Hunting, History of Ideas | 331 holiness had restored to the docility of Eden Other medieval changes in the symbolic meaning of wild places and creatures reflect changes in the social status of hunting From the 10th century on, Europe’s forests dwindled as improved techniques of agriculture fostered a surge in human population growth Hunting gradually became the exclusive privilege of the aristocracy, who put the remaining forest patches off limits as hunting preserves and ruthlessly punished any peasants caught taking game Deer, the symbolic inhabitants of the wilderness, became the main objects of the aristocratic hunt, and took on an air of nobility in both folk ballads and high culture It was not until the early 1500s that the chase began to be viewed as cruel and to be invoked as a symbol of injustice and tyranny Erasmus condemned the hunt in 1511 as a bestial amusement In 1516, Thomas More denounced it in Utopia as “the lowest and vilest form of butchery [which] seeks nothing but pleasure from a poor little beast’s slaughter and dismemberment.” Similar revulsion toward hunting is evident in the essays of Montaigne and in the plays of Shakespeare Anti-hunting sentiment also crops up in 16th-century hunting manuals, which from 1561 on contain rhymed complaints by the game animals denouncing the senseless cruelty of Man the Hunter The rise of anti-hunting sentiments in the 1500s reflected rising doubts about the importance of the boundary between people and animals In 1580, Montaigne denied the existence of that boundary and concluded that “it is [only] by foolish pride and stubbornness that we set ourselves before the other animals and sequester ourselves from their condition and society.” The erosion of the animalhuman boundary in Western thought was accelerated by the scientific revolution of the 1600s and the associated mechanization of the Western world Animal suffering came to be more widely regarded as a serious evil, and hunting was increasingly attacked as immoral The romantic movement of the late 1700s brought about a radical transformation in Western images of wilderness In romantic thought, nature ceased to be a system of laws and norms and became a place, a holy solitude in which one could escape man’s polluting presence and commune with the Infinite Romantic art and literature picture the hunter sometimes as a poet with a gun participating in the harmony of nature, for example, James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo, but more often as a despoiler of nature and animal innocence, for example, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner Western hunting has always been a characteristically male activity, often regarded as valuable training for the military elite and praised as a prototype of the just war In the context of 19th-century European imperialism, this tradition gave birth to a third stereotype of the huntsman, the colonial White Hunter who dons a pith helmet and leads an army of servile natives on safari to assert his dominion over the conquered territory’s land, animals, and people At the height of Europe’s empires in the late 1800s and early 1900s, a love of hunting commonly went hand in hand with imperialist politics, and anti-imperialism was often associated with anti-hunting sentiment This link between hunting and the political right has persisted into our own time During the 20th century, the romantic idea of the sanctity of nature and the