The earliest extant hunting treatise is composed as if almost everything that can be said about the art can be done so by considering the pursuit of hares with hounds. For Xenophon, roughly 70 percent of whose Cynegeticus or 'Hunting with Hounds' is about hare hunting, the hare is the quintessential quarry, virtually synonymous with the pleasures of the chase — "so pleasing, that whoever sees it trailed, or found, or pursued, or taken, forgets everything he is most attached to." For this retired Greek general writing in the fourth century BC, as for later theorists of the hunt, it is the hare's combination of speed, endurance and 'artfulness' that makes it so suitable for sport. A sport which consisted of following on foot what must have been relatively slow-moving scent-hounds, for he writes that "she is not overtaken by the dogs by speed alone, she is so fast; if they are caught, it is in spite of their natural physique, by accident."
See also the previous post: Vile, Gluttonous, and Cruel
Image: "The Hunted Hare" by Akinga.
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