Hunting and heresy: A skirmish with Ortega y Gasset

If my pristine hardcover copy of Meditations on Hunting was a paperback, it would be heavily marked up.

Here and there, a sentence would be underlined, noting my emphatic agreement. Mostly, though, the margins would be crammed with question marks, exclamation points, and words of protest.

This little book, written in 1942 by Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, is quoted so often in the literature of hunting that it has taken on near-scriptural status. I guess I’m a heretic.

Of the dozens of bones I have to pick with Ortega, here I’ll chew on just one.

Ortega celebrates the “exemplary moral spirit of the sporting hunter” who hunts for diversion. He looks down on the “utilitarian” hunter who, like “Paleolithic man and…the poacher of any epoch,” hunts for food.

A sport is the effort which is carried out for the pleasure that it gives in itself and not for the transitory result that the effort brings forth… In utilitarian hunting the true purpose of the hunter, what he seeks and values, is the death of the animal. Everything else that he does before that is merely a means for achieving that end, which is its formal purpose.

Ortega seems to have forgotten something here. What the utilitarian hunter seeks and values is not death. It is life: food. But Ortega has more to say.

In hunting as a sport this order of means to end is reversed. To the sportsman the death of the game is not what interests him; that is not his purpose. What interests him is everything that he had to do to achieve that death—that is, the hunt…

Setting aside the fact that some sport hunters do seem quite interested in “the death of the game,” I agree with Ortega that there is far more to hunting than the death of the animal. The process of the hunt is undeniably compelling.

But, here again, Ortega has missed something. Utilitarian hunters are also compelled by the hunt itself. In his introduction to A Hunter’s Heart, Richard Nelson writes, “During a year I spent in the arctic coastal village of Wainwright, I was struck by the fact that Inupiaq men lived to hunt as much as they hunted to live.”

Ortega’s sportsman may live to hunt, but he does not hunt to live. And that makes the killing—and Ortega’s explanation of it—more tenuous.

Death is essential because without it there is no authentic hunting… The hunter seeks this death because it is no less than the sign of reality for the whole hunting process. To sum up, one does not hunt in order to kill; on the contrary, one kills in order to have hunted.

So, for Ortega’s sportsman, the animal’s death is a “sign” that the hunt was “authentic” and “real.”

To my ear, such insistence on authenticity suggests one thing clearly: Ortega’s sportsman is out of touch with reality. Why else would he need a sign of it?

Here, as elsewhere in the book, Ortega’s case for the superiority of sport hunting over utilitarian hunting appears to stem from a fundamental cultural arrogance. Tribes who depend on hunting for survival, Ortega writes, “represent the most primitive human species that exists.” Ignorant as these primitive brutes are—lacking “the slightest hint of government, of legislation, of authority”—their hunting and their philosophical understanding of it must, naturally, be inferior to those of civilized Europe.

But it his own ignorance—of tribal cultures and their enormously complex “utilitarian” hunting traditions—that Ortega demonstrates.

For, as Bob Kimber writes in Living Wild and Domestic, “it is the utilitarian hunter dependent on the hunt for sustenance who will have the greatest knowledge of, and respect for, his wild brethren and whose culture will make that knowledge and respect manifest in its arts, rituals, myths, and day-to-day behavior.”

Unlike the Inupiaq hunters described by Nelson, I don’t need to hunt to survive. But I do hunt to eat. Food is central to the landscape of meanings in which my hunting is rooted.

It is for food—not for a sign that my hunting is real—that I take aim at the whitetail’s heart.

The good, the bad, and the hungry

Two weeks ago, I got an email from Michelle Scheuermann, a spokesperson for The Sportsman Channel.

Hunt.Fish.Feed.—a project Michelle works on, bringing donated game and fish to the hungry—was getting some bad press. She wondered if I would take a look and share my thoughts. Given my journey from veganism to hunting, she thought I might have some insight.

I smiled. It was a nice way of saying that I might be weird enough to understand both sides of the thing.

Curiosity aroused, I clicked the link.

The post—“Kill Wild Animals to Feed the Homeless and Poor?”—was short.

The author, Jake Richardson, challenged Hunt.Fish.Feed.’s economic efficiency, asking why money should be spent on “gasoline, bullets, permits, beverages and other hunting gear” and on game-processing, rather than on “much more affordable produce.”

But his fundamental objections were moral. The Hunt.Fish.Feed. project, he wrote, “smacks of self-promotion…the promotion of killing wild animals for sport.”

More striking were the comments. The post had already drawn nearly 500, most of them vehemently supportive of Richardson’s position. I could see why Michelle had been amazed by the hatred expressed there. But I wasn’t surprised.

Fifteen years ago, as an anti-hunting vegan, I would have agreed with Richardson and his supporters: Hunting is morally wrong. Modern humans don’t need to hunt to survive, and killing for fun is depraved. There are more humane and cost-effective ways to feed the hungry.

Like some of the commenters, I might have accused Hunt.Fish.Feed. of being “another desperate excuse to try and justify [hunters’] blood lust” and a “way…to whitewash their evil.” Like Richardson, I might have listed “beverages,” but not food, as a subset of “hunting gear”; aren’t all hunters notorious beer-swillers?

The polar opposite view is just as easy for me to imagine: All legal hunting is honorable. Using game to feed the hungry is an obvious good, perhaps evoking traditional hunting cultures where successful hunters help feed a whole village. Cost-effectiveness has nothing to do with it. (My garden may not be the most efficient way to produce food. But why not plant an extra row of beans or corn to help feed a needy neighbor?)

Many of us, though, don’t see hunting in stark black or white. What do we think of a project like Hunt.Fish.Feed.?

Do we see it as a sincere effort to help, or as disingenuous self-promotion? If the project partnered with vegetarians to offer more diverse meals at future Hunt.Fish.Feed. events, as Michelle has told me they might, would that strike us as a praiseworthy attempt at collaboration, or as a blatant marketing stunt?

And how do we feel about the donated meat itself? Do our opinions—like most Americans’ attitudes toward hunting—hinge on why the hunters hunt and why the animals are killed?

Would we approve of hunters seeking out game specifically to donate it, but disapprove of them killing “for sport,” as Richardson put it, and donating the meat only as an afterthought? Would we approve of meat donations that resulted from an ecologically necessary culling of deer, but disapprove of those that resulted from a trophy hunt where venison was never part of the aim?

Personally, I hunt for food. I hunt for the humbling reminder of my impact as a living being. I hunt for a deeper understanding of the land and my place in it, one animal among many.

I don’t hunt for antlers. I don’t enjoy killing. I don’t live in a village that depends on my hunting for survival. And the deer population in my immediate area is not so dense as to present impending danger, ecological or otherwise.

So I don’t kill more deer than Cath and I can make use of, with a few pounds given away here and there.

Yet, if a second deer came my way in a single autumn, might I not raise my bow or firearm, with my mother’s, sisters’, and friends’ freezers in mind?

And what if I knew that a needy family or a group of homeless folks—perhaps unknown to me—would end up with the meat? Would I kill a deer for them?

An accidental trophy

Even with the leaves damp and quiet, I heard the buck coming. And even through the branches and brush, I saw enough antler to know he was no off-limits spikehorn.

When he stepped around the big hemlock twenty yards away, my rifle was up.

In the periphery of my mind, the antlers registered: maybe six points, probably a little bigger than the five-pointer I had shot some fifty yards from here, the year before.

But I wasn’t watching his head. I was watching his body, looking for a clean shot at heart and lungs. And I was simply thinking “legal deer.”

I had seen a couple of does in archery season and would have killed one if I’d had a good opportunity. Now, in rifle season, the only legal game was a buck with forked antlers. I wouldn’t get to the woods many more times. If I wanted to bring home venison this year, this buck might be my last chance.

When he came around the hemlock, he kept walking. I prefer to shoot at a still target. And there was something about the angle I didn’t like, his chest almost directly toward me—technically a fine shot with a firearm, but it didn’t feel right. Then he slowed and turned. He was nearly broadside when I squeezed the trigger.

As he staggered and went down—my bullet through his heart—the thought occurred to me: He was big.

As a vegan and staunch anti-hunter, I had seen trophy hunting as the lowest of the low. Animals shot for their antlers? Living beings reduced to measurable possessions? Kills competitively compared by size? Yuck.

Later, as I began exploring the philosophical terrain of hunting, I realized that hunters kill big animals for a variety of reasons. Some are, indeed, fixated on possession and competition, sometimes not even wanting the meat. Some seek out older, bigger, wilier animals to challenge themselves as hunters. Some, like my uncle, welcome the occasional large animal as an unexpected gift.

I realized, in short, that when I saw a pickup going down the road with a big, dead deer in back, I had no real idea who was behind the wheel or what his or her motives were.

When I reached the fallen buck, I was shocked: eight points, four on each side, spreading half again as wide as the five-pointer from the year before. Bits of bark and wood were ground into the base of the antlers, from rubbing against trees.

The buck was heavy. Even with help from a friend, he dragged hard. At the check-in station two miles down the road—a simple scale behind a convenience store—the field-dressed deer weighed in at over 190 pounds. In some parts of North America, that’s not an impressively large whitetail. Here, it is.

Now I was the guy behind the wheel of the pickup with the big, dead deer in back. Now I was the guy being congratulated by strangers, their admiration for the magnificent animal displaced to me. I shook my head and shrugged.

“I just got lucky,” I told them. I wasn’t out to bag a big buck. Just legal venison.

Yet I did keep the skull and antlers: As things of stark beauty. As a reminder of that hunt. As a reminder of the biggest deer I ever expect—or feel any need—to kill.

And, the night after the kill, as I drifted off to sleep, I did wonder: What would it feel like to catch even a fleeting glimpse of the massive buck some hunters swear they’ve seen roaming these hills, the one whose shed antlers people say they’ve found, seven or more points on a single side? Would I kill such an animal, or would I simply stare in awe?

Blueberries and venison: The gift of wild foods

Cath and I looked at the ground in surprise.

We had visited this rocky hilltop many times. It was here, some eight years earlier, that I had asked her to marry me.

We had often seen these low bushes clinging to the meager soil. We had never seen them fruiting.

The patch of green leaves at our feet was speckled with clusters of dusty blue. We picked a few ripe berries and savored their sweetness, then picked a few more, dropping them into a plastic grocery bag I happened to have in my fanny pack.

Soon we realized that the entire southern side of the hilltop was thick with blueberries. Thrilled by the unexpected bounty, we loaded the grocery bag with nearly two quarts, hardly making a dent.

But no measure of volume can gauge what we gathered that morning.

From farming done by others, we get the bulk of our calories and nutrition: fruits, vegetables, grains, chickens, and more. From our own gardening, we get a smaller portion of our food—greens, peas, beans, carrots, squash, and the like—plus an invaluable sense of involvement and connection.

From wild food, we get something else.

Whether unsought and unforeseen like that bagful of blueberries, or hunted and hoped for like the chanterelles I seek in the summer woods or the deer who steps out from behind a tree twenty yards from where I crouch in autumn, wild food is not something grown or owned, bought or sold.

It is something given. Something that feeds soul as much as body. A reminder of our oldest, humblest way of eating.

Unlike the hunted animal, remarks Bob Kimber in Living Wild and Domestic, “The animal raised and slaughtered is not a gift. We have earned that food in a different way, and when we eat that animal, we are not accepting a gift as much as we are exercising our property rights.”

To blueberry bush or fallen deer, I am not master, standing over that which is rightfully mine, but supplicant, on my knees, hand outstretched.

Moose at the threshold

Photo by Mike Lockhart/US Fish & Wildlife Service

The moose steak sat on the kitchen counter in a steel bowl, thawing.

Having just completed the state hunter education course, I was contemplating the prospect of going after meat on the hoof. Though I didn’t have any plans to hunt until the following year, I did have a question to answer: How would it feel to cook and eat the flesh of a wild mammal?

Two years earlier, for health reasons, Cath and I had given up veganism. We had started eating chicken and fish, foods that seemed strange after so many years.

Eating them was, for me, unsettling. It was also grounding, bringing with it an unexpected sense of embodiment, of fully inhabiting the world, of coming to terms with the inevitable impacts of living.

Handling the flesh of birds and fish, I was quite aware of their origins as living beings. Some of the chickens were ones I had seen pecking away in a friend’s grassy yard. Some of the fish were ones I had caught and killed. Yet, once they had been reduced to food, I didn’t dwell on them as individual creatures.

Moose was different.

The steak was a gift from a local hunter. Under my hand, the cool, firm muscle felt strange as I sliced. Lightly sautéed and served with a stroganoff-style sauce, it tasted even more alien than chicken and fish had.

With a piece of moose between my teeth, the huge, dark animal stood there, vivid in my imagination. Perhaps my awareness of the individual creature stemmed from his sheer size. Perhaps it stemmed from my categorization of moose as part of the local landscape, but—unlike cows or pigs—not part of the modern American diet. Perhaps it stemmed from the simple redness of the meat; Cath and I had not been cooking and eating the flesh of fellow mammals.

With the moose in mind, I took his body into mine uneasily.

Yet, by the time I sat down to the leftovers a night or two later, the texture and flavor seemed more familiar, the idea more palatable.

Eating this creature, whose individuality I pictured, was more potent than eating chickens, whom I imagined less specifically. I was in nutritional relationship not just with mammals in general, but with this one in particular. I felt the gap between me and my food closing even more.

I was, of course, still one step removed. That winter I bought a deer rifle.

What won’t you eat?

Despite the title of my blog, I’m not a carnivore. I’m an omnivore.

Or am I?

According to my Random House Webster’s Dictionary, an “omnivore” is “someone or something that is omnivorous.”

Duh. Next reference, please.

Omnivorous (om niv’ər əs), adj.

feeding on both animals and plants – Check.
eating all kinds of foods indiscriminately – Uh…no.

I’m not a fussy eater. It’s just that there are some things I don’t consider “food.”

I know, for example, that insects are eaten by humans all over the globe. People insist that they are tasty, nutritious, environmentally friendly, and even “the food of the future.” (Online, you can order “cricket and larva lollipops” containing arthropods with “the taste and crunch of popcorn.”) Call me prejudiced, but I can’t see myself going there, unless I was starving.

Pickiness is, I suspect, inversely correlated with hunger.

When we’re reasonably well fed, though, it’s not hard to abide by our rules: our aesthetic, ethical, religious, and cultural proscriptions.

Some of us, obviously, won’t eat flesh, or any food that comes from animals. Been there, done that.
Some of us won’t eat wild game. For others, a hunted-or-fished meal is the finest feast imaginable.
Some of us won’t eat flesh unless we know where it came from. Others would rather not know.
Some won’t eat pigs. Others have recurrent fantasies involving the mysterious aromatic powers of bacon.
In some parts of the world, folks consider cows sacred; harming them is taboo. In other places, folks will happily sit down to a plate of sirloin but are revolted by the idea of people eating horse, dog, or cat.

By and large, I have no quarrel with such notions of what is or is not edible. But I do think they’re worth questioning, and—now and then—stretching.

Twenty years ago, early in college, I had the chance to spend a semester in Japan. My first afternoon there, I sat down to a plate of okonomiyaki: a kind of thick pancake, with vegetables and seafood stirred into the batter. A few bites in, I found myself looking down at a chunk of purple tentacle.

It wasn’t bad. A tad rubbery, but not bad.

‘I could definitely kill one of those’

The timing was dead-on.

Just as I walked past the table, the woman said, “My rule is, ‘I’ll only eat it if I could kill it.’ And I could definitely kill one of those.”

I left the restaurant chuckling. I was thinking how the line echoed one of my reasons for taking up hunting: to face the killing of the fellow vertebrates I had begun eating after a decade of abstention. There would, I felt, be a lesson in that confrontation.

But the line also reminded me how complex our eating is.

As a vegan, my rule had been like hers. I was unwilling to kill animals or keep them penned up—or to have someone else do the killing or penning for me—so I didn’t eat their flesh or even their eggs or milk. I was okay with the killing of vegetables, grains, and legumes. Whether I grew it myself or bought it, the question seemed simple: Was I willing to behead broccoli?

Eventually, though, I came to the uncomfortable realization that harvesting individual plants was not all it took to put vegetarian meals on my plate.

Was I willing to remove wild plants (trees, grasses, and wildflowers) from a given area, to make room for domesticated plants? Was I willing to evict the wild mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians who lived there?

Was I willing to keep marauding insects and herbivores at bay? If deterrents and repellents didn’t work—if fences were breached or unaffordable—was I willing to kill beetles, woodchucks, and deer so I could eat?

If not, was I willing to do all of the above by proxy, knowing someone else had done it for me?

Faced with these questions, I had to (A) stop eating, (B) stick my head back in the sand, or (C) make peace with a far more complex picture of what it meant to be alive. I opted for C.

Yet I do still find value in posing the woman’s simpler question, especially when I’m about to eat flesh: Could I kill one of those?

And I still find myself wishing I had seen what was on her plate.