Tag: anti-hunting

August 4, 2010

How not to keep a hunter in the closet

Seeing a neighbor coming down the woods trail, I winced.

There I was, dressed in camo with a bow in hand, headed home after a morning hunt. And here he came, walking his dog.

I suspected that he, like most of my friends and acquaintances, wasn’t keen on hunting. I could hardly blame him. I had long deplored the killing of animals for food, let alone for sport.

Though I knew a respectful hunter or two, my predominant opinions had been rooted in stereotypes reinforced by personal experience: Cath’s tires slashed after we had put up a no-hunting sign, deer parts dumped alongside our road each autumn, and more.

Now, in my first autumn afield, I was still uncertain how I felt about hunting, even my own. I imagined I would have a clearer sense of it after I killed my first deer.

As my neighbor drew near, I could see surprise on his face.

“It is you,” he said. “I thought, ‘It’s some redneck out hunting and I need to watch my back.’ But no, it’s you out hunting and I need to watch my back.”

We had a polite if awkward chat. Then, only half-joking, he reminded me that he would be in the woods for a while and that his dog looked like a deer. (It would, I thought, be impossible to mistake her for anything but a young, frenetic golden retriever.) And we parted ways.

I felt that same awkwardness three years later, when my first hunting essay was published. I knew the magazine’s readership wasn’t entirely hostile to hunting. The editor sometimes wrote short pieces about his experiences in deer season. But it felt strange to publicly announce my new pursuit. Would acquaintances see the piece and be shocked? Would they give me a hard time?

Thankfully, the essay sparked no negative response. What little feedback I got was positive: an enthusiastic phone message from a conservationist friend here in Vermont, an appreciative letter-to-the-editor from a hunter in upstate New York.

I breathed more easily. I would go about my business quietly now.

In the woods, I would rarely be seen.

In my writing, I would stick to other subjects. That first, brief essay had said all I wanted to say about hunting. There was no need to return to the topic, broadcasting news of my transmogrification.

I wasn’t ashamed of hunting. I didn’t need to hide it. But it wasn’t something I wanted my name to be associated with too strongly.

Heaven forbid it should get around on the internet.

July 11, 2010

When hunters ruin the hunt

He loved the woods, the animals, and the hunt. What he didn’t count on were the hunters.

Following his boyhood dream, he earned his license as a Registered Maine Guide and landed a job with an outfitter.

Then came the group of hunters who returned to camp bragging about how they had chased a moose with their truck. There to hunt deer or bear, they had just happened onto the bull. They laughed, describing how close they had gotten to the animal and how wildly he had run.

Then came the hunters who used their truck to drag a bear back to camp. A half mile or more of high-speed travel over rough ground left the carcass battered: the hide torn and stripped of hair, the meat covered with dirt.

Then came the hunter who, having already taken a bear, illegally shot another one on the last day of the hunt. The tag on the animal belonged to an inexperienced and luckless companion.

Then came the hunter who wouldn’t keep his rifle pointed away from people, even when reminded.

Had these been isolated incidents, he might have stuck it out. They were not.

Had his fellow guides been as outraged as he was, the outfit might have tightened ship. They were not.

So he left.

When this young man and I crossed paths a few years ago, he was still a hunter. But he’d had enough of prostituting his skills to guys who cared nothing for what he loved.

When I consider the future of hunting—how it will fare in the public eye, and what meaning it will have for generations to come—it’s not anti-hunters I worry about.

It’s these guys.

June 8, 2010

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?

May 31, 2010

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?

March 5, 2010

‘Gone killing’

Hunters and anglers, writes Marc Bekoff in Animals Matter, “often like to hang signs that say ‘Gone Fishin’’ or ‘Gone Huntin’.’ But what these slogans really mean is ‘Gone killing.’”

When I opposed hunting, I would—like Bekoff—have objected to the euphemisms. Even catch-and-release fishing, with its professed intent not to kill, often does.

Now that I hunt, though, what strikes me is simply that “gone killing” is a terribly inaccurate description of my experiences in the woods.

When I hunt deer, the creatures I see most often are small woodland birds, usually chickadees. If I’m lucky, a pileated woodpecker might land on a nearby tree trunk with a thwack, or a pair of ruffed grouse might scurry by in the brush. Typically, the biggest mammal I see is a red squirrel, hopping past or pausing to scold me.

Hunters do hope to kill now and then. Yet many of us go years without doing so. I recall talking with a man who was out in the woods, hunting with his son. He said he hadn’t shot a deer in over twenty years. He seemed perfectly content just being out there.

Even when animals do show up, often there isn’t any opportunity for a legal, ethical shot. And even when there is, hunters don’t always kill. Sometimes we let the moment pass.

On the rare occasions when I do shoot a deer, the killing itself takes mere seconds.

In short, killing isn’t what hunters do with most of their time in the field.

But, just for a moment, let’s imagine that Bekoff’s words were literally true—that all hunting entailed killing. If we were all subsistence hunters, dependent on the meat to keep our families alive through the winter, perhaps we’d be glad to know that we’d return from every outing with dinner in tow.

Even then, though, how would the certainty and the constant killing feel? What kind of experience would it be?

I’m not even sure what we’d call it. As one local hunter—a particularly experienced and skilled outdoorsman—once put it after a long, unsuccessful deer season, “That’s why they call it ‘hunting,’ not ‘finding.’”

Maybe next time I head to the woods, I’ll hang a sign: “Gone looking, listening, and birdwatching—and, just possibly, killing.”

February 5, 2010

Hunters and other whackos

The word “hunting” or “hunter” catches my ear. Then I hear my name.

I’m at a gathering of neighbors and a friend has just told a couple acquaintances that I hunt. Catching a few more words, I can sense their astonishment from across the room. He seems like a nice enough guy, I imagine them thinking. You wouldn’t think he was part of that deranged, bloodthirsty lot.

Ten or fifteen years earlier, I would have been in their shoes. I would have reacted from the same viewpoint: Modern hunters don’t have to kill to survive. They kill because they want to. Wanting to kill is a sign of ignorance, sadism, or worse.

To be sure, there are some nasty, sadistic hunters out there. But I’m not sure that such people are found any more frequently among hunters than among the general population.

When you paint all hunters with that brush—convincing yourself that they’re all deranged—you can ignore everything they say. Who listens to nutcases? It makes things easy. You can dismiss them as a stereotyped category, shaking your head and saying, “I just don’t understand that (crazy) way of thinking.”

But the blade cuts both ways.

I hear folks talking about anti-hunters in similar ways: they’re ignorant, naïve, or worse. They’re all nutcases.

When we—in either the anti-hunting camp or the hunting camp—circle our wagons and sit around congratulating ourselves on having so much more on the ball than those whackos, I think a few things happen.

One: We lose touch with our empathy for them as fellow humans.

Two: We lose sight of our common ground. Many hunters and anti-hunters share basic beliefs about animal welfare. Folks in both groups, I wager, think more about animals than do folks in the non-hunting majority. Some folks in both groups go out of their way to help animals and alleviate suffering.

Three: We stop trying to see beyond the stereotypes, to comprehend where other folks are coming from. We run the risk of becoming rigid, self-absorbed, and deaf to reason. We short-circuit our own capacity for learning.

Anti-hunters could learn a lot from open-minded conversations with thoughtful hunters.

And hunters could learn a lot from anti-hunters.

I’m thinking, for instance, of the comments left by Clyde on my post of January 1^st. He says he’s a dedicated vegetarian and feels antipathy toward the gunshots he hears in the woods. Yet he respects those hunters who have “a solid code of ethics.” He’s found a way to hold both and expresses passionate, sensitive views. He writes of the moral responsibility that comes with hunting, the need for the hunter to minimize suffering through “compassion and acute judgment,” and the sacredness of the power to kill or let live.

Some hunters I’ve met could have written Clyde’s words. Others I’ve met could stand to read and ponder them.