Tag: ethics

July 18, 2010

Ceremony for a meal

Kneeling beside my first deer, I had no words. I just sat there stunned, my hand on his shoulder, uncertain whether I would ever hunt again.

Finally, I whispered something clumsy: half gratitude, half apology.

The next year, when my second deer dropped in his tracks, I was shaken but less shocked. I spoke my thanks and asked forgiveness simply, without grace.

It was after my third deer fell that I knelt to lean a few small sticks against each other, then cloaked them with three fern fronds, still green in mid-November.

If I had grown up in a family of hunters, or in a culture that spoke to the wild, perhaps I would have had some prayer or ceremony at the ready. As it is, the words and gestures are still part of what I hunt for. Over time, as I find them, perhaps a ritual habit will take root in the thin soil of my few years afield.

These gestures need not be confined to the hunt, of course.

Considering all the deaths we inflict, directly and indirectly, there’s as much reason to fall to my knees by a shelf full of bread or corn chips in the grocery store, or even by a display of organic produce at the local farmers’ market.

Yet, standing in front of fruits and vegetables grown by others, I have the luxury of not knowing what cost they incurred.

Maybe the harm was no worse than the initial “conversion” of forest to tillable farm land, plus a few earthworms chopped by shovel or tractor, or some caterpillars knocked off by a bacterial insecticide.

Considering the larger impacts I know my life has, I have decided not to worry about individual invertebrate deaths. I value them ecologically and gently escort many insects out of our house. But I crush the cucumber beetles that attack our squash seedlings.

On the other hand, maybe a few toads were diced in the tilling. Maybe the field was fertilized with compost made from both the manure and the carcasses of cows. Maybe the bushels of greens on display at the farmers’ market took the life of a family of woodchucks. Maybe the flats of strawberries grew to ripeness thanks to the killing of a deer or two.

A long list of maybes: things most of us don’t know or care to know.

When I garden—uprooting weeds, mashing beetles, occasionally shooting a woodchuck—the luxury of ignorance begins to fade.

When I kneel beside a dead whitetail, it disintegrates. Yanked out of forgetfulness, I find I must offer some gesture of gratitude and apology, no matter how clumsy.

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 27, 2010

Monkeys, venison, and the sentience of dinner

Was that the faint sound of steps? Of hooves crunching dry leaves under the thin blanket of snow?

Seated on the ground, I shifted to the right and half-raised my .54 caliber caplock.

Moments later, I saw deer some forty yards off, walking toward me among the pines. Two, three, four of them. I brought the rifle to my shoulder and eased back the hammer. My third year of hunting would come to a close in less than a week and I had yet to kill a whitetail.

The first in line was a doe. My tag was for a buck. The little parade had closed to less than thirty yards now, weaving through the trees. Heart pounding, I stared along the iron sights, watching for antlers.

If the chance came, I would probably shoot. Yet I couldn’t be sure. I had mixed feelings about the idea.

It would have sat more easily if I believed, with Descartes, that animals are senseless: nothing more than animated meat. But I don’t.

How different am I, after all, from my fellow primates? Some days I don’t feel like the brightest monkey in the forest. If my mind was not cluttered with abstract ideas, might I experience the world much as an ape does?

If I cannot exclude all non-humans from the realm of sentience, by what logic can I exclude some, drawing the line somewhere south of chimpanzee? A deer is not a primate, but it does have senses—perhaps different in kind, perhaps different mainly in degree. So does the hawk. So does the rabbit on which the hawk feeds. If we give credence to old teachings and recent science, even plants have kinds of awareness.

Perhaps the world is more complex and more beautiful than we have imagined. And more terrible.

My vegan diet had taken its toll not only on plants, but on animals, too—those displaced by the conversion of forest and prairie to farmland, those minced by the combines that harvested my grains, those gassed in their burrows to protect my salad greens, those shot in defense of the soybeans that became my saintly tofu.

Now my omnivorous diet was taking its toll on vertebrates more directly.

And here I was in the woods, wondering how willing I was to exact that price myself.

The lead doe was closer now. Looking past her, I could see that the second in line was a doe as well. The third, also antlerless, looked like a six-month-old. And the fourth?

Ah, another doe.

There would be no killing today, and no answers. Yet my heart still pounded.

The lead doe stood broadside a dozen paces away, her breath pluming in the frosty air, her ears and great, dark eyes focused on me. All four deer paused, aware of my crouching form. Unsure what I was, they hesitated. They looked and listened. Then, slowly, they turned back the way they had come.

Trembling, I sat and watched them go.

June 14, 2010

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.

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?

May 19, 2010

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.