Mother Nature’s Child (or Girl the Hunter)

Even before the film started, my antennae were up. Cath and I had gone to the January 25th screening of Mother Nature’s Child: Growing Outdoors in the Media Age out of general curiosity. The documentary’s message would, I expected, be much like that presented by Richard Louv’s compelling book Last Child in the Woods. In … Read more

Adult-onset hunting: Know the signs

Experts have not yet determined whether Adult-Onset Hunting™ (AOH) is an epidemic. What they do know is that thousands of people are afflicted. More than a year ago, it was known—and reported in a widely read New York Times article—that a growing number of U.S. citizens had the condition. According to a recent article in … Read more

Redneck culture, city culture: The clash over hunting

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 … Read more

Hunting philosophy for (and by) almost everyone

A philosopher I am not. 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 … Read more