How Bambi Dies: On the Evil of Sentimentalism

Recently, I was having dinner with a friend during his visit to London from his home on the Isle of Skye. During our meal at his splendid Pall Mall club, I expressed my interest in visiting Skye to stalk red deer, at which point he exclaimed, “Oh please do; the deer herds greatly need reducing!” 

The number of red deer in the Scottish Highlands and on the islands has doubled in the last fifty years, and with each passing year, the number of deer being culled drops. Sometimes herds of over a thousand deer are spotted moving over the hillsides, stripping the landscape of its already thin and depleted foliage as they travel.

“Doesn’t recreational stalking deal with this problem to some degree?” I asked. To my amazement, my companion informed me that such stalking is very much out of fashion now in Scotland, and is a pastime pursued by an ever-diminishing number of people. “Why is the venerable and celebrated tradition of highland stalking dying out?” I further inquired. My friend replied with one word: “Bambi.”

In Scotland, like so many other places, recreational hunting as a key part of wildlife management is under threat, the chief reason being the misguided sentimentalism of a generation increasingly severed from the realities of the natural world. The question we should ask ourselves is: if Bambi doesn’t take a bullet to the chest or neck, how does he die? This, it seems, is a question never raised for consideration by those who condemn hunting as barbaric.

Deer, if not killed by a predator, towards the end of their lifespan of about fifteen years eventually grind down their teeth. Then, they continue to pull up plants, but they cannot chew. Chewing is a basic part of cervine digestion, breaking down the fibres in their food and making it not only physically ingestible but a source of nutrition. Eventually, they swallow sufficient quantities of indigestible plants that they cannot move. At that point, they lie down with huge, bloated bellies. In agony, with bursting stomach and intestines, they either perish due to dehydration, internal bleeding, or by being eaten from the inside out by parasites, or from the outside in by hooded crows and buzzards. A worse ‘natural’ death is hardly imaginable. 

The above description ought to indicate that the best a deer can hope for is that it becomes, at some point after the prime of its life, the prey of a predator. The most desirable sort of predator for a deer—and fortunately for Scottish red deer, it is the only predator prowling around in the British Isles—is one armed with a centrefire rifle who can dispatch it before the creature ever knew it was being hunted. Due to growing anti-hunting sentiment, the appalling death that is unavoidable for unhunted deer has increasingly become the norm, and as the herds increase in areas like the Scottish Highlands where food is already scarce, deer will come to such an end younger and younger.

Lovers of wildlife—and I certainly consider myself among those—ought to wonder which end they’d prefer for the deer which they claim to cherish. But this example of the dying deer serves to highlight a much wider and more general problem with modern society: the problem of sentimentalism. 

Sentimentalism is emotion which is directed at oneself, and thus a form of counterfeit emotion. This phoney emotion is conjured to make oneself feel morally righteous. Sentimentalism is everywhere in modern society. 

Were sentimentalism just the phoney emotion expressed by a small group of narcissists for self-congratulatory purposes, perhaps it would be manageable. But sentimentalism is causing havoc in our world. As the case of the unhunted deer writhing in agony upon the hillside illustrates, sentimentalism extends avoidable suffering under the guise of apparent righteous moral feeling, which, as noted, is in reality a fake and superficial counterfeit emotion.

Once one recognises that sentimentalism is a dominant driving force of human conduct in our modern world, one cannot help but see it everywhere, nor can one remain blind to its terrible consequences. Sentimentalism underpins ‘gender-affirming care’ for so-called ‘trans children’; and the ‘migrants welcome’ approach to managing vast numbers of fighting-age, predatory males arriving in one’s country and colonising whole cities or terrorising economically disadvantaged towns; and the poor parenting that allows a child to express his ‘authentic self’ in bad behaviour, which is then diagnosed as ADHD or autism; and the “Be kind!” screamed from the contorted mouth of a blue-haired activist as she swings punches at her ideological opponent. 

The sentimental feeling of being on the ‘right side of history’ supports all the multifarious ways by which our fragile social structure is further weakened. Those enjoying the fake emotion whose noxious effects frustrate us all never dispassionately reflect upon the veracity or lack thereof in their worldview because they are intoxicated with the overpowering feeling of righteousness. And this sense of self-righteousness simultaneously excuses almost any possible misconduct. One need only think of how the death of George Floyd in the U.S. somehow justified the smashing up of small businesses by masked yobs in England throughout 2020.

That the sentimentalism undergirding ‘Be kind’ mentality is a species of fake emotion is proved by the fact that its expression is typically linked not to being kind but to hatred. Recently, for example, I was climbing a deerstalking high seat whilst out on a hunt, only to discover that a do-gooder had sawn through one leg of the 5-metre-high ladder leading to the shooting platform. An activist had thus been sufficiently motivated by feelings that orbit his idea of Bambi that he wanted to break the neck of someone trained to responsibly manage deer numbers in the countryside. In other words, his sentimentalism drove him to wander out at night with the intention to murder.

Of course, such a person would, most likely, say that if the hunter fell and broke his neck on account of the vandalised ladder, then that hunter had merely been prevented from murdering an innocent animal. And that is exactly the point. For such a response could only come from someone who knows absolutely nothing about animals and how they live and die in their proper habitats. It is a response that comes not from truth but from sentimentalism, and as noted above, the upshot isn’t only the potential injury of the hunter but the extreme suffering of the deer. 

The example of the dying deer, whose agony could have been prevented by a bullet were sentimentalism not reigning supreme, should cause us to pause for thought and reflection on the extent to which sentimentalism animates our political and social life. Fake emotion has invaded family life, education, business, law, and, perhaps above all, politics, the very ordering of the nation and securing of its future flourishing. 

In turn, this issue is not as trivial as the broken neck of one deer stalker. The problem of the ascendancy of sentimentalism concerns the corruption of whole civilisations. The emotional life of the West is in desperate need of formation at present. I don’t have all the solutions to this grave problem, but getting more people outdoors and with crosshairs on Bambi would be a good start.