Here in Vermont, as in other places where crunchy Americans congregate, the 14th Dalai Lama is a popular guy. Folks like Cath and me who shop at community food co-ops and farmers’ markets—and are often vegetarian—tend to think of him as a wise and compassionate teacher.
For many, it comes as a shock to learn that he eats meat. I know it did for me.
By the time I read about it in his autobiography, I had already abandoned vegetarianism, and his story resonated.
Back in the 1960s, he had witnessed the slaughter of a chicken and had sworn off flesh foods. Before long, though, his health began to suffer, with complications caused by hepatitis. Following his physicians’ instructions, he reluctantly returned to eating meat and regained his health.
What resonated even more was his commentary on Tibetans’ relationship with meat.
He notes that, in the 1960s at least, very few Tibetan dishes were vegetarian. Alongside tsampa—a kind of barley bread—meat was a staple of the local diet.
This, however, was complicated by religion. Buddhism, the Dalai Lama writes, doesn’t prohibit meat-eating “but it does say that animals should not be killed for food.” And there lay the crux of what he calls Tibetans’ “rather curious attitude” toward meat.
Tibetan Buddhists could buy meat, but they couldn’t order it, “since that might lead to an animal being killed” for them specifically. (This reminds me of a friend’s experience with a rabbit earlier this year.)
What, then, were Tibetan Buddhists to do? How could they eat meat without being involved in butchery? How could they consume flesh, yet prevent themselves from being implicated in killing?
Easy. They let non-Buddhists do it, often local Muslims.
These moral gymnastics might strike us as odd. But is the average American so different? Here, people’s distaste for butchery may be guided less by scripture than by squeamishness, the task assigned less by religion than by profession. The end result, though, is much the same. The dirty work gets done by others.
And there lies the crux of my own curious attitude toward meat. I prefer to take my own karmic lumps.
Eighteen years ago, I had no doubt: hunting was wrong.
Not that I made big distinctions among kinds of violence. I abhorred the idea of industrial meat operations, and thought little about the alternatives. Why split hairs? A murdered animal was a murdered animal.
Hunting, however, did seem especially gratuitous. We no longer needed to do it. Thanks to agriculture we now had ample plant matter to survive on.
At the same time, though, I mourned the extermination of indigenous hunter-gatherer cultures around the world.
If someone had pointed out that contradiction—the fact that I wished for the survival of cultural traditions that involved killing animals—I probably would have argued that such cultures, like ours, could make moral progress away from hunting and meat-eating.
Yikes. Might I have made a good missionary?
I also would have argued that indigenous cultures respected animals in ways that Euro-American culture did not. My problem wasn’t really with human predation in all times and places. My problem was with hunting here and now: mainly white folks with guns.
Now, most of two decades later, a new book has me reflecting on the views I held back then.
In A Matter of Life and Death: Hunting in Contemporary Vermont, anthropologist Marc Boglioli argues that mainstream American culture is increasingly dominated by a particular way of seeing (and talking about) nature and animals. “Killing beautiful wild animals,” he writes in the Introduction, “simply does not fit into the mainstream urban worldview.”
Consider the quote he pulls from Matt Cartmill’s book A View to a Death in the Morning, where hunting is characterized as “the rural equivalent of running through Central Park at night, raping and murdering random New Yorkers.” Or the quote from a commentary by animal rights philosopher Tom Regan: “The gestalt of rural people, their whole way of viewing the world, is radically different from somebody living in Washington, D.C., and the more we understand the other layers of it, the more we can practice ‘hate the sin, love the sinner.’”
In short, Boglioli argues, hunting is characterized as “a morally deficient aspect of rural American culture”:
I believe my research clearly shows that antihunting sentiment is not a product of a more highly developed sense of ethics or a greater ‘respect for nature’ among nonhunters, but rather is just one aspect of a rural/urban cultural debate that masquerades as a discussion of moral absolutes.
I wonder: Was that me eighteen years ago?
My ethical concerns about the treatment of animals were—and continue to be—sincere. But was my attitude toward hunting rooted in the cultural debate Boglioli suggests? Though I grew up in the country, my parents did not. I had one uncle who hunted, but I did not come from a “rural” family.
As further evidence of the urban elite’s condemnation of rural American practices, Boglioli points to his own discipline: anthropology.
Hunter-gatherer cultures such as the Inupiaq, Mbuti, and Bushmen have been studied for decades. Their hunting practices, beliefs, and rituals have been well documented. But people such as those Boglioli studies—hunters in rural Vermont—have been essentially ignored. Prior to A Matter of Life and Death, he notes, only one book-length ethnographic study of Euro-American hunting had ever been published: Stuart Marks’s 1991 Southern Hunting in Black and White.
What value could there possibly be in studying rural American hunters, in understanding and writing about their beliefs, practices, and ways of relating to animals and nature?
A lot, I think.
For one thing, it might help us reconsider the sharp divide in our ideas about “noble savages” and “ignoble Westerners”—a split which, Boglioli notes, is “slipping into the realm of caricature.”
Note: In Boglioli’s book and in this blog post, “urban” and “rural” refer not to individual people, but to cultures—systems of meaning that tend to predominate in certain types of places. Some hunters, of course, grow up or live in cities, just as some anti-hunters grow up or live in the country.
When Cath and I moved to our home here in the hills on the eastern side of the Winooski Valley, there was one group of people I wanted to keep off our few acres: hunters.
Anywhere you stood on our land—or fired a rifle—you were within a few hundred yards of our house. In most spots, you were a lot closer than that.
Our driveway is part of an old railroad bed, long used as a trail by hunters, hikers, bicyclists, cross-country skiers, and snowmobilers. Decades ago, after part of the railbed embankment washed out and disappeared downstream, a trail detour was put in around our house and driveway.
That detour winds through our woods just seventy yards from the back porch.
With safety in mind, and not liking the idea of hunting much, I did the obvious thing. I bought a roll of those ubiquitous bright yellow signs. Several went alongside the trail detour: not blocking it, but telling folks to stick to it.
Six years later, I started hunting.
Our few acres, though convenient, offered little opportunity. And, anywhere I stood—or fired a rifle—I was close to the driveway, the house, a neighbor’s house, or the frequently used trail. State land offered greater opportunity and safety, if I drove some distance to reach it. But the most convenient combination of opportunity and safety was offered by the hundreds of acres of timberland stretching out behind our house: others’ private property.
So I asked permission to hunt there.
Landowners who had grown up elsewhere thanked me for asking, and said yes.
Landowners who had grown up here were baffled by my question. Their land wasn’t posted. Didn’t I know that meant I could hunt it? (I did. The liberty to hunt on un-posted, un-enclosed private land was inscribed in Vermont’s Constitution two centuries ago.)
Talking with these landowners, I got thinking about our yellow signs.
I didn’t want to tempt fate by removing them entirely. In the previous few years, careless hunters had killed two bystanders in Vermont: one man picking berries where a hunter expected to see a bear, and another sitting in his living room watching television a long way from where a hunter missed a deer.
Reading those stories in the newspaper, I found little consolation in the statistical fact that hunting-related injuries to humans are (1) very rare and (2) almost always self-inflicted or inflicted on another hunter.
Hunters still needed to know that our few acres were not a place for shooting.
That message, though, could take a different tone.
Not in the academic sense, at least. My formal education in the subject consists of a single undergraduate class—“Reason and Argument”—which left me impressed by the contortions through which the human animal is willing to put its gray matter.
So, some fifteen months ago, when I saw a “call for abstracts” for a new anthology of philosophical essays on hunting, I had reason to doubt my suitability as a contributor. The editor welcomed abstracts from philosophy, of course, and also from a number of other disciplines—such as anthropology, political theory, and theology—in which I was equally unqualified.
Yet there was this one little phrase. They also welcomed abstracts from “thoughtful hunters.”
After a few helpful email exchanges with the editor, Nathan Kowalsky of the University of Alberta, I said, “What the heck. Why not?” and shot from the hip, firing off a 250-word description of the 4,500-word essay I would write if he and his colleagues wanted me to.
A month later, I got word that they did.
Hello. Time to step up to the plate and deliver “Hunting Like a Vegetarian: Same Ethics, Different Flavors.”
My complimentary copy hasn’t arrived yet, so I can’t give you a review.
What I can do is tell you that the mix of voices is remarkable. In addition to contributions from a fascinating group of folks who, unlike me, are trained in philosophy (including environmentalist and vegan Lisa Kretz and weapons fanatic Jesús Ilundáin-Agurruza), there are essays, for example, by Canadian zoologist Valerius Geist, Algonquin hunter Jacob Wawatie, and historian and bird-trap builder Paula Young Lee.
And I can point you to the first review of the book (review copies go out early), posted on Sustainablog by Justin Van Kleeck who, appropriately enough to my way of thinking, is vegan.
Enjoy! And I promise: my next post will not be about books, present or future.
Note: If you end up with a copy of the book in hand, and decide to read my essay, two small caveats. First, it is a smidge drier than my average blog post. Second, no sooner had the editing been finalized than I learned that some of the greenhouse gas figures given in the U.N. report Livestock’s Long Shadow, which I reference early in the essay, had been discredited. Ah well, it’s the spirit of the thing that counts.
Just a glimmer of an idea. Nothing more than a flicker of movement, caught out of the corner of my mind’s eye.
Bold one moment, it would dash into full view like a blustery red squirrel. Furtive the next moment, it would skitter off into the mental underbrush. (I have underbrush to spare. A tidy parkland my mind is not.)
Within a few months, I realized it wasn’t going away. So I started reading up on it: How exactly does one go about getting a book published?
But I won’t bore you with the tedious details.
Fast forward to earlier this year: as I mentioned back in April, I found a book agent—and not just any agent, but the patient, insightful, and tenacious Laurie Abkemeier (aka Agent Obvious)—who thought I had an idea worth pursuing. Together we crafted a proposal, which she then shopped around to editors.
Just over two weeks ago, Laurie emailed me with the news. We had a publisher. (Friday the 13th is my new favorite day.) We just had to keep it under our hats until the details of the contract got ironed out.
Now it’s official.
The Mindful Carnivore: A Vegetarian’s Hunt for Sustenance will be published by Pegasus Books!
I’m psyched. I’m grateful for the support and encouragement of all my friends and family, in person and online. And I’m looking forward to working with the fine folks at Pegasus on the next leg of the journey.
A bobcat crouching in thick cover. A cougar staring intently, its head dusted in snow. A black bear on its hind feet, marking a white birch.
And the words that went with them—spoken by wildlife biologist, conservationist, photographer, and tracker Sue Morse—were inspiring.
I had never heard anyone speak so passionately about the importance of habitat protection, particularly the danger of habitat fragmentation and the need to protect the travel corridors that keep wildlife populations interconnected and genetically viable.
She concluded the public presentation with yet another stunning photo of a bobcat.
“These are our neighbors,” she said.
A year later, while taking part in a habitat stewardship training designed and taught by Sue, I learned that she was a deer hunter.
What?
Sue loved wild animals. She admired them. She spent the vast majority of her waking hours working to understand and protect them. Keeping Track, the organization she founded, was working to conserve tens of thousands of acres of vital wildlife habitat across North America. How could she then turn around and kill one of them? It did not compute.
Only years later, as the possibility of hunting bubbled up into my own consciousness, did it begin to make sense. Only now, asking Sue about it, have I really begun to understand.
It turns out that she didn’t grow up hunting either.
It wasn’t until her early forties, she tells me, that she recognized a basic disconnect: what she calls her “schizophrenia” about predation. Carnivores were the focus of most of her research. When she came across signs of a mammalian predator’s successful hunt—perhaps a place where she could track a bobcat’s stealthy movements in the snow and read the story’s end in scattered turkey feathers—she celebrated, knowing the animal had survived another day.
A meat-eater, Sue had been raising lambs for years. She detested the cruelties and ecological impacts of the meat industry, and valued having a personal connection with the flesh foods she consumed.
Yet she wasn’t participating in the forest life cycles she studied.
It was, she decided, time to start.
Now, after more than twenty years as a predator, Sue’s message as a hunter is inextricably bound to her message as a naturalist and conservationist.
She wants to see some changes in American hunting.
Recent trends in the portrayal of hunting in television shows and videos, for instance, get under her skin. She sees far too much emphasis on competition, on success in bagging animals—in short, on killing. She sees far too little room left over for cherishing and respecting animals, for pausing to reflect on the meaning of hunting and killing, for allowing sorrow to coexist with gratitude and elation.
Sue, a hunter education instructor, feels it’s important for thoughtful hunters to address these things: “We have a huge responsibility to share with our non-hunting neighbors the truth about what hunting can and should be.”
But Sue has a more serious gauntlet to throw down.
“Many hunters,” as she once put it, “fail miserably at championing conservation and environmental protection causes.”
She’s well acquainted with the role that hunter-conservationists have played in the history of North American wildlife conservation, and with the programs funded by the license fees and excise taxes that hunters pay today. But she doesn’t think we should sit around congratulating ourselves.
Today’s dangers are too real and urgent.
Human activity continues to drive species over the brink of extinction, diminishing global biodiversity. In the United States alone, Sue notes, 3,000 acres of habitat are destroyed every day.
And we’re doing next to nothing about acid rain: “The Clean Air act hasn’t been strong enough after all, and the incalculable tons of filth we pump into the air do indeed fall back down upon us. Meanwhile our lakes and fish are poisoned, mercury contamination dictates that we shouldn’t eat our catch, and our forests sicken and decline in ways we can sadly measure but not fully understand.”
More hunters, Sue says, need to give back to the land. More hunters need to join organizations fighting to conserve wildlife habitat. More hunters need to work at building people’s awareness of the preciousness of all life, from invertebrates to wolves and cougars.
It’s vital, she argues, for hunters to join forces with environmentalists. We can’t afford political divisiveness.
Too often, she says, a few outspoken hunters “dominate the agenda, often opposing conservation measures, with their over-simplified and often selfish interests.” Too many hunters are distracted by what she calls “our increasing fascination with the machismo of bigger trucks, and the ease of mechanized hunting on ATVs and snowmobiles.”
Too many hunters miss the big picture: good hunting—like good birding, good hiking, and good berry-picking—has to begin with clean air, clean water, healthy soil, and intact ecosystems.
“We, of all people,” she told me recently, “really should get it. We should understand the relationship between a healthy natural environment and what makes us whole.”
Thanks, Sue, for all you do to keep the world whole. And for providing such a fine example of what hunting can be.
Notes: Sue’s organization Keeping Track, like so many non-profits, is struggling to keep afloat in these tough financial times; every donation, no matter how modest, helps. Also, Sue’s work with youth is profiled in the book The Woods Scientist, for kids age 9-12.
Last summer, when a mother bear and three cubs raided our apple trees at dawn, Cath and I watched, spellbound. Some broken branches and a few dozen apples were no great loss—nothing compared to the privilege of watching bruins in our front yard.
In winter, when red squirrels pilfered sunflower seeds from the bird feeders, we watched again. When I chased them off, it was merely to give the finches and chickadees a turn.
I like living peaceably with my fellow creatures. I begrudge them little.
The main exception to that peace is my hunting. A few weeks each year, I set off into the woods with bow or gun. Most of that time, I’m still watching in quiet admiration. I may not get (or take) the chance to kill. If I do, it is for food, not spite.
I’ve been thinking, for instance, of the three or four woodchucks that have burrowed in deep under our garden fence in the past twelve years. I killed them reluctantly, again for food: for the green beans and broccoli my furry friends were happily gorging on, and sometimes for their meat, too.
Less comfortably, I’ve been thinking about porcupines.
I have nothing against our spiny neighbors and enjoy seeing them in the woods. The harm they inflict on our apple trees is minor. The damage they do to building materials (whether part of our house, or tucked under our shed) is usually tolerable. The risk they pose to our black Lab, Kaia, is minimal; between her sense of caution and my calling her off, she has never made full contact.
Some years ago, however, things went too far.
It wasn’t any one thing.
It wasn’t just that two porcupines had been visiting nightly for weeks and that Kaia finally got quilled, in broad daylight, no less: one paw bristling with forty small, black needles.
A taste for laminates
It wasn’t just that the porcies, attracted to the resins in laminated wood, had finally gnawed right through the back corner of the plywood doghouse under the front porch, and were making more frequent forays up onto the porch to gnaw at certain spots on the decking (something salty spilled there years ago?), on the siding next to the front door (something special in the stain used there?) and on one of the 4×4 posts that hold up the porch roof (who knows?). One night they sampled a pair of rubber boots.
It wasn’t just that they were keeping us awake in the middle of the night, with chortling conversations in the trees just outside our bedroom window, or with sounds of their gnawing reverberating through the framing of the house. Yelling and throwing pebbles drove them away only briefly.
It wasn’t just that I had seen them around our vehicles of late, reminding me how they had nibbled through a brake hose a few years earlier: a problem I discovered on the way to work the next morning, when my foot went to the floor without slowing my pickup at all. I was grateful for a long driveway and a hand brake. The truck—our only vehicle at the time—was out of commission for three days while a replacement hose was located.
It was all those things added together.
Finally, late one night, wishing we had a few more fishers around, I suppressed my neighborly instincts and shot both porcupines.
Hating the killing, I told myself that I should cook them up as Bob Kimber describes doing in Living Wild and Domestic. But, in the middle of the night, I didn’t have the oomph to try butchering my first porcupines. So, with apologies, I slung them into five-gallon buckets and took them deep into the woods where no dog would find them.
Late the next night, I woke and heard noises. Not porcupine noises, surely.
Yes, porcupine noises. Groaning, I steeled myself, rolled out of bed, and went to fetch the .22.
By week’s end—surprised both by their numbers and by my knack for the dubious skill of holding both rifle and spotlight—I had killed six or seven.
I was not a hunter those nights. I was an executioner, disposing of fellow creatures whose only crimes were a burgeoning population, a territory that overlapped with ours, and a few unfortunate gustatory preferences.
I can think of only one upside to that grisly week. It worked. Though porcupines still abounded in the woods, they stopped trying to dismantle our house.
Here in Vermont, as in other places where crunchy Americans congregate, the 14th Dalai Lama is a popular guy. Folks like Cath and me who shop at community food co-ops and farmers’ markets—and are often vegetarian—tend to think of him as a wise and compassionate teacher.
When Cath and I moved to our home here in the hills on the eastern side of the Winooski Valley, there was one group of people I wanted to keep off our few acres: hunters.
I didn’t want to tempt fate by removing them entirely. In the previous few years, careless hunters had killed two bystanders in Vermont: one man picking berries where a hunter expected to see a bear, and another sitting in his living room watching television a long way from where a hunter missed a deer.
Two years ago, it was small.
