Photo: A hunter stands in the woods, rifle to his shoulder, looking through the scope. Caption: “All you can think about is how good this shot is going to feel.” I saw the advertisement several years ago. I don’t remember if it was for the rifle or the scope. I don’t even remember what magazine … Read more
Back in November, a fellow hunter and I talked about an essay he’d written. In it, he described stumbling onto a deer that had been wounded by someone else. When the piece was published, he heard from some disgruntled hunters. They didn’t like seeing that kind of story in print. A couple months later, I … Read more
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
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
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
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 … Read more
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