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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.

© 2010 Tovar Cerulli

What won’t you eat?

Despite the title of my blog, I’m not a carnivore. I’m an omnivore.

Photo by Ingrid Taylar

Or am I?

According to my Random House Webster’s Dictionary, an “omnivore” is “someone or something that is omnivorous.”

Duh. Next reference, please.

Omnivorous (om niv’ər əs), adj.

  1. feeding on both animals and plants – Check.
  2. eating all kinds of foods indiscriminately – Uh…no.

I’m not a fussy eater. It’s just that there are some things I don’t consider “food.”

I know, for example, that insects are eaten by humans all over the globe. People insist that they are tasty, nutritious, environmentally friendly, and even “the food of the future.” (Online, you can order “cricket and larva lollipops” containing arthropods with “the taste and crunch of popcorn.”) Call me prejudiced, but I can’t see myself going there, unless I was starving.

Pickiness is, I suspect, inversely correlated with hunger.

When we’re reasonably well fed, though, it’s not hard to abide by our rules: our aesthetic, ethical, religious, and cultural proscriptions.

  • Some of us, obviously, won’t eat flesh, or any food that comes from animals. Been there, done that.
  • Some of us won’t eat wild game. For others, a hunted-or-fished meal is the finest feast imaginable.
  • Some of us won’t eat flesh unless we know where it came from. Others would rather not know.
  • Some won’t eat pigs. Others have recurrent fantasies involving the mysterious aromatic powers of bacon.
  • In some parts of the world, folks consider cows sacred; harming them is taboo. In other places, folks will happily sit down to a plate of sirloin but are revolted by the idea of people eating horse, dog, or cat.

By and large, I have no quarrel with such notions of what is or is not edible. But I do think they’re worth questioning, and—now and then—stretching.

Twenty years ago, early in college, I had the chance to spend a semester in Japan. My first afternoon there, I sat down to a plate of okonomiyaki: a kind of thick pancake, with vegetables and seafood stirred into the batter. A few bites in, I found myself looking down at a chunk of purple tentacle.

It wasn’t bad. A tad rubbery, but not bad.

© 2010 Tovar Cerulli

‘I could definitely kill one of those’

The timing was dead-on.

Just as I walked past the table, the woman said, “My rule is, ‘I’ll only eat it if I could kill it.’ And I could definitely kill one of those.”

I left the restaurant chuckling. I was thinking how the line echoed one of my reasons for taking up hunting: to face the killing of the fellow vertebrates I had begun eating after a decade of abstention. There would, I felt, be a lesson in that confrontation.

But the line also reminded me how complex our eating is.

As a vegan, my rule had been like hers. I was unwilling to kill animals or keep them penned up—or to have someone else do the killing or penning for me—so I didn’t eat their flesh or even their eggs or milk. I was okay with the killing of vegetables, grains, and legumes. Whether I grew it myself or bought it, the question seemed simple: Was I willing to behead broccoli?

Eventually, though, I came to the uncomfortable realization that harvesting individual plants was not all it took to put vegetarian meals on my plate.

  • Was I willing to remove wild plants (trees, grasses, and wildflowers) from a given area, to make room for domesticated plants? Was I willing to evict the wild mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians who lived there?
  • Was I willing to keep marauding insects and herbivores at bay? If deterrents and repellents didn’t work—if fences were breached or unaffordable—was I willing to kill beetles, woodchucks, and deer so I could eat?
  • If not, was I willing to do all of the above by proxy, knowing someone else had done it for me?

Faced with these questions, I had to (A) stop eating, (B) stick my head back in the sand, or (C) make peace with a far more complex picture of what it meant to be alive. I opted for C.

Yet I do still find value in posing the woman’s simpler question, especially when I’m about to eat flesh: Could I kill one of those?

And I still find myself wishing I had seen what was on her plate.

© 2010 Tovar Cerulli

A Mindful Carnivore: Same blog, new name

Dear Readers:

Two teachers
Two teachers

You’ve been very tolerant.

For months now—in email subscriptions, in RSS readers, and on my website—I have been subjecting you to the unpalatable blandness of the blog title People. Animals. Nature. Yet there has been nary a peep of protest.

The affront to your good taste is, I hope, at an end.

Next time you visit my site, you’ll see the new title, A Mindful Carnivore. Within a few days, that title will be showing up in the email and RSS feeds, too. I think the transition will be smooth. If you run across any glitches, please do let me know. (If I’m on your blogroll and it doesn’t update when my RSS feed does, I’d sure appreciate it if you could refresh the listing.)

Don’t worry: I won’t be writing only about eating meat.

The new title aims to capture the essence of the odd perspective that I, a vegan-turned-hunter, bring to the topics of…er, well…people, animals, and nature. It comes from the current working title of a writing project I’m working on. It’s in the early stages yet, but will—one of these days—be my first book.

A number of people, including my wonderful wife Catherine and several enthusiastic friends, were of huge help in getting me as far as including “carnivore” in the working title. (Our collective brainstorming generated a few memorable ideas, including From Tofu to Tenderloins and The Vegetarian’s Guide to Successful Deer Hunting. Titles including “omnivore” were contenders, too, but I think a sort-of-famous book used that recently.)

It took the sharp eye of Laurie Abkemeier, the fantastic book agent I’m working with, to pick the word “mindful” out of my early scrawlings and combine it with “carnivore.”

Next up in the blog, thoughts on something I overheard in a restaurant: “My rule is, ‘I’ll only eat it if I could kill it.’ And I could definitely kill one of those.”

© 2010 Tovar Cerulli

Meditation with meat and knife

My fingers slide under the muscle, separating it from the layer below. My knife snips tendons and traces the curvature of bone.

I add the slab of venison to one of the 13×9 pans on the kitchen counter.

Hours ago, this leg was a deer. In the early morning light, the animal was moving somewhere in the cool, damp forest. Then pausing to listen and test the breeze. Then walking or trotting on again, toward the gentle slope where I sat waiting among the hemlocks.

Much of my time in the woods is quiet, contemplative. Afternoons spent scouting in late summer and early fall, looking for tracks and other sign. Hours, days, or entire seasons spent listening and watching, seeing no deer.

If I get the chance for a clean shot, the killing is over in a flash.

When I crouch beside the fallen animal and whisper thanks, I am both grateful and unsettled. There in the woods, though, there is work to be done—gutting the deer and dragging the body home.

It’s at the kitchen counter that I make my peace with the killing. There, with a leg on the cutting board, contemplation returns. Separating flesh from bone, I marvel at the power these muscles held, to launch the buck in great leaps.

There is a quiet rhythm to the task, like canning, my wife Cath suggests: a small repetitive act done by these hands, a pattern within the larger rhythmic patterns of the seasons, the patterns of all things that live and eat and die and feed one another.

Inexperienced as I am, it takes me a long while to get from skinning the animal to grinding the last pounds of burger. Someday, caught between my slowness and my schedule, I may have to pay a local butcher to do the work. But not soon, I hope.

© 2010 Tovar Cerulli

Meditation with meat and knife

My fingers slide under the muscle, separating it from the layer below. My knife snips tendons and traces the curvature of bone.

I add the slab of venison to one of the 13×9 pans on the kitchen counter.

Hours ago, this leg was a deer. In the early morning light, the animal was moving somewhere in the cool, damp forest. Then pausing to listen and test the breeze. Then walking or trotting on again, toward the gentle slope where I sat waiting among the hemlocks.

Much of my time in the woods is quiet, contemplative. Afternoons spent scouting in late summer and early fall, looking for tracks and other sign. Hours, days, or entire seasons spent listening and watching, seeing no deer.

If I get the chance for a clean shot, the killing is over in a flash.

When I crouch beside the fallen animal and whisper my thanks, I am both grateful and unsettled. There in the woods, though, there is work to be done—gutting the deer and dragging the body from the woods.

It’s at the kitchen counter that I make my peace with the killing. There, with a leg on the cutting board, contemplation returns. Separating flesh from bone, I marvel at the power these muscles held, to launch the buck in great leaps.

There is a quiet rhythm to the task, like canning, my wife Cath suggests: a small repetitive act done by these hands, a pattern within the larger rhythmic patterns of the seasons, the patterns of all things that live and eat and die and feed one another.

Inexperienced as I am, it takes me a long while to get from skinning the animal to grinding the last pounds of burger. Someday, caught between my slowness and my schedule, I’ll have to pay a local butcher to do the work. But not soon, I hope.

Springtime and a hunter’s debts

The snow is almost gone from our yard already. Here, facing northwest across the Winooski Valley, an April without white stuff on the ground is a rare gift.

Moose track

Soon, crocuses will be in bloom. We’ll be planting peas and salad greens. And the world will be buzzing with life.

The spring peepers, returned from the mud, will begin their chirping chorus in the old beaver pond near our house. The ruffed grouse who have spent the winter feeding on aspen buds and eluding raptors will be drumming, mating, and laying eggs. And the largest of our forest-dwelling neighbors will be on the move.

Every spring, we find moose tracks by the pond. The great, dark animals come down from the hills, drawn to wetlands where they—still wearing thick winter coats—can find relief from the heat. The thermometer is supposed to hit 75 this weekend. With no leaves on the trees yet, shade can only be found among the conifers.

Black bear track

If we’re lucky, we find bear tracks, too. Emerging from hibernation, they’re on the lookout for food. Time for us to take the birdfeeders down, lest we once again wake at midnight to the sounds of a bruin snuffling around on the back porch.

In this lush, bustling time of year, I take pleasure in seeing our wild neighbors and signs of their passage.

On seeing deer or deer tracks, I might think briefly of autumn, of the way dry, frosty leaves crunch under a whitetail’s hooves.

Mostly, though—as I did before my hunting days—I am just grateful to move among my fellow creatures, knowing that they are moving all around me. As I did before my hunting days, I feel indebted for the simple gift of their presence.

Bear-marked beech with backhoe, near a southern Vermont ski area

As I did before my hunting days, I sense the importance of protecting our neighbors’ homes—the highlands and the wetlands and the routes traveled by moose in between, the stands of beech where bears fatten themselves when the mast crop is good, the steep and rocky places where bobcats den—from greedy encroachment by too many of our homes and roads and economic enterprises.

Perhaps the only difference, now that I occasionally drag venison from these hills, is that I am indebted to these creatures and places in yet another way.

© 2010 Tovar Cerulli

The why of the hunt

When I was a vegetarian, I had no clue why modern people hunted.

Now that I hunt, I still puzzle over it. Every hunter has his or her own reasons, of course. I wonder mostly about my own, and even there it’s often hard to lay claim to certainty.

Photo credit: Robert Bryan

Of two things, though, I feel sure.

First, the labels we ascribe to ourselves say very little about why we hunt.

When, a few years ago, a local hunter told me he was a “meat” hunter, he wasn’t saying that “meat” explained his hunting; he only gets a deer once every few years, and enjoys his time in the woods for its own sake. He was saying that he was perfectly willing to shoot a doe if he got the chance. In other words, he was telling me what kind of hunter he isn’t. He’s not a trophy hunter. He doesn’t hunt for antlers.

This way of defining ourselves—by marking the boundary between “us” and “them”—is a human habit long studied by anthropologists. “Identity,” after all, comes from the Latin idem, meaning “the same.” We say who we are by saying who’s different: who we are not.

At times, labels serve an important function. They help us denounce the intolerable. In the mid- and late-1800s, American “sport” hunters defined themselves in part by pointing to what they were not: “market” hunters, who were pushing the continent’s wildlife to the brink of extinction. (Less helpfully, these middle and upper-class hunters also denigrated backwoods “pot” hunters, the meat hunters of the day.) Today, whatever we call ourselves, many of us decry the “slob” hunter, whose disrespect—for animals, people, and land—leaves a deep stain on the image of the American hunter.

When wildlife populations and real ethics are at stake, it’s important to say who we are not. Even then, though, labels fail to convey why we hunt.

Second, I feel sure that it’s worth making the effort to understand and explain why we hunt.

Some hunters, of course, feel that explaining such things is part of “being on the defensive.” They don’t want to go there. They hunt because (1) it’s legal and (2) they want to. And they leave it at that. Fair enough.

But I think the effort can be more positive than that. As a non-hunter (and sometimes anti-hunter), talking with respectful hunters and reading words written by respectful hunters helped me see past my negative stereotypes, opening my eyes to what hunting could be. And at least a few acquaintances have, in turn, had their views of the pursuit improved by talking with me about my hunting.

I think we need to continue the effort to understand and explain what hunting means to us. If, that is, we want hunting to be accepted by the non-hunting majority—and supported at the polls when related ballots are cast.

We need to go beyond the tired argument that hunting is needed to keep wildlife populations in balance with habitat. It happens to be true, at least where ungulates are abundant and no longer hunted by other large predators. But, as Thomas Baumeister argued in his essay “Heart of the Hunt,” it “falls pitifully short” as a way of explaining hunting.

The challenge, as I suggested above—“now that I hunt, I still puzzle over it”—seems to be understanding the “why” of our own hunting. Some parts of my hunting I can name and explain: how it helps me confront the impacts of my own eating, how it puts wonderful, local, organic, wild meat on my table, how it heightens my appreciation for everything I ingest (animal and vegetable), how it gives me a sense of participation in nature, and so on.

Other parts are harder to pin down: that sense of mystery, that call for which I still have no good name. Those pieces may be—as the late John Madson put it in “Why We Hunt”—“too deeply rooted in the metaphysical to allow clinical examination.” But I’ll keep on trying. Not for the clinical—which would, I fear, kill the mystery—but for the moderately comprehensible.

Now and then, though, I do wish that we were more like other animals. That we could, like dog or wolf, sniff at the places others have labeled, marking boundaries, and actually learn something useful.

© 2010 Tovar Cerulli

Note: Thanks to Montana Outdoors magazine for making both of the above-mentioned essays available online.