by The Mindful Carnivore: A Vegetarian's Hunt for Sustenance
I wasn’t sure that the ancientness of human predation had much bearing on the question either. We reject traditions all the time: the treatment of other human beings as property, for example, or the denial of voting rights on the basis of gender or skin color. Why, then, should the ancientness of hunting traditions provide a meaningful justification for its practice in modern times?
Had I—in adopting veganism and morally setting myself above the predator-prey relationship—lost sight of my unity with other animals, with nature as a whole, and with my heritage as a human? Or was I now—in fishing and in entertaining the possibility of hunting—losing sight of the very thing that made me human, the ability to reflect on my own needs and instincts and to make moral choices?
If I simply wanted a face-to-face reckoning with my meat, I could volunteer to help a chicken-raising friend on slaughter day, wielding the knife and seeing how it felt. If I wanted to experience the whole process from beginning to end, I could raise chickens myself. Had I lived in a suburban or urban setting, I might have gone that route, as many Americans have in recent years. Here in the hills of north-central Vermont, though, with the woods just a stone’s throw from our front door, this disconcerting notion kept stalking my thoughts: hunting.
When I imagined Uncle Mark hunting, I did not think merely of the killing. I knew, in fact, that he spent most days and weeks afield without taking a shot. Only once a year, on average, did he drag a deer out of the woods.
I thought mainly of Mark’s relationship with the land, his knowledge of the places he had hunted, his familiarity with the habits of the creatures who lived there. I recalled walking into his room when I was a boy, marveling at the bows and arrows, the powder horn and pelts and antlers. Would hunting teach me to see these wooded ridges and valleys differently? Would it sharpen my attention to the nuances of terrain and breeze, of vegetation patterns and animal behavior, the way fishing had attuned me to the interplay of current, stone, and sunlight? Would hunting help me feel more like a participant in nature and less like a spectator? Would it give me some sense of belonging, of communion? Would it remind me of the largeness and wholeness of the world, and of my tininess within it?
To be honest with myself, I had to admit something else, too. I had been glossing over the presence of predation not only in nature, but in my own psyche.
The year after we moved to Vermont, on opening weekend of rifle season in mid-November, I had dreamed of a deer. And of a cougar, watching intently. Predator and prey circled each other, round and round, until finally the deer brushed by within inches of the great cat. Not yet hungry, the cougar let the white-tail pass. Still a vegan, I woke, jotted the dream in a notebook, and thought of it no more.
Two years before that, in what little snow we had gotten at Bird Cottage, I had once found deer tracks in the woods on the far side of the brook. I followed them, slowly at first, then faster and faster, running, weaving through the trees as the deer had done, pursuing the hoofprints for the sheer fun of it, feeling like the boy I had once been: fascinated with the ways of wild creatures, delighted to find signs of their passage and to have the chance to make plaster casts of their tracks. At the time, following those tracks near Bird Cottage, the feeling seemed nothing more than excited curiosity, the thrill of tracking and not knowing where the chase would end.
But was it not a hunter’s excitement?
6
Hunter and Beholder
When men and women put on blaze orange hunting vests or camo, they temporarily lose their individuality beneath the layers of symbolism loaded on the image of hunter.
—Jan E. Dizard, Mortal Stakes
Who would I be if I hunted?
After so many years of sticking to veggie burgers, could I really picture myself striding into the woods with a lethal weapon in hand, intent on shooting down a wild animal and dragging its bloody carcass home for dinner? Who would I become in my own eyes? Who would I become in others’ eyes?
Where Cath’s views were concerned, I was fortunate. Though my return to fishing had surprised her, as it had me, she could relate. Just as I could conjure memories of spring outings with Willie when the quarry was still half covered with ice, or of dropping my line into its cooler, shadier corners in midsummer, she remembered fishing with her brothers when they were kids, catching suckers in Rippleton Creek, the little waterway that ran near their house. They fed the small ones to the barn cats and brought the big ones home for their grandfather to cook.
Though Cath had no interest in angling now, she took mine in stride. She knew how enjoyable fishing could be and understood my desire to have a hand in procuring the flesh foods we were eating.
And though hunting was alien—except for her brother’s pursuit of the occasional cottontail, no one in her family had hunted, and the regular dispatching of woodchucks in the garden had been a simple extension of agriculture—she was keeping an open mind. If the vegan she had fallen in love with eight years earlier wanted to learn to stalk his own meat on the paw or hoof, she would adjust to the idea. For that, I was grateful. In an e-mail, Uncle Mark mentioned that his wife, who now looks forward to venison each autumn, was an anti-hunter when they first met. “Things were kind of stressed when I brought something home from the woods,” he wrote. I could well imagine.
In Cath’s eyes, then, my hunting would not precipitate a catastrophic fall from grace. Nor would my mother, sisters, aunts, uncles, or grandmother see it that way. Though Mark was the only hunter in my immediate clan, his annual pursuit of wild meat was well respected, and no one but me had ever taken up veganism.
I was less sure about our friends. My return to angling—the idea of me tossing flies and treble-hooked lures to unsuspecting trout or bass—had been a bizarre enough surprise. The image of me in a blaze-orange vest with a deer rifle slung over my shoulder would be far worse.
But why? Why should fishing, a thoroughly predatory activity, be so much more socially acceptable than hunting, and so much more popular? Nearly 30 million Americans fish each year, while only 12.5 million hunt.
Is it because we see fish as “other,” but perceive mammals, and to a lesser degree birds, as kin? As the late anthropologist Susan Kent noted, in traditional hunter-gatherer and hunter-farmer societies, “animals are classified as intellectual beings. They are therefore placed in the same macro-category as humans, whereas plants and fish are not.” Here in the modern West, we tend to make sharper distinctions between Homo sapiens and other animals, often claiming that humans possess something that animals do not: typically a capacity for reason, or a soul. But don’t we still identify more closely with hairy, warm-blooded fellow mammals than with scaly, cold-blooded fish? More with Bambi than with Nemo? (Ironically, the average American eats well over a hundred pounds of beef, pork, veal, and lamb each year, and less than twenty pounds of fish.)
Or is our greater discomfort with hunting rooted in its violence, so much more sudden and final than that of fishing? For the individual angler wielding rod and line, killing is not essential to successful fishing. Whatever we may say about the practice of “catch-and-release” angling—whatever praise we heap upon it for conserving fish populations, whatever criticism we level at it for causing pointless suffering and unintentionally killing some fish—we can agree on the simple fact: It can be done. We can fish, catch, and then decide the fate of our prey. We can even snap a quick photo before the rainbow, brown, or largemouth swims away. In hunting, our predatory implement is not a hook that can be removed, but a bullet, or a blast of shotgun pellets, or a razor-tipped arrow: a projectile that captures by killing. If a hunter shoots, there is no throwing the animal back to live another day.
Differences can also be heard in our idiomatic uses of the words “fish” and “hunt.” When we say someone is fishing for something—information, perhaps—we evoke an image of a line dropped quietly into water, or a net cast out, a subtle gesture toward an uncertain end. The fisherman waits, receptive, not knowing what, if anythin
g, will take the bait or lure, or appear in the net. Hunting for something—a job, perhaps—is different. Pointed and aggressive rather than patient and fluid, the hunter doggedly pursues his or her goal. If Simon and Andrew had been hunting along the shores of the Sea of Galilee, rather than casting a net, Jesus could hardly have said unto them, “Follow me, and I will make you hunters of men.”
If I really thought about it, I had to admit: My problem had never been with hunting itself.
Oh, in my most righteous vegan phase, I had been certain that hunting, like other forms of animal murder, was wrong. Yet, at the same time, I had mourned the extermination of indigenous hunter-gatherer and hunter-farmer cultures around the world. If someone had pointed out that contradiction—the fact that I wished for the survival of traditions like those of the Kiowa and Cree, and of the Yupik I had first read about in Julie of the Wolves, all of which involved hunting—I probably would have argued that such cultures, like ours, could make moral progress away from slaughter and meat eating. (It’s frightening to think that I might have made a good missionary.) If pressed on the point, however, I suppose I would have conceded: I didn’t object to human predation in all times and places.
Shortly after our move to Vermont, Cath and I borrowed David Attenborough’s series The Life of Mammals from a local public library. The final episode depicts an ancient form of hunting, the persistence hunt, as traditionally practiced by the San people of the Kalahari Desert. In the show, three hunters find the tracks of a group of kudu. When the animals are spotted, the pursuit begins. Alternating between walking and running, the three men focus on a single bull. Where tracks are visible, the hunters follow them. Where they are not, the men attend to subtler signs, in places relying on little more than their imagination, their ability to see the terrain from the kudu’s perspective and know where he would have gone.
Hours later, when the kudu begins to slow, the final stage of the hunt commences: the chase. One man runs in the blazing heat, pursuing his prey. But for the sneakers on his feet, the plastic canteen he carries, the steel of his knife and spear, and the unseen presence of a camera crew, the scene—man chasing animal—could be from ten thousand years ago. For hours, they run, the hunter’s expert tracking skills keeping him on the trail, his extraordinary stamina gradually overcoming the kudu’s.
Evolutionary biologists Dennis M. Bramble and Daniel E. Lieberman have speculated that this method of hunting—historically used to take deer and antelope in North America, kangaroos in Australia, and a variety of species in Africa—may, along with competitive scavenging, have influenced the evolution of the human body. Though we lack the speed of large quadrupeds, we have astonishing endurance, due to the musculoskeletal specializations of our bipedal form and our unique capacity for evaporative cooling.
Eight hours after the hunt began, man closes in on animal. Both walk slowly. Finally, the great antelope’s legs give out, and he lies on the ground, unable to rise, head up and alert, watching the hunter. From only a few yards away, the man launches the slender spear, striking the animal just behind the shoulder.
When the kudu lies still, the hunter scatters handfuls of sandy earth over the body, like a priest sprinkling holy water. Crouching, he caresses the animal’s face, looks into its eye. With his finger, he scoops saliva from the corner of the kudu’s mouth and rubs it into the skin of his own legs to relieve the pain of the long run. He gives thanks for the life he has taken, for the meat that will feed his family.
In watching that extraordinary segment, I saw the hunt as natural. Despite the artifice of film editing, the piece expressed something elemental, something true. The man was undeniably a part of nature: an intelligent, highly developed predator, to be sure, but only one among many. The moment of the kill—and the sorrowful, respectful moments just after it—made my heart ache.
No, my problem wasn’t with hunting. It was with hunters.
On one hand, for me the word “hunter” conjured images of the San’s reverence for the kudu, and of Uncle Mark. As a boy, I had grasped that Mark was gentle and sensitive. Now, as we corresponded about hunting, that perception was confirmed. “Killing,” he wrote, “is not something to be taken lightly.” Even after four decades as a hunter, he felt a wave of conflicting emotions at every kill: sorrow mixed with elation and gratitude. I imagined him crouched beside a fallen animal, touching it gently, as the San hunter did. He was glad to hear of my curiosity about hunting, but didn’t push me in that direction. Hunting wasn’t for everyone, he knew. “Everyone has to do what they are comfortable with,” he wrote. As a young man, he had sometimes felt the need to apologize for his affinity for hunting. Now, though, he embraced it. Hunting felt deeply right for him—a kind of spiritual pursuit.
On the other hand, the word “hunter” conjured other scenes.
It made me think of Julie of the Wolves: the shots fired from airplanes, the animals killed for entertainment.
It made me think of the young buck Paul and I once found near a small brook, while logging a suburban woodlot. The whitetail had taken a bullet in the chest but was never recovered by the hunter. The tail appeared to have been torn out by dogs or coyotes, perhaps as they ran the wounded animal down.
It made me think of the deer parts unceremoniously dumped along our road each autumn, pushed over the steep embankment above the brook where I had been catching trout. Finding those bones and scraps, I would silently curse the slobs who had discarded them, typically in garbage bags. Twice I carried a doe’s head home, left it in an anthill until the flesh had been stripped away, then set it in the woods, at the base of a spruce where I sometimes went to meditate.
“Hunter” made me think of shooting mishaps, both those that have ended in tragedy and those that might have: the Wisconsin woman killed in 2001 by a neighbor who thought he saw a deer, and the stray bullet that Cath told me had come through a window in her girlhood home and lodged in the wall of the upstairs hallway. Though such events are relatively rare, they make an indelible impression. As sociologist Jan E. Dizard notes in his book Mortal Stakes: Hunters and Hunting in Contemporary America, “even hunters themselves are not all that trusting of other hunters.”
And “ hunter” made me think, too, of the one autumn Cath and I had spent at Bird Cottage. The driveway connected to a trail that led back into the woods. When deer hunters armed with shotguns started walking down the driveway, passing within forty yards of us, we put up a no-hunting sign. A week later, we found Cath’s car slouching to one side, two tires slashed.
Hunters, it turns out, have occupied a complicated place in the Anglo-American psyche from the very beginning.
In seventeenth-century Europe, as historian Daniel Justin Herman documents in his book Hunting and the American Imagination, the New World was said to be a land of plenty: full not of the gently flowing milk and honey of a new Canaan, but of elk and deer, turkeys and waterfowl, and pigeons that darkened the skies with their uncounted millions. Such a wealth of wild meat appealed to the investors who were funding commercial explorations of North America. It also appealed to commoners, for the privilege of pursuing European game had long been reserved for the elite.
The New World’s wild plenty was matched by its wild terrors. One English sailor reported on its “many Tygers, monstrous and furious beasts, which by subtletie devoure and destroy many men.” As historian Andrea Smalley has noted, most reports about the New England and Virginia colonies downplayed these dangers, so as to avoid discouraging colonization. But longtime residents were aware of the impression the continent made on newcomers. What could they possibly see upon their arrival, asked William Bradford in his account of the early days of the Plymouth Colony, but a “hidious & desolate wildernes, full of wild beasts and wild men?”
As European colonists established a foothold along the eastern shores of North America, they took advantage of the abundant wildlife. Birds and mammals of every shape and size—from pigeons and ducks to beavers and deer—were netted, snared, tr
apped, clubbed, and shot. For those who did the killing, wild animals provided food. They also provided the opportunity for economic profit, as meat and hides could be sold at market.
Yet hunting stories are remarkably rare in colonial lore. Herman draws our attention to New England as an example. “How was it,” he asks, “that New England could be so full of game at the outset of colonization and yet produce so few tales of hunters and hunting?”
In some areas, perhaps colonists simply did not hunt much. At Plymouth, some twenty-five miles north of where Uncle Mark now hunted deer each fall, the archaeological evidence suggests that the Pilgrims were, in Herman’s words, “lackluster hunters.” Though they apparently consumed a fair number of wild ducks, they ate few wild mammals and almost no turkeys. In 1621, at the feast now commemorated as the first Thanksgiving, the main course was apparently venison, supplied by Wampanoag Indians.
More generally, colonists simply did not think of themselves as hunters. There was ample reason for them not to. With a few notable exceptions, such as the Finns who settled in the Delaware Valley, they had not been hunters in their homelands. For generations, they had primarily eaten the fruits of the field and pasture, not of the chase.
Nor had they come from hunting religions. Take the Puritans, for instance. In seventeenth-century England, they campaigned against hunting and cockfighting because they believed that such activities, like drinking, gambling, and pagan celebrations, were unchristian. In the words of British historian Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay, Puritans hated bear baiting—a form of entertainment in which bears were chained to posts and tormented by dogs—“not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.” In England, the Puritans had seen hunting as evidence of the gentry’s moral corruption. In the New World, they saw native peoples’ hunting in a similar light. “They believed,” writes Daniel Herman, “that Indians, like English aristocrats, were gamblers, fornicators, and ardent hunters, men who repudiated steady work habits and godliness.”
