Looking to join a hunters’ organization other than the NRA, I start researching various groups. But I’m shocked to discover how many of them oppose, for example, sensible bans on toxic lead ammunition. Ducks and other birds ingest small stones to help grind up food in their gizzards. If they swallow lead shot on a beach or at the bottom of a lake, they could eventually die of lead poisoning. Since 1991 it has been illegal to use lead shot for hunting water-fowl. But lead is still the norm in big-game hunting and hunting for other, upland birds.
Nationwide, three thousand tons of lead are shot into the environment by hunters every year, another eighty thousand tons are released at shooting ranges and four thousand tons are lost in ponds and streams as fishing lures and sinkers. The effects of all this lead on an ecosystem can be tragic. The California condor, for example, once lived throughout the southern United States but is now one of the rarest birds in the world—in 2010 there were fewer than two hundred wild birds left, all near the California coast. Condors, unlike other vultures and coyotes, have especially strong acid in their stomachs and can actually digest lead fragments, leaving them particularly vulnerable to lead poisoning. (When a hunter shoots an animal with lead, fragments of the metal usually disperse into the animal’s organs, which are often dumped in the field and left for vultures and coyotes to eat.)
With ammunition now made of steel, tungsten and copper, there is no good reason to keep spewing lead into the environment. As one hunter told me, “If you only shoot steel, then that’s what you’re used to. And you’ll hunt very well with it.” Lead remains cheaper, but if more people bought non-toxic ammunition, the cost would likely drop because it would no longer be manufactured as a specialty item.
Some of the hunting groups that I research argue for the expansion of off-road vehicle use on public lands, which could damage fragile wildlife habitat and destroy the remote backcountry hunting experience. Other groups complain about responsible hunting quotas, modest fees and game management laws.
The more I read, the more frustrated I become. These hunting groups are arguing against their own long-term interests. My responsibility as a hunter seems obvious: If I am serious about preserving our nation’s hunting heritage, I must also be serious about protecting the environment.
I decide to join the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, which has a long-standing reputation for conservation-and wildlife-oriented policies. The organization has played a major role in successfully restoring elk populations in North America. But my esteem for the foundation sours in 2010, when the president announces that one of the organization’s top priorities is to oppose Endangered Species Act protection for gray wolves, recently reintroduced to the western United States. I am disappointed in the organization’s uncharacteristic shortsightedness.
As hunters, we should understand better than anyone the importance of natural predators in a healthy, functioning ecosystem. When wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park after being eradicated decades earlier, of course elk numbers dropped—that’s what happens when a predator is introduced to prey that has lived virtually without threat. But elk numbers didn’t drop nearly as much as some biologists had feared. In fact, they noticed changes that helped the entire ecosystem. The elk moved around more, instead of overgrazing certain riparian areas. This allowed native plants to recover, boosting nearby beaver and fish populations. Coyote numbers dropped a little, due to the competition from wolves. Bird populations flourished. Elk became more wary of humans, too. In short, the presence of wolves brought balance to the ecosystem and made elk behave more like, well, elk.
What first attracted me to the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation was the priority it placed on habitat protection. That’s what makes this anti-wolf vitriol so hard to swallow. Wolves are native to much of elk country, which means that wolf habitat and elk habitat are often one and the same. Moreover, there are millions of people out there who don’t hunt and don’t care much about elk, but who care very much about wolves. The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation is squelching an enormous opportunity to ally itself with wolf proponents and protect even more habitat in the long run.
At the same time that he denounces wolves, the group’s president pledges that the organization will “become more engaged in the core issues of our time that threaten our hunting heritage and that of our children.” But what if environmentalists like me—who wish to see not only ample elk populations but full, healthy ecosystems that include wolves—are the future of hunting? I consider joining other hunting organizations and get the same feeling from many of them—they don’t represent me.
There is no shortage of conservation-minded sportsmen’s groups that specialize in one species: Pheasants Forever, Ducks Unlimited, the National Wild Turkey Federation. Don’t get me wrong, these groups represent a true benefit of hunting: A constituency develops around a particular species to help pay for its habitat protection and vote for its long-term interests. And protecting the habitat for one species nearly always benefits others, too. But from an ecological standpoint, it doesn’t always make sense for hunters to focus on one species. That’s why I value groups like the National Wildlife Federation, which was founded by a hunter back in 1936 and still reaches out to hunters and anglers today. The National Wildlife Federation aims to protect entire ecosystems. In doing so, it’s one of a handful of organizations working to bridge the way-too-distant gap between hunters and conservationists.
In my Hunter Safety class, our instructors spoke frequently about protecting what they—like the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation president—called “our hunting heritage.” E.V. told our class, “You might be the only hunter that a person ever meets. And so you are representing all of us.” That’s a big responsibility, and one that merits some real thought about how we are perceived by non-hunters. E.V. encouraged us, for example, to cover our dead deer when transporting it, rather than sprawling it over the hood of a car.
“Some people are offended by the sight of a dead animal,” he said, “and we need to respect that.”
I meet some hunters who boast about being offensive. They enjoy making non-hunters uncomfortable, plastering their bumpers with stickers that say things like VEGETARIAN: OLD INDIAN WORD FOR BAD HUNTER. They brag, as that Hunter Safety instructor in Virginia did, about being despised. But for every American who considers herself a hunter, there are at least nine who don’t. In just about every election, non-hunters cast more ballots than we do. Non-hunters decide whether to post NO HUNTING signs on more acres of land than we do. They submit more comments than we do when hunting bans are proposed in public spaces. E.V. was on to something that many other hunters aren’t: The future of hunting will largely be determined by non-hunters. It is in our best interest to try to get along.
CHAPTER 8
WILD TASTES
After a day of goose hunting, I bring home a goose, as well as a duck that another hunter shot but didn’t want. The next week, I buy a whole chicken at the grocery store. As I cut open its plastic casing, I wonder about its life and how it compared with that of the goose I grilled just a few days earlier.
The greater white-fronted goose (Anser albifrons) is a grayish brown bird with orange feet and a white mottled front that inspires its colloquial name, the speckle-belly. Hunters sometimes call them “specks” for short. Whatever you call them, there are more than one million of them in North America. Like most geese, specks are gregarious, social animals that migrate between winter and summer grounds. They travel in large clans called skeins in the air and flocks or gaggles on the ground.
I’m not sure if my goose was a male or a female, as sexing this particular species requires expertise that I don’t yet possess. But I’ll assume, for the sake of personalization, that it was a she. I’m not sure of her exact age, either, but as a bird with mature coloring and an average weight (somewhere between four and a half and seven pounds) she was at least one year old, and more likely two or three.
My goose hatched from an egg in Alaska, where her f
lock spends each summer. She was probably one of about six chicks in the nest. She and her siblings fledged quickly but stayed close to both their parents. As summer turned to autumn in her native land, my goose and the rest of her gaggle soared south. They traveled for several months before settling for the winter in California’s Central Valley or, perhaps, western Mexico. When spring warmed the air, the flock flew north again, returning to Alaska.
During the second year of her life, my goose found a mate. Specks, like most geese, are monogamous. But unlike Canada geese, who commit until one partner dies, specks are prone to their own version of divorce, and may switch partners after a few years.
On the last morning of her life, my goose awoke on a large farm pond in central Oregon. She and her traveling companions began arriving from the north about three weeks earlier, and found everything they needed—food, water and a lack of predators—within a short distance. The days were getting colder and shorter. Soon it would be time to fly south, but the group was not yet in any hurry. Until this cold mid-October day, that is, when mist wafted off the water as the sun crested over the surrounding buttes. My bird did not know it yet, but it was opening day of goose season.
If she was feeling especially peckish that morning, she might have awoken early and tilted her tail in the air so her beak could reach down for a weedy underwater snack. But she saved her real appetite for a nearby barley field. At about seven thirty, just after sunrise, my bird and the others lifted off the pond and flew to the field for breakfast. Here, she waddled up and down the rows, gorging herself on rich, golden kernels. Swallowing grain after grain, she began to fill the long crop at the bottom of her esophagus. It acted like a silo, dribbling food into her tiny stomach as quickly as it was pumped out into her gizzard.
While my goose ate her breakfast, I pulled a borrowed camouflage jacket over my fishing waders. (I left home the blaze-orange cap that I wear while hunting for rabbits or even pheasant, which rarely fly overhead. Geese—like other birds—have keen eyesight, and the same fluorescent clothing that alerts other hunters to my presence could also tip off a goose in the sky.) Then I crouched beneath some willows at the edge of the farm pond where she had spent the night.
Two hours later, the gaggle had filled their crops, and their overloaded digestive tracts declared an end to the meal. Three particular geese took flight. The skein usually traveled with three vanguards in front, testing a location to make sure it was safe for the others. The birds called to one another as they flew, and from the ground it sounded like manic laughter. My goose hung back with the hordes, waiting until the front-runners floated safely on the pond before setting her wings and gliding in for a landing.
As she approached, I stood up from my blind, shouldered my gun and switched off the safety. I’m not sure why my eyes locked on to her, instead of some other goose in the skein. I lined up the tip of my gun with her neck, to better my chance that one round ball of steel would intersect her slender neck or head. For a second, I held the tip of my gun so it just covered her, making sure my own movement matched the speed of her flight, twenty yards away. Then I pulled the trigger.
She fell into the water immediately. A couple of her feathers drifted behind her in a lazy zigzag, as if in a cartoon. Unlike a cartoon, though, my goose did not pick up her head and roll her eyes at the camera. Stars didn’t swirl around her head. She did no double take. She was dead. This time, unlike when I killed the pheasant, remorse wasted no time in finding me. I felt guilty as soon as I picked her up. One moment, this beautiful, well-traveled bird was soaring overhead. The next, she was floating limp in a pond. All because of me.
But her death, I told myself later, was just one part of her life. And her life, though undoubtedly strenuous—if she was just two years old, she had already flown thousands of miles and seen more of the continent than most American citizens do—was not necessarily sad.
My store-bought chicken (Gallus domesticus) was another story. As with my goose, I’m not sure whether it was male or female, as both sexes are raised for food. Let’s say, for the sake of storytelling, that my bird was a male Cornish rock. My chicken’s eventual packaging identified him only as a “broiler,” the industry’s generic term for a chicken raised for meat (as opposed to a “layer,” who provides eggs).
He hatched from an egg and likely spent all but the last few hours of his life in a low-slung shed with about thirty thousand other chickens the same age. Shortly after he hatched, the tip of my chicken’s beak was cut off, without anesthesia. For the first week of his life, the lights were left on twenty-four hours a day, to encourage him to eat as much as possible. After that, the lights were turned out for just four hours a night, again to minimize sleep and maximize weight gain. Although he was technically a free-range bird, there is a chance that he never set a claw outdoors or felt a ray of natural sunlight. To earn the “free-range” badge, chicken producers must provide a small outdoor exercise yard. But because these doors aren’t opened until the chicks are a couple of weeks old, the birds have no incentive to leave the one home they have ever known. By the time they’re full grown, the chickens are so tightly packed—in most commercial operations, each bird occupies a space smaller than an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven sheet of printer paper—that those located near the center of the shed can’t easily reach the door.
Unlike most chickens, mine was organic. His feed, therefore, did not contain growth hormones to rush his physical development. But even without performance-enhancing drugs, his breed was developed in the 1940s with the primary goal of growing pornographically large breasts at an astonishing rate. If my chicken was lucky enough to be able to walk until the last day of his life—and let’s say optimistically that he was—then it’s safe to assume that three of his four closest neighbors were not so lucky. The broiler just to the north of him, for example, its wing touching my chicken’s wing, one day felt its leg snap under the weight of all that breast meat. This injured bird was not removed from the shed, but left to lie and wait until the entire flock had reached slaughter age, about seven weeks. Lame chickens are slaughtered and sold along with the sound ones. (Dead chickens, however, are removed from the shed every day or so, and are not sold as meat.)
The last day of my chicken’s life began as all the others had, with the shed’s bright lights switching on. He opened his eyes and began to eat. At some point, the doors at one end of the shed opened and a group of people wearing white hazmat suits entered. They grabbed chickens upside down by their legs. Clutching several birds in each hand, they thrust them into transport crates. Some of the birds were dead by the time these workers reached them. They were tossed in a pile and discarded. The live, crated birds—including mine—were loaded onto a truck and transported to a slaughterhouse. There, my bird was unloaded by a different worker, who slid his ankles into shackles. As he hung upside down, a conveyor system dragged him through an electrically charged water bath that paralyzed most of his body. His eyes and beak might still have been able to move as he reached the next station, where a mechanized blade sliced through his throat. My bird’s two-month life was over.
To me, the story of my chicken’s life is an undeniably sad one, although I can’t know what my chicken thought and felt. All of animal ethics hinges on assumptions about what it means to be a species other than human, something we can imagine and guess and study but can never really know.
Here is what I do know: I bear responsibility for the death of my goose. But I bear responsibility for the entire life and death of my chicken. And one of those scenarios is more bearable to me than the other.
My goose probably endured near-misses by other hunters and possibly cars. She endured hard, hungry winters. She may have lost a mate to hunting or to disease. Some of her goslings were probably snatched up by a fox before they could fly. But none of that was my fault. My chicken would never have lived at all if not for demand by meat eaters like me. No matter how little I saw of it, everything about my chicken’s life and death was my do
ing. A natural death was out of the question because his entire life was, in a way, unnatural.
At times, I catch myself romanticizing the idea of a “natural” death. I think of it in terms of a peaceful human death: He died in his sleep. But nature can be as brutal as any slaughterhouse worker. If my goose hadn’t been shot, she could have suffered a broken wing or leg and eventually starved to death, slowly and painfully. She could have been torn apart by a coyote or chopped to pieces by an airplane engine.
As far as I was concerned, both my goose and my chicken had tasty, nutritious afterlives. I skinned and gutted my goose within an hour of her death. We took one bone-in breast to the house of some friends and grilled it, then ate it with fresh salmon that one friend had recently caught. The meat was dark and rich, more like steak than chicken. A few days later, I deboned the rest of the goose and cut the meat into long, thin strips. I marinated it, in the fridge, in a bowl of soy sauce, garlic, brown sugar and dried red pepper flakes. We got out a small metal smoker that I recently bought used. I stoked a charcoal fire in a pan at the bottom, then laid the strips of meat on a grill on top. Hours later, the jerky was stiff and dry. We nibbled on some, and saved the rest to pack on long ski trips.
I unwrapped the chicken’s plastic suit and tossed the giblets in the garbage can. I patted the bird dry, then filled its cavity with a paltry amount of stuffing. (I’ve often wondered why these carefully engineered birds aren’t bred to have larger cavities, since I’d take a second helping of stuffing over more breast meat any day.) I roasted the bird and served it as the centerpiece of a Thanksgiving-like feast.
But unlike with the goose, there was no talk of the chicken’s life, no heartfelt toast. Just dinner as usual.
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