by The Mindful Carnivore: A Vegetarian's Hunt for Sustenance
If ecology was one of my measures of merit when it came to food, wouldn’t it make more sense to eat meat from a locally pastured beef cow than to buy salmon shipped in from Alaska or processed blocks of tofu made from soybeans grown a thousand miles away on industrially farmed land where diverse prairie habitat once thrived? If humaneness was another of my measures, wouldn’t it make more sense to shoot a deer who had lived a truly free life than to buy even the happiest, most local, backyard chicken? What meat could be more ethical than fifty or more pounds of venison resulting from a single, quick death?
I wanted the creatures I was eating to have lived well and died swiftly. As much as possible, I wanted their journeys to my plate to resemble the workings of nature: the grouse snatched from the air by a great-horned owl, the minnow plucked from the water by a kingfisher. I did not want them to be mere product, churned out by an economic machine remarkable mainly for its heartless efficiency and ecological myopia—a system in which a single beef patty is often composed of assorted parts from dozens of cows processed in multiple slaughterhouses and even in multiple countries.
But hunting? I pushed the idea away.
The more charismatic mammals of farm and forest weren’t on my plate, but they were on my mind. And the more I considered them, the more aware I became of the warped lens through which I had grown up seeing them.
On the one hand, we picture such creatures as adorably cute. Think Bambi and Thumper, or Wilbur in Charlotte’s Web. As cartoon caricatures, they are entirely disconnected from reality. Miraculously, Thumper and Friend Owl are buddies, and we are spared the discomfort of imagining the meaty—and often rabbity—meals enjoyed by real owls.
On the other hand, we consume animal flesh at an astonishing rate, only distantly aware of the millions of incarcerated creatures who feed us, or of the conditions in which they live and die.
I wondered, though: Might not these apparent extremes—dewy-eyed infantilizing and callous disregard—have common roots? Is there not, in both, an echo of the late cultural historian Thomas Berry’s observation that we have become “autistic”: deaf to the voices of nature, unable to perceive the larger-than-human world with anything resembling clarity?
In the extreme of anthropomorphism, we project human personalities, typically those of children, on to characters like Bambi. On the flip side, in the extreme of anthropocentrism, we deny animals any semblance of value as beings, treating them as nothing more than “live stock”—living, fleshy commodities. In grocery- store coolers we do not see “animals” but “meat,” prepackaged, even pre-prepared for our convenience. In both extremes, we remain self-absorbed, caught up in our own fantasies. Stuck there, how can we hope to understand animals, or even respect them? “Respect,” after all—rooted in the Latin verb respicere, to look back at, to regard, to consider—requires seeing beyond ourselves.
Doesn’t this echo the way we see the rest of nature, too? Collectively, we and our multinational timber corporations lay waste to millions of acres of forest habitat, treating the planet as a mass of “natural resources” to be commoditized and exploited at will. Yet, often in reaction to such damage, we also invoke the notion of “wilderness” as a place off-limits to human activity and habitation. (Ironically, notions and reality often don’t match. The creation of many of America’s national “wilderness” parks required the eviction of local residents, both white and Indian.)
Are not both extremes rooted in the illusion that we are separate from nature, in what environmental historian William Cronon has called “a dualistic vision in which the human is entirely outside the natural”? If we imagine ourselves as essentially separate from nature—perhaps as the unseen evil presence of man in Bambi—how can we possibly imagine a place for ourselves within it?
When we do think of humans as part of nature, we usually imagine ourselves standing at its pinnacle. As the T-shirt states, “I Didn’t Claw My Way to the Top of the Food Chain to Eat Vegetables.”
It’s quite a fantasy, this linear food chain with Homo sapiens at its apex. It neatly avoids the cyclical truth of our own mortality, glossing over the fate we share with the large carnivores, which are, as environmental scholar Paul Shepard once wrote, inevitably “pursued by microbes, fungi, and plant roots.” Maybe the T-shirt should read, “I Clawed and Clawed But Couldn’t Escape the Food Web—Soon I’ll Be Feeding Vegetables.”
There’s beauty here, when you stop to think about it. If I am buried in a plain pine box, the nutrients of my body will return to the earth. Of the water molecules that reside within my veins and arteries when I die, perhaps some will be drawn up into a growing tree. Perhaps some will find their way up into clouds, come down in a spring rain, and course through brooks where trout feed and spawn. Of the calcium atoms in my shoulder blades, perhaps a few will end up in the leg of a frog or in a falcon’s wing. Inevitable reincarnation.
Picturing ourselves in league with the large carnivores—or with the owl who plucks the grouse from the air and who must, in the end, return to the forest floor—has its comforts. Though death may be disturbing, most of us can make our peace with the idea of a gentle demise in old age. Being violently transformed into food—being the grouse struck down by the owl—is a less appetizing prospect.
As a boy, I read stories about human encounters with grizzly bears, encounters that didn’t always end so well for the human. And I occasionally took out the bundled python skin my father kept in the closet: an oddity he had inherited from some great-aunt who had traveled overseas. I would take it out and unfurl it, fold by fold, until I had the entire skin—some twelve to fifteen inches wide and twenty-plus feet long—stretched out on the ground. The desiccated skull, still attached, smelled faintly of stale decay. I was fascinated by the sheer size of the thing. I knew that snakes this large could eat pigs. Why not a small boy?
Such events are, of course, exceedingly rare, even in grizzly or python country. Growing up in New England, long ago swept clear of wolves and cougars, I never feared that an animal would try to eat me. I never even glimpsed what such a threat might feel like, until one night well into my third decade.
The scream came at midnight.
Cath and I, still living at Bird Cottage among New York’s Finger Lakes, were getting ready to move to Vermont. We had pitched a tent behind our friend Dierdre’s house, not far from Syracuse. Her front yard along a main road was a perfect location for the garage sale we’d be having in the morning, jettisoning cargo in preparation for the move. We would have slept inside like regular houseguests, but Dierdre had cats and I—still vegan and still seriously allergic to them—preferred not to wake up bleary eyed and wheezy. Besides, Cath and I liked camping out. It would be fun.
“Keep the woodchucks out of my garden, will you?” said Dierdre, as we headed out back to sleep. “I’ve been having trouble with them.” I didn’t mention my track record in that department: the woodchuck at Bird Cottage staring me down just two months earlier. Chuckie: 1, Tovar: 0.
Inside the lightweight tent, it seemed like the perfect summer night: a gentle breeze, nothing but mosquito netting between us and the stars.
When the scream came, Cath and I were both awake in an instant. What had we just heard? Yanked out of dream time, we weren’t quite certain. It had been a loud, nasty sound. But what made it and where had it come from? Minutes later, the scream came again—the most frightening animal sound I had ever heard. It wasn’t merely strange, like the wailing bark of a fox. It was angry, a full-throated, snarling yell. And it was close, maybe thirty yards off.
“What is that?” whispered Cath.
“I have no idea.”
We listened. Heard nothing.
“When Dierdre asked us to protect her garden,” Cath whispered again, “I didn’t think it would be this hard!”
“Don’t worry, honey,” I said. “The garden’s safe. Whatever that thing is, it doesn’t eat plants.”
Again the scream, closer still. Now the animal had to be under
the trees at the lawn’s edge, about twenty yards off. It occurred to me that I had stood right there a couple hours earlier, taking my before-bedtime pee. Had I offended this creature’s territorial sensibilities? In the faint starlight I thought I caught a flash across the grass fifteen feet away, something the size of a large terrier but fluid in its movement, entirely undoglike. The mosquito netting around us seemed pathetically insubstantial.
We listened and watched, wired on adrenaline. Nothing more.
Finally, Cath said she needed to pee. In the house, of course. We unzipped the tent door and crawled out cautiously. No snarl, no silent pounce.
Once inside the house, we relaxed, solid walls on all sides of us. Cath wasn’t keen on going back out to the tent. I wasn’t keen on staying inside and breathing cat dander.
“Why don’t you sleep in here and I’ll go back out?”
“No way!” she said. “I won’t be able to sleep knowing you’re out there with that thing.”
She decided to go with me, but wanted to bring along something for self-defense. She looked around and came back with a hockey stick belonging to Dierdre’s son.
“Oh no,” I said, laughing. “That’s not coming into the tent with me.”
I had visions of trying to swing a full-length puck slapper in the confines of a space only six feet across. In the end, we compromised. She brought the stick and leaned it against the tent beside the zippered door. I got a heavy steel flashlight from the car and set it beside my sleeping bag, more as a club than as a source of illumination.
All was quiet as we snuggled into our bags.
It was ten or fifteen minutes later, as we both began to drift softly down into sleep, that the heart-stopping scream came again. That was the last we heard of our night visitor. But we lay there a long while, listening, before finally dozing off.
In the morning, we told Dierdre about the night’s events. She had woken at one point, thinking she’d heard a noise. But inside, buffered by the walls of the old farmhouse, the sound was faint and she couldn’t be sure. When Dierdre’s teenage daughter joined the conversation, she mentioned that she had spotted a large bobcat nearby a day or two before.
Yes, I imagined a bobcat could scream like that. And the fluid form I had seen flash across the grass definitely could have been feline.
“Oh, and I spread some dried blood fertilizer around the garden,” said Dierdre. “I was hoping it might scare off the woodchucks.”
Chum, I thought wryly. Bait.
I had never seriously believed that we were in danger of being attacked. My rational mind knew better than that. No wild animal in upstate New York was likely to attack a human, unless it was rabid. Yet my body had been in overdrive, heart racing, limbs tingling. Was this what it had been like to be human for most of the past couple hundred millennia—not only predator, but prey as well?
In her essay “Being Prey,” about the crocodile attack she survived in 1985, ecofeminist philosopher Val Plumwood wrote of Western culture’s “strong effort to deny that we humans are also animals positioned in the food chain,” a denial she sees reflected in our revulsion at images of human bodies being consumed by predators, or by worms, for that matter. Hence our penchant for tightly sealed coffins. We imagine ourselves as “outside and above,” she wrote, “not as part of the feast in a chain but as external manipulators and masters of it.”
At the time of the crocodile attack, Plumwood was a vegetarian, not because she considered predation “demonic and impure,” but because she objected to “the reduction of animal lives in factory farming systems that treat them as living meat.” Being attacked gave her another level of insight. It was, she wrote, “a shocking reduction, from a complex human being to a mere piece of meat.” Reflecting on the experience, she came to the conclusion that “not just humans but any creature can make the same claim to be more than just food. We are edible, but we are also much more than edible. Respectful, ecological eating must recognize both of these things.”
Again I thought of hunting. And I thought of Uncle Mark.
We had never seen each other more than occasionally, usually for a couple of hours at Thanksgiving dinner, roasted bird on the table between us. Those visits to Cape Cod, where Mark still lived, fished, and hunted, had dwindled in frequency to once every few years. When I abandoned vegetarianism, though, I had written to him—curious about his relationships with forest, ocean, and food—and we struck up an e-mail correspondence. At family gatherings, he had always seemed contained, his full, expressive lips pressed firmly together. In writing, though, he was downright chatty.
Back and forth we went, mostly sharing experiences we’d had outdoors. I would tell him of the fox I had seen, or of the pileated woodpecker that had hopped among the trees near where Paul and I were working in the woods. Mark would tell me of his unusual daytime sighting of a pair of flying squirrels—they are typically nocturnal—or of the deer he had encountered over the past week.
Now, reflecting on my conversation with the turkey hunter who had parked alongside our driveway, I wrote to Mark again. I expressed my hope that we could visit in person one of these days, despite the busyness of our lives. Perhaps we could walk in the woods together. Perhaps we could fish. Perhaps we could talk about hunting.
I recalled the Wendell Berry poem I had pinned to the wall of my Brooklyn apartment, “The Peace of Wild Things.” A vegan at the time, I had recited the poem like a mantra. I imagined reconnecting with nature, lying down, as the author does, “where the wood drake / rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.” I imagined the stillness of the heron, standing in the shallows, peaceful, tall, and majestic. I did not imagine the heron actually “feeding”: the sudden, violent stab of its beak. It didn’t occur to me that the heron’s stillness was the stillness of a hunter.
For years, I had been glossing over the killing that surrounded me: birds, bugs, fish, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals, one feasting upon the other. The incessant eating—which I could now more comfortably acknowledge without boomeranging to some bleak Tennyson-like vision of “Nature, red in tooth and claw”—had been easy to forget, for I rarely witnessed such nutritional transactions.
When Cath and I lived at Bird Cottage, we had watched the songbirds that came to the feeders we hung, and thought little of the other visitors that were, in turn, attracted to the clearing. One afternoon I saw a cardinal dart for the trees. The sharp, taut shape of a small hawk streaked after it. The cardinal zipped back and forth, the raptor in fierce pursuit, carving tight, full-speed turns among the branches. In seconds, they were out of sight and the illusion of peacefulness returned.
Our midnight encounter with the bobcat had been similarly fleeting. The next morning, Dierdre’s backyard looked tame. Mowed grass, lilacs, the vegetable patch with lettuce in rows. The tranquil scene gave no hint of the hunter who had been there a few hours before. It offered no reminder of the larger, older, wilder world beyond, creatures helping themselves to each other’s very lives. All eaters, sooner or later, one way or another, being eaten.
Even in my most devout vegan phase, predation among animals had never bothered me. Unlike Cleveland Amory, founder of the Fund for Animals—who once described how, in his vision of a perfect world, “prey will be separated from predator”—I had no wish to impose my morals on the affairs of nonhuman creatures. Their actions might not meet my standards for human kindness and compassion, but it never occurred to me to interfere.
Well, almost never. I did intervene once, in boyhood. Among the cattails along the quarry’s edge, I had found a full-grown bullfrog with a garter snake attached. The dark, yellow-striped reptile, less than two feet long, had grabbed hold of one of the frog’s hind feet and started swallowing. It had worked its way up to the top of the thigh and was stuck there. The frog couldn’t get away. And the snake, unable to get the other leg into its small jaws, couldn’t get its meal. The stalemate was pointless. Wondering if digestive juices had already set to work on
the hapless foot, I picked up a stick and gently pressed on the snake’s back, just behind the head. Reluctantly, the reptile disgorged the leg and both parties fled the scene. That, however, had been an extraordinary circumstance.
Predator-prey relationships were, I knew, essential to the workings of nature. The temptation to judge those relationships—to delude ourselves into thinking that predator and prey could be disconnected—was just another manifestation of human hubris.
Yet I had been certain that I shouldn’t participate in the bloodshed. Moral interaction with animals required nonviolence. Humans had done enough harm already: building shopping malls where forests once stood, disrupting entire ecosystems, driving species after species to extinction. It was time we let nature be.
Now, I was reconsidering.
A few months after my conversation with the turkey hunter, Cath pointed out an impressive photo in the newspaper. A local angler had hauled up a new state-record lake trout from Lake Willoughby, a deep, fjord-like stretch of water an hour north of us. The fish was more than thirty-five pounds and most of four feet long. A state biologist estimated it was more than thirty years old. When I mentioned the fish to my youngest sister, she replied, “Too bad it didn’t get to die naturally.” I thought I knew what she meant. A creature that venerable has earned special respect. I wouldn’t begrudge it the chance to die of old age.
But I wondered: Why do we distinguish ourselves from “natural” predators? Surely it isn’t just because we use synthetic fishing line, flashy lures, bullets, and arrows, rather than tooth, beak, and claw. Humans have been part of the earth’s ecosystems for hundreds of thousands of years. Though we have proven ourselves uniquely capable of damaging and altering those ecosystems, we are not aliens. Why, then, do we consider our predation “unnatural”? How far have we gone in accepting the dangerous illusion that we are separate from the rest of life?
On the other hand, I wasn’t sure that the “naturalness” of predation—the fact that it occurs among animals—had much bearing on the question of whether humans should hunt. Plenty of animal behaviors, after all, are proscribed by human moral codes. No one tries to justify infanticide by pointing out that other creatures sometimes eat their young: mice and rabbits, for example, and various species of fish and insects.