more trapped in our own minds, the whole realm of meaning and purpose is locked up and cloistered within ourselves because the world out there is just the world of quantity and measurement and so all reality gets reduced. to just the ideational realm of your interior life. And then you just get different people competing over whether they're going to be able to dominate extramental reality with their own interior world of ideas. And the name that we have for that is ideology, right? That's what we end up with. We end up with a world of ideology. that's just a description of modernity. And what that means is... People stop talking about nature and they start talking about the environment, right? The environment, this is a francophone word, it just means all that stuff out there with which you're surrounded. It's what the environment is. It's not nature, nature is, you have a nature, I have a nature, nature is something with which we are contiguous. Nature is actually a conglomerate of natures in a cosmic hierarchy. That all disappears and it just gets replaced with the environment. Sebastian Morello (21:56.563) we become more and more disassociated from one another. And we know that in the modern world, even though we boast of having all of these marvelous communication technologies from which you and I are benefiting right now, actually people have never been so lonely. They've never been so cut off from one another. The kind of really deep, deep friendships that people used to experience as, if you like, the matrix within which their lives unfolded, that is becoming thinner and thinner, or indeed has for many people evaporated altogether. And this is the world in which we've been, in which we've landed. it's terrible. So. So, and then the question is, well, when we do encounter extramental reality, how do we encounter it? Well, the modern person in so far as he or she encounters it at all, does so as an observer, as something extrinsic to it. Right. You might go for a hike outside and Jason M. Craig (23:00.246) Mm-hmm. Sebastian Morello (23:11.602) It's like you're kind of visiting the natural world like an alien from another planet, you know, and then you return to the real serious business of your screen and your, you know, and your kind of strip lighted cave or whatever it is. And that's where the real business of life unfolds. so modernity has basically turned everything on its head. Now, what I found in hunting, was that hunting with hounds, deer stalking, the various kinds of hunting that I've done throughout my life, what it did is it placed me back in nature so that I suddenly became one of the predators prowling the face of the earth among the predators of the world. And suddenly It was no longer that I was simply an alien visitor, but I had found my natural place within the cosmos. And I no longer had to be a modern alienated person from the world. I could be fully a participant in the world. But what really amazed me from a philosophical perspective about this experience because I came to hunting, I mean I had some experience of it as a schoolboy hunting with hounds, but I really came to hunting in a big way as an adult, which meant that I come to it in a questioning relation with it. And what really shocked me was that I suddenly realised that whilst I had become one of the predators of the world out hunting for my food, I was the only predator who could hunt whilst privileging a moral relation with my own quarry. That when a lion attacks a gazelle and the gazelle gets away, the lion isn't up all night worrying whether the gazelle is going to be alright or not. Sebastian Morello (25:37.544) unhappy that it's hungry. But the fact that we are completely unique in being the kind of predator that can worry a great deal about the flourishing of our own quarry and be constantly trying to calculate how we're going to mitigate its suffering in our dispatching of it. That's completely unique to us. And one of the the that still haunts me, one of the things that worries me a great deal, is that modern industrialized farming methods where, you know, plastic coated chicken is just available to us whenever we want it in the nearest shop or whatever, is precisely that those methods break down the moral relation that we have with the natural world. So we never think that we're implicated in the suffering of that chicken when we go and buy it. Whereas the deer stalker is thinking a great deal about how he can honour the animal that is about to keep him alive, that is going to sustain him, that he has to live with a disposition of gratitude towards this animal. Now that is unique to the hunter and it greatly alarms me that modern people will so readily make moral judgments on hunters and think of them as as bad people because they want to go out and kill a poor innocent bambi or whatever it is when actually there is a very solid argument that can be made that hunters are the the one people who are trying as hard as possible in the modern world to hold on to that to that moral tie, to that tie of sympathy and empathy that we can have with creatures, with the creatures of the world. And that is actually a highly moral endeavor. So these are some of the thoughts at least that made me think, well, I have to convey this in some way, because as I said, so few sporting writers are thinking in this way and talking in this way, which is a great shame. Jason M. Craig (28:02.988) Yeah. Sebastian Morello (28:03.168) it doesn't help. Jason M. Craig (28:06.24) No, they are the ones I think there's there's so much conversation about, you know, again, the environment, which is that's something that's the environment in which we can talk about its care, but we don't care for it. The way a father might say he cares for his house because I come from, you know, the tradition I love and I'm an agrarian, right? So we we raise our food and we have events on our farm regularly to bring people here. And I joke that I'm a one trick pony. What I like to do with people when they visit from the city or from Sebastian Morello (28:20.831) Hmm. Jason M. Craig (28:35.542) a lack of experience of those kind of things is to kill a pig with them. And there's this misconception that a farmer is callous towards animals because he has the ability to kill them. But the opposite has been my experience. The opposite is the truth, which is the farmer is very concerned. Sebastian Morello (28:39.911) You Jason M. Craig (28:54.222) about the care of his animals, their happiness, insofar as they can be happy. And when you go to dispatch them, you have great care versus when you're unwrapping meat from, if it brought into existence in that wrapper, like an orange. And my... This comes out of one of the best sayings. Maybe you could put it in a future book. My neighbor who's a butcher across the street, his daughter, he has a, the butcher's Creed, which he got from some, I don't know if it's an old Spanish Abattoir or something. It's, it's, it's, you know, a poetic, something to the effect of, you know, do your duty well, do not cause the animal to suffer. And his daughter has a funny saying when that, when they're trying to position an animal to be dispatched. Sebastian Morello (29:37.937) Hmm Jason M. Craig (29:44.278) Is to say, come here, little pig. We don't want to hurt you. We just want to kill you. And we had the experience and there's no other way to experience that that relation to nature that happens when you're killing or trying to kill. There's no other, you know, we always read a window berries on the hog killing when we kill a hog. It's a poem about let the let the let the let the hog stare the shooter in the eye. And recently, a son of mine who. Sebastian Morello (29:48.967) You Sebastian Morello (30:03.207) Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Jason M. Craig (30:10.642) I won't name him or throw a nervous or anything, but he went to dispatch and he missed and the pig ran away squealing in pain. And I had to take the gun and fire a second shot, which dropped him, which everyone was in. There was a lot of people there were doing it there was tension in the air because this animal was suffering. Everyone was uncomfortable at the suffering of this animal. And when I finally dropped him, Everyone was relieved at the end of his suffering. And I was able to look to my son and see the pain and the shame, which I'm happy it felt by the way, because you don't want to do that a lot, but it's good to know the consequences of your action. I had to comfort him and his sorrow at causing suffering. Sebastian Morello (30:54.793) Yeah. Jason M. Craig (30:59.432) And it was this interplay of the manly, you we are the predators. I like to joke. I'm I used to say before we had to hunted more and we do now that I I'm an agrarian, not a barbarian. I keep my animals and fences. Right. But still, the relationship that's created, it brings you closer to nature and not just bring it closer and a closer observer, but actually to become a part of it. Sebastian Morello (31:11.763) Ha ha ha ha! Jason M. Craig (31:25.602) Because as my other friend likes to say there's there's no greater dignity for an animal than to become one with man He's not getting any higher in creation than to be eaten by a man and you know, he's just a good old homesteader who's come to that on his own and his experience of Reality so which brings up so in the United States maybe you and I can discuss this we have a different Sebastian Morello (31:26.111) us. Sebastian Morello (31:33.585) interesting. Jason M. Craig (31:50.262) relationship to like what people call conservation and I'm a big fan of Wendell Berry and Aldo Leopold and they were they pointed out regularly which people that were forgetting it again, it seems like in the conversation that those that make use of the land and Are a part of it and know the consequences of their actions are much better conservationists Sebastian Morello (31:57.193) Hmm. Jason M. Craig (32:15.118) than those that want to wall off the wild as if man is not a part of it and to just to leave it alone. It's actually been so that there's a lot of history of that in the United States, but tell me in the UK, you guys have a very different situation and that you're just, there's just not nearly as much land. have just millions of acres to argue over what to do with. Yours is very small, but tell me a little bit about what you write about in the book. that very thing, that it's those that are doing the killing that are much better at doing the conservation. And it's usually thanks to them that you actually conserve and bring health to what people call the natural environment. Sebastian Morello (32:57.479) Yes, that's right. I mean, we have a long history now in Britain of successive governments imposing legislation on the countryside and on rural communities, whether that's farming methods or regulating hunting or all sorts of things that routinely turn out to have the most serious adverse consequences for the landscape. And so you have what's essentially now just a kind of bureaucratic hub of career politicians in London. There was a time, by the way, not that long ago, when most of our politicians were also landowners. They were from old families. know, just a few days ago, the Labour government was successful in ousting all of the hereditary peers from the House of Lords. So we now have no hereditary peers in the House of Lords after hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. So that means that all of those people who came from families of large scale landowners who really understood how topsoil works, how habitat works, what the purpose of a coppice is, what the purpose of a spinny is or a woodland, all sorts of things. All of those people are now gone. So this kind of adverse rural legislation is only going to get worse and worse. And so we have this problem in Britain and what then happens is that the countryside just becomes a place of political experimentation. So you have, for example, in the 1960s it was decided by Westminster that Sebastian Morello (35:01.343) What was going to be really good for the topsoil and for natural health and all sorts of things is vast amounts of monocultural planting. we need to put these great big evergreen woodlands all over the place. And of course that completely destroys the topsoil and all of the mycelial webbing and everything on which kind of healthy woodland is dependent. That all just goes. And then of course then they have to reverse it. So they have to send people and to chop all of this down and and put it, you know, and it just becomes this place of ongoing experimentation by people who don't know anything. And, you know, a very good example of this actually is the Hunting Act in 2004. So Tony Blair, 22 years ago, brought in an act to ban hunting with hounds, you might call natural hunting as opposed to the use of technologies like firearms. So you probably are aware that in Britain we have a very, very long tradition of hunting with hounds, whether that's... foxhounds or staghounds for deer herds or hunting beagles for hares or the English hunting basset is also used for hares. So we have this long tradition of having all of these different packs around the country in order to manage these various quarry species. 22 years ago Prime Minister Tony Blair banned that. But what no one seemed to foresee was that there's absolutely no reason at all for a farmer to tolerate the presence of a fox or the presence of a hare or the presence of mink or anything on his land. Absolutely no reason at all. There's no reason for a farmer to preserve or conserve Sebastian Morello (37:13.943) certain habitat for those animals, unless they serve the purpose of looking after these animals, because there is an entire rural community that wants to pursue these animals as part of landscape management, essentially. So the moment Fox hunting was banned, people just said, well, let's just shoot them all. Let's just get rid of them. So, so, so the, so it turned out that of course the only people who were really protecting the fox and saying look don't just wipe them out please look after their habitats you know with a fox hunting community that had an entire tradition and community based around the pursuit of this animal which by the way they had a very high regard for which is why they had a closed season right which meant that you did not hunt foxes when they were mating or they were pregnant or any of those things you left them alone right because the the purpose was not to wipe out the species, it was to manage the species. Now, of course, it's open season all year round. So whenever a fox is seen, it gets shot. Very often, these foxes are milky vixens, so of course all their cubs then starve to death in the den. Not only are far more foxes being killed, not only is the life of the fox far worse, but the amount of suffering the species now experiences. is incalculably more. now, of course, anyone involved in rural life could foresee that this was going to be the consequence. But of course, the politicians in Westminster knew better. And now, of course, there is a whole consultation about limiting the quarry species for shooters and for wildfowlers. Sebastian Morello (39:14.489) And, you know, the hunting and the shooting community in this country is constantly saying, please, let's have a bit of subsidiarity here. Let just just let us who know about these things. mean, particularly in the case of wildfowlers. Wildfowlers have been right at the forefront of of migratory bird conservation for well over a century. I mean, and actually it's a huge success story. The number of migratory geese and ducks and waders and things that come to England because of how jealously the wild fouling community has protected the habitats of these creatures along our very diverse shores in this country. It's been absolutely astonishing. And now Westminster comes along and says, but I think we know better. about what quarries should be on the list and what you should be able to do. And this is just constantly the way. So, you my prayer is that future politicians will just approach the countryside and both the sporting and the farming community with just a bit of humility. But that might be too much to ask. Who knows? Jason M. Craig (40:37.71) Well, mean, humility would have to acknowledge reality and the thing it seems I mean from from from the I mean, if there's a tendency towards politicians is to not know the reality that they're that they're legislating about and then to never have to answer for the consequences because I think actually when they go after the hunter. By the way, I love that you say huntsman. I'm going to try to recover that word. I say hunter like huntsman. Sebastian Morello (40:41.343) Ha Sebastian Morello (40:54.879) show. Sebastian Morello (41:06.975) You Jason M. Craig (41:07.054) The fact is that he did a better job than they did because, but they were after not the reality of the species, but the idea of the barbarian out killing something. And the idea of the hunter appalled them, even though what's more appalling is the callousness that the modern detachment from the world, from nature, from reality, the callousness of how we produce food and then the actual reality of the impact on the land, the actual, so it's the idea of the farmer that appalls them. It's not the reality. And the great example in your book, which we have the same thing in the States, of if we really wanted to, I hope you can defend, you didn't quite get to this point, but it was implied in your book. If we really wanted to save wildlife, we would start killing a whole lot of cats. Sebastian Morello (41:44.884) Yes. Sebastian Morello (42:04.031) Mm. Jason M. Craig (42:04.878) Right? I mean, cause there's an example in your book where it's cats, it's people's pets that are overwhelmingly. if you, and I just, it is funny. You mentioned this in your book. I just watched the cat. Uh, the other day I was, oh, he caught something and I watched him play with and torture this animal, uh, to the point where I actually went and dispatched the animal. couldn't watch it. I wanted to end the suffering and the brutality of cats. So, uh, if there's a deep, well, we do plenty of that. If there's a. Sebastian Morello (42:28.391) You should have dispatched the cat. Jason M. Craig (42:32.671) If there's a demon among us, it's the cat, not the hunter, right? Sebastian Morello (42:35.839) Sure. Yeah, no, it's incredible how destructive the domestic cat is in this country. mean, just doing the most horrific damage to our songbird population in particular here. But yes, nobody talks about that. The whole thing is totally confused. But what I think... is interesting to go back to this notion of the moral relation is and this is something that's very very difficult to explain to people I'm not even sure that I quite know how to convey it that is that people who hunt and people who farm particularly people who farm on a small scale who aren't doing big industrial farming but who do the sort of hunting that that you practice is the incredibly high regard they have for these creatures. Something that somebody with a purely Disney-fied sentimental conception of animals will never be able to achieve. However much they might be convinced that they have this kind of deep respect for animals, it will be nothing like what the kind of moral attachment that somebody has who works directly with these creatures. And I mean, the last time I was in Africa, because I've been hunting in Africa a few times, and the last time I was there, I was out there in pursuit of kudu. And when I was talking to the chaps out there who hunt kudu. They were saying you know you have to understand that nearly all animals have a heightened sense. For some it's smell, for some it's hearing, for some it's sight. But the kudu has all of them. The kudu will smell you and see you and hear you from miles away. It is the the most difficult quarry and the way that they were talking about this creature with such deep Sebastian Morello (44:56.295) respect. In Roger's book on hunting he talks about the fox as totemic, right? It's like a totem, the fox, that as you pursue this animal you're almost pursuing it in an act of something that's almost like worship, you know, you're so... there's such a deep, deep connection there. And this was really expressed to me when I was out in Africa and I got my foot stuck between two great pieces of ironstone and I twisted my foot and I was in absolute agony and I couldn't continue that day because I'd really damaged my ankle. And so my friend who I was with out there He said, look, we're get, and we were on his game farm and he said, look, we're going to have to get back to the farm a different route. We're going to just have to get straight down and I'll support you. And I sort of limped all the way back. And as we're going through, we get into this great thick undergrowth and I could see that my friend was bothered by the fact that we were having to go through there. And I asked him if everything was alright. And he said, well, this is where the kudu come and lie up. And I never come here. I never ever come here. This is their area. This is where they come to, they are a herd species. They are quarry species. hunt. He has he has leopard on his land. He has jackal on his land. They are they are. It's not just humans that are hunting them. There are lots of predators hunting them. And that is where they go to feel safe, where they go to gather together and to rest. And he said, know, and now they're going to come in here and they're going to be frightened and they're going to smell us. And I really I really feel like. Sebastian Morello (46:59.898) it's we're doing something wrong we're really trespassing here and and I I was so touched by the fact that he just had such a deep respect for these creatures and I thought to myself only a hunter can think like that only a hunter can think like that Jason M. Craig (47:19.884) Yeah, think compared so his thinking, you one thing you bring up, see, I think I've marked it and this might be the way he's thinking. And I'd like to ask about this in its relationship to, you know, community life and how we just understand being human, but he's thinking what I think you would call organistic, organistist, versus here's what you say for organicists. There we go. For centuries. Sebastian Morello (47:40.24) Organi- Organicist. Yeah. Jason M. Craig (47:44.76) There has been a mounting tension between those whose assumptions about the world are based on a mechanistic metaphor. So that's obviously coming from Descartes, from Bacon, where the world is a machine that we will figure out and we will fine tune. If the world's a machine. then we are the mechanics, right? There's really little reverence once something is a machine. The reverence is gone, the humility is gone. So I would say the politicians are clearly mechanistic. I if we do this, then this and fiat, shall be so. say, assumptions about the world are based on a mechanistic metaphor on the one hand, and those who opt for an organist, say it, it, organist, organist. Sebastian Morello (48:24.507) Organ assist. Jason M. Craig (48:27.052) This is a new word I'm working on. You know, my friend who's an Englishman says, I'm here, Jason, to teach you how to speak English and or metaphor on the other hand. So, yeah, tell me more about in your philosopher. I appreciate I've wrestled a lot with what the whole idea of the world that we've created as the machine world versus the organic world. But it seems that that's the difference between. your friend's reverence for a place and someone else's prideful confidence in their ability to mechanize their desired outcomes without the hunter. Sebastian Morello (49:07.795) Yeah, I mean, obviously, the ancient Christian world and the medieval world inherited this classical conception. Obviously, the fathers themselves were extremely influenced by neoplatonic thought, where essentially you have the one, the one who is beyond all description, who is beyond all possible account. with whom you can spiritually commune with, at the moment you have a concept of the One, you don't have a concept of the One at all, right? Because the One is always transcending your ideas of the One, right? So, and this of course undergirds much of the apophatic theology of the Church that God can be spoken of positively in a kind of second personal way when we're talking about God, really as we get to know God in a third, sorry, let me rephrase that. God can be spoken of positively in a third personal sense as a he or an it, but really as we get to know God in a second personal sense as a you, we enter this negative. theology where we realize all of our ideas about God are actually reducing him to a creature and he always is beyond that, he always transcends that. As John of the Cross says, eventually there is this darkening of the intellect because our intellectual pursuit of God is superseded by something volitional where actually we realize we can only unite ourselves with God not through ideas but through love. And this is where we enter this so-called dark. Sebastian Morello (51:10.812) dark night and in the neoplatonic idea that is the one the one is always transcending but he is always he is always simultaneously emanating his inner life through well Platinus calls it the nous or the nous, the mind, the intellect for someone like Maximus the confessor, it's the logoi, right? Or as Aquinas will say, the divine ideas, but it's the emanation of substantial form into the created order. And there is the firmament or the materia prima that is actuated by being in receipt of substantial forms of the essences and that actuates the materia prima into the corporeal world that we behold. And so that's all a kind of long-winded way of saying. that we find ourselves implicated in God's own disclosure of himself through the created order, and the created order is being actuated into the corporeal world in this kind of spousal or nuptial response to God, so that the entire imagery of the creator-creation relation is kind of marital. And we suddenly find ourselves implicated in that. And what do we do in response? Well, we celebrate the whole thing in this ongoing love affair that we do liturgically, actually. That's kind of what the Church is. The Church is where we just constantly celebrate the wedding feast of the Lamb, essentially. Sebastian Morello (52:58.854) That is to put it in the language of the book of the apocalypse. So that's kind of the classical conception of the creator creation relation that gets baptized through the fathers and then becomes articulated in this very eloquent way by Aquinas's what's called his metaphysics of his twofold exemplarism, the exemplarism of God's existence, so everything that exists exists because it participates in his non-contingent existence, and the exemplarism of the divine ideas, everything that exists is a reflection through its form of the ideas that exist from all eternity in the divine mind. So what that means that we end up with this great iconography, iconographic conception of the cosmos as one great image of the creator. And we find ourselves implicated in that so we can rationally and consciously participate in this great nuptial experience of the creator-creation relation. And that's part of the joy of being situated as our nature is situated in the cosmos. Now all of that gets replaced in modernity. All of it gets replaced first by, as I said before, this retrieval of democratisation and atomism, this reduction of the world stripped of all qualities to pure measurement and quantity. Then, of course, the question is, if that's the case about the world, what does that say about me? Right? Am I just a lump of purposeless, meaningless matter? And, of course, Descartes' answer to that is, well, yes, you are, but don't worry, there's this other thing. Sebastian Morello (54:45.203) called the self, or the cogitating thing, that kind of subsists, that hovers inside this lump of purposeless matter. And it's kind of accidentally related to it, it's not substantially related to it, it just kind of uses it as a vehicle, and that's your, that's going to be your inner world of meaning and purpose. And then of course, Bacon gives us the kind practical response to all of this, which is well then how do we relate to all of this stuff around us? Well we just dominate it and we utilize it and we treat it as plastic, we reconfigure it according to our will for it. And then a certain, you could say, an abusive reception of Newton gives us the whole mechanical cosmology into which all of that fits. So by the time you are in modernity or even late modernity, what you've actually got is an entire cosmology of nihilism. And that has given us, I mean this is part of the problem with error, right? Which is that it doesn't just remain error in your mind, it actually creates, it manifests, it makes real the errors that you conceive. Right? Just as, you know, the tradition of liberalism gave us this whole idea of the pre-social atomic self. who has to somehow emancipate himself from society in order to discover his true authentic self, completely false anthropology, which all of us, if we think about it, know to be untrue. But because we got duped by it, liberalism has actually created that kind of atomic self in society. Most people have become the representative of that false anthropology. Well, this kind of Sebastian Morello (56:48.287) nihilistic cosmology has created the modern world, right? The way that we build our cityscapes, the way that we construct our landscapes, right? The way that we pollute our oceans. The fact that we can no longer create beautiful architecture that raises the intellect and allows us to live in a contemplative and questioning relation with reality, but instead we build these disgusting grey blocks that constantly suffocate the intellect, right, we've actually, we have manifested the error all over the place. And that's why these errors, I mean I've got in trouble for saying this in the past because it is a kind of an occultic idea, but one of things that I've suggested in the past is that we think about ideology as egregoric. Jason M. Craig (57:31.0) you Sebastian Morello (57:47.134) right, as a kind of curse upon the mind that gets us to behave in a way that no human would ordinarily behave if they weren't completely entangled in this in this era. And so a lot of my writing, whether I'm writing on metaphysics or I'm writing on liturgy or I'm writing on politics or indeed I'm writing on hunting, outdoorsmanship and conservation, a lot of my writing is just to try and give people a little window peer through into a pre-modern world, a world that was living, that was full of meaning and purpose, that was glorious, that was pregnant with the presence of God, and a world where we get at least just a snapshot, a vision, of what it would be if we were in right relation with the rest of the created order, and by extension in right relation with the Creator. Right? And that's really what I'm trying to do. with everything I write, actually. Jason M. Craig (58:49.742) Yeah, think this comes up a lot and maybe it's the nature of the guests that we're attracted to or they're attracted to here is to bring things back into some living organic whole, some sort of body because that mechanistic thinking and this is a constant discussion with, you know, good brothers, friends of mine. of the technological lens, we say, no, everything is just a tool and we decide how it's used. But of course, technology is not neutral. It's doing something to us. That mechanistic view of the world, that the world is plastic. We can make something out of it. Let's melt it down and mold it to our use without a relationship to it is definitely related to Descartes. And of course, if anybody didn't catch what you were saying that it... He's alone with his thought once once it's just his thought. Hey, you're now gonna just exist in your mind You know, it was it was a mark t Mitchell his book the the limits of liberalism that pointed out That Descartes was completely alone and isolated as he was writing these things. Just really was just living in his mind. And I can't help but think we've all become little Descartes with our screens. Just living in our mind without relation. And the result is... Sebastian Morello (01:00:00.959) Yeah. Jason M. Craig (01:00:05.62) It is the misery of not having we are made by relation. That's how I mean, that's even God. God, the father is only called the father in relation to God, the son. Had they not revealed the relation, we wouldn't make the distinction of father and son. It doesn't make sense. Maybe in some abstract father is like seed planter, but father and son that we know him as Christians is is is by relationship. So on that same page, you I underline this and marked it here. Because a lot of us Catholics, I hear this a lot that we would like to have Catholic culture again. We sort of see the artifacts of it. We do slideshow presentations about the history of our art and our architecture and and we make websites about restoring these things and then but we find ourselves in my estimation completely unable to do it. And I think it's because we don't want to take the patient time to become bodies again, not just within ourselves, but within our local community. Sebastian Morello (01:01:02.163) Yeah Jason M. Craig (01:01:04.566) and you say, we can't, you put it this way. We can't even contribute to culture anymore that we can't, we can't even contribute to culture anymore, let alone establish a culture. And this is because we don't know how to civilizationally cultivate for cultivation is an organic activity. And I think when we try to construct and build our communal life, you know, intentional community, this and that, that I think you're right. We can't. because we're looking at the mechanisms of it instead of acknowledging the bodiliness of it, the wholeness, the organic connection. And the reason that's annoying to us is that that takes time and patience and growth the way you would grow a tree, the way you would tend to a herd on your land. And it's also a rootedness that is not based on our willpower towards one another, but in sort of actually submitting to our belonging to one another. Which is why I love, over and over I return back to St. Paul when he's chastising people for their sins against one another. And he just says, don't you know you belong to one another? that, the membership to one another is not merely a member in a club, but it's actually the member of a body you belong to. And that takes time to grow. And we can't, we can't do that, without the patient relationship to that place. That's why I think your work and the silence of the huntsman, that the, the, the solitude, looks. Sebastian Morello (01:02:17.853) Thank Sebastian Morello (01:02:26.153) Yeah. Jason M. Craig (01:02:42.55) Like what they could, what we're accusing Descartes, this isolated, he, isn't he just the king of everything, killing whatever he wants? but actually it's, it's in that process. He recognized that I am, I am a part of a whole, and that seems to be what we really desire to be a part of again, but we don't know how. Sebastian Morello (01:03:00.975) I think that's right. what you're saying is so true about what we are is what we are for one another. And there's a wonderful great work of philosophy by Spayman who was, in fact, I have it on my desk here somewhere. Jason M. Craig (01:03:27.224) There you go, you are ready. Sebastian Morello (01:03:29.419) Yeah, Robert Spayman's book Persons, the subheading of which is the difference between someone and something. you know, he makes this argument with great depth and profundity that actually person, if you analyze what it denotes, does not correspond to any kind of genus or species category. person is not, as it were, a thing or a nature in which things participate, right? Which is why, indeed, we use the word of... things that don't share our nature, not just divine persons, but angelic persons, or indeed persons that don't exist. You know, I mean, it's quite obvious that Frodo Baggins is a person, right, but he's not human. So, so what is this? What is this term person? And what Speyman argues is that actually, person really denotes a special kind of moral relation that can exist between rational beings. And in fact he has the most wonderful and pithy phrase in that book. He says that person is a generalizable proper noun. Because what Christ does is he tells us that we have to love our neighbor. He doesn't say love humanity or love humankind or love man. He says love your neighbor. Your neighbor is concrete. Your neighbor is the person who you have to put up with who might be really irritating in lots of ways. That's your neighbor. so what Christianity required was a category that included everyone but somehow Sebastian Morello (01:05:43.328) maintained their utter concreteness, the special relation in which that person subsists in relation to you. And the word that our civilization developed was the word person. And we extend it to all sorts of ways, which is why we say, know, if we go into a modern building, one of things we might say is this is deeply impersonal, right? What are we saying there? We're saying that the uniqueness, the kind of moral bond that enables me to connect with my community, with my place, with its history and so on, it's all been stripped in this place. That's why it's impersonal. So, you know, I think Spayman's book is one of the richest analyses of this term person, which is absolutely at the centre. of the very unique Christian civilization that we developed. And one of the things I would say about outdoorsmanship, and this came up right at the beginning regarding my scholarly history with Roger Scruton, is the primacy of mentorship. You can't just wake up one day and say, I'm gonna be a farmer, or I'm gonna learn bushcraft, or I'm gonna do this or that. You know, have to find someone who can say, I'm gonna incrementally take you through. the ways in which you do this until you possess these things as a habit, right? Until they become you. And then you can do what I'm gonna do for you for somebody else, right? And that's what's going to happen. And that's absolutely essential. For this stuff, yes, you can buy lots of guides and lots of books and lots of manuals and all sorts of things. but none of those are ever going to be, even altogether, are going to be a sufficient substitute for having a mentor in your life. And it's... Jason M. Craig (01:07:45.23) Wait, but not even YouTube? I mean, I can just watch YouTube, right? Sebastian Morello (01:07:51.328) Yeah, mean, look, I know you're poking fun. mean, there is a degree to which that might be possible, particularly as it happens with machines, right? I mean, that is one of the interesting things that when it comes to machines, YouTube is fantastic, right? I mean, I was able to, my... Jason M. Craig (01:07:57.65) You Sebastian Morello (01:08:20.283) our tumble dryer stopped working in our house and I was able to kind of look up what was wrong with it and then watch a sufficient number of YouTube videos to then go and deconstruct the entire tumble dryer, fix the problem and then reassemble the whole thing and I was able to do that through watching some YouTube videos. Yeah, if you want to deal with machines, YouTube actually comes in quite handy. If you want to deal with habitats, it's a very, very different kettle of fish. If you want to deal with land management, if you want to deal with topsoil, you, you know, no, no number of YouTube videos will understand exactly the acidity and the amount of chalk and the amount of rainfall and the amount of sunlight and all of the things that the field behind your house is going to get and how you're going to have to respond to that. You're gonna need a local farmer who is going to be able to induct you into how to look after that properly. And that is why mentors, I think, are so important. And it's interesting, know, I I had a great mentor to learn how to deerstalk. I had a great mentor, or a number of mentors, when I started hunting with hounds and I eventually became a master of a pack. And the... you know, a lot of landowners and local farmers and people who have been hunting for a long time and we had a so so actually just a little qualification on the word huntsman in England. Huntsman means something very specific, which which is the the the the person who looks after and and guides, as it were, a pack of hounds. Right. So everyone else might be hunters, but that person is the huntsman, right? And we had a wonderful huntsman whose family had been huntsmen going back generations and generations. So I was able to be formed by that. And even now, know, not long ago, we moved to a different part of England, a place that we wanted to move to for a very long time. this, the occasion arose. And so we moved here and we're not that, Sebastian Morello (01:10:37.565) we're not that far away from the coast here. So I decided I wanted to learn how to spearfish, right, which is a growing sport in this country. So it's offshore fishing with a spear gun or a pole spear. And it's a very, very demanding and difficult sport and you have to also train your body so that you have carbon dioxide resilience and you can hold your breath for long enough in order to spear a fish and all sorts of things. But it's a really good way of fishing for your family and providing that kind of protein for your family without getting any bycatch. So you never ever harm or take away a fish that you're not intending to eat because the only fish you take are the ones that you see, you make a decision on and you spear. So it's a form of fishing that is deeply connected with conservation, with habitat protection and with a particular respect for the quarry species. And so I was very keen to learn this. And what was the first thing I did? Well, I found out who in the area of England I'm in. is a well-known and adept spearfisher and I asked that person to train me up, right, and to teach me how to do it properly. And that's the only way in. That is the only way in. And one thing more I will say on this which I find extremely interesting, and I haven't thought enough about this to make total sense of it, but I think what we've already talked about so far kind of points in the right direction in any case. when I have hunted with people. Sebastian Morello (01:12:40.967) You form bonds that in other circumstances would take years to form. It's very, very strange. The only thing I can compare it to is being a soldier or something like that, in these intense situations you form these very close bonds. if you were working at a desk next to somebody or something like that. It might take several years to form the kind of bond that you can form with other hunters in the space of three or four days. Right? And it's because all the time you are relying on one another, you're encouraging each other, are, you're looking out for each other, you're constantly attending to whether the person is dehydrated or needs assistance or whether the person's confused about something, whether it's the firearm or whatever it is. I particularly hunting in Africa, where sometimes, sometimes you're on your feet for 11, 12, 13 hours over razor sharp ironstone, really difficult terrain, in pursuit of a quarry that will outwit you at every turn. You are so dependent on one another all the time. that's, I wonder whether this is the reason why historically when kings or great leaders of men had to in some way, you know, come to peace with one another or form a treaty or get to know one another, the thing that they would typically do is organise a hunting party together. They would meet in a particular place and they would ride out in pursuit of a stag or whatever it was. Because, you know, here you have two kings or two dukes or whatever and the safety of their nations or their peoples or whatever it is is dependent on this conversation or this relationship going well and so you only have a very limited amount of time to form a very very tight bond with that person. Sebastian Morello (01:14:58.279) So there is genuine trust there. Well, what do you do? Well, of course you go on a hunt together. That's going to do it. Anyone who's hunted knows that's going to do it. and of course that... Yes, yes. Please, go ahead. Jason M. Craig (01:15:11.17) Yeah, I think that's. Sorry, I, that, you the apostolate that this magazine Sword and Spade has come from is fraternist and it's with men that are especially concerned with initiating the next generation, which is a helpful way to think about instead of just educating, right? Just imparting something that they will leave with. Sebastian Morello (01:15:28.872) Hmm. Jason M. Craig (01:15:35.894) Right with our it's actually bringing them into a shared way of life that we live and the great dilemma And the reason I would recommend this book the great dilemma is but what do we do? because as good as Commiserating together and in a small group bible study is great the actual experience in and I think that maybe the word That has come into my mind that you're describing the mutual care that you develop for one another when you're in the practicalities of the hunt You're you're attentive and you're experiencing a way that yes, it's not the same brotherhood that's forged perhaps on a battlefield, but it's a close cousin. Not in the measure of heroics or bravery or valor or anything like that, but it's simply in the measure of a shared and necessary experience in that moment. A lot of cultures were born from shared mutual need. They're taking care of one another and they raise up and they have a culture in the time when so few of us actually have practical need for one another in the intensity of that moment. You need and care for one another, um, in a beautiful way that on the other side of it, if somebody who, you know, it's like when we killed the, we have these groups that come in here on the farm, we kill a pig together, we process it, we cook it together, we eat it. And if somebody were to come in the next day and say, Hey, I'm a part of this thing, you would say, no, you're not. You did. You were not a part of what we were just a part of. You're not one of us for you, for you to be one of us. You, you, you need to go back and come through that ordeal with us. So that's beautiful. Uh, Sebastian Morello (01:16:53.853) Ha ha ha ha! Yeah. Sebastian Morello (01:17:02.537) Yeah. Yeah. Jason M. Craig (01:17:04.224) As a closing question, I can't believe how quickly this is gone. As a closing question, what recommendations, it didn't sound like maybe you just gave some by just searching out a mentor, to a man who does not inherit this as well as you do as a tradition and a culture but knows why I can't just form myself or my sons from this cubicle, give us some parting wisdom on getting into hunting. and by the way, I was just going to say, I think I am a huntsman because I have a pack of children all around me all the time. And it's they can be akin to dogs. They're crying, howling like, well, what advice would you give to become get on the path towards being a huntsman? Sebastian Morello (01:17:34.495) And they're hound, they're quite hound like. Yeah. Sebastian Morello (01:17:46.13) It's a great question and I'm sure the situation is very different in the US to here. mean, one of the things that breaks my heart about the banning of trail hunting in the UK is that getting into field sports and getting into the life and the cycles of the countryside. The bar was quite low. You know, if you want to follow a pack of foothounds, you didn't need a firearms certificate or license. You didn't need any particular clothing. You basically needed a waterproof coat and a pair of Wellington boots or something. And you could just go and start to learn how to follow a pack of hounds. And that was so wonderful for those who were perhaps not... brought up in a hunting environment but wanted that participatory connectivity with the landscape. The fact that that was banned 22 years ago and now the current government that we have here which is just a truly wicked, wicked government for so many reasons. They've said that what hunting has been reduced to, which is basically trail hunting, the pursuit of an artificial scent in the landscape, and it's only really continued, not for any... hunting or conservation reasons just to keep the community going. You know, they can get together and do this traditional activity in its reduced state. Well, the current government has said they're going to outlaw that now as well. So, I mean, the attack on the countryside in Britain from so many different directions, all coming down from Westminster at the moment, huge attack on farms, a huge attack on rural pubs, Sebastian Morello (01:19:51.25) an attack on the shooting industry. They're trying to merge what are called Section 1 and Section 2 firearms, which will make it really difficult for people to obtain shotguns, just to do land management or to go on a game shoot or whatever. There are, and of course the ban on trail hunting as I'm saying, the current government, which is just a wicked government full of wicked people, they are doing everything they can to destroy the countryside at the moment. So right now we've got a huge fight on our hands in rural England. yes, mean, if you want to get into hunting and be part of that fight, in England at least, you can find a mentor, you can find people who are deeply connected with... with these ancient activities. There are lots of wonderful organizations. I'm a great fan of BASC, the British Association for Shooting and Conservation, which is a fantastic charity and they give a lot of advice to people. In England, the traditional way you get into shooting is as a young person, you get given or you go and buy a sub, 12 foot pound air pistol, er, not air pistol, air rifle or air gun. And you start teaching yourself how to take headshots on squirrels and pigeons and things like that. And then if you get yourself a wood pigeon, you know, you can teach yourself how to fillet it and fry its fillets and have them on toast or whatever. And that's how you get into it and then you start getting interested. As you get older you apply for a shotgun certificate and you do all sorts of things. I expect the situation is very different in the US. I mean, you've got those wonderful whitetail bucks, don't you, over there with these... Jason M. Craig (01:21:45.966) Wow. Sebastian Morello (01:22:01.79) great antlers that go forward which which you don't have on this side of the Atlantic and I think you have a wonderful wild fouling you know duck and goose shooting culture there as well as far as I know but you would have to tell me I mean I don't I don't I don't know I don't know what the mentoring situation is on that side. I would love to hunt in the US. I hope somebody will invite me to come over and do a bit of stalking or shooting over there. you tell me, how does it usually happen in America? Jason M. Craig (01:22:35.733) Yeah, I feel such pity for you after that answer when when the answer ends with buy a BB gun. That's a you're at a you're at a hard spot. Well, consider this your your your invitation. We I live on a farm where my son keeps me abreast on what season is coming up all the time. And it's always squirrel season, I believe. And Beaver. Well, then I tell you what, I'll end. Sebastian Morello (01:22:43.037) Ha ha ha! Sebastian Morello (01:22:56.5) Yeah. Jason M. Craig (01:23:01.365) I'll wrap us up then with putting your advice to the context that most of us are in is that you quite easily can buy a gun as I'm sure people in your country make fun of us about but or they think they are and but don't watch videos find find find a find a mentor find a mentor and read woodland philosophy by by sebastian morello i think i think that's what i would recommend and and don't watch Sebastian Morello (01:23:16.543) I don't. Jason M. Craig (01:23:28.855) Don't watch the videos as good as Meat Eater can be. That's a very popular hunting show in the United States. Sebastian Morello (01:23:34.173) Right. Jason M. Craig (01:23:34.667) Buy this book, find a mentor and establish the customs and the tradition, which blessedly will come around every season for you. And Sebastian, consider this your invitation. I live in North Carolina. We don't have the biggest white tail around here, but they are everywhere. And I look forward to having you. And if you've enjoyed this podcast, make sure you become a subscriber of Sword and Spade or even better yet, please become a supporter and a donor to fraternist, which makes these things possible. Sebastian, thank you so much. for being on the sword and spade podcast. Sebastian Morello (01:24:07.929) Thank you, been a real pleasure.