by The Mindful Carnivore: A Vegetarian's Hunt for Sustenance
And I had other questions, too. Was hunter-driven conservation the only way to go, or even the best? Did such an approach encourage us to think in terms of whole ecological systems? I was skeptical of humanity’s ability to understand the complexities of nature with enough precision to “manage” it predictably. And I was more skeptical yet of a management system primarily motivated by hunters’ desires and funded by their wallets.
Prominent game species, the hunter-education manual reported, have thrived under modern wildlife management. In 1907, for instance, only about 41,000 elk survived in the United States. By 2000, their population had rebounded to 1.2 million. In the same century, wild turkey numbers soared from an estimated 100,000 to 5.6 million.
Less popular game animals have not fared as well. The inauspiciously named Lesser Prairie Chicken of the southern Great Plains, for example, has received little conservation attention from hunters. Its numbers have declined by more than 90 percent in the past hundred years, mainly due to habitat loss, and it is now a candidate for protection under the Endangered Species Act.
The question that had struck me as so odd—“Would It Survive Without Hunting?”—began to make a strange kind of sense. Non-game and unpopular game species might benefit as a side effect of habitat protection intended to support popular game animals, but it was nothing like being in the spotlight. If animals understood the mechanics of hunter-driven conservation, I could imagine a bizarre contest ensuing, each species jumping up and down and shouting, “Hunt us! Hunt us!”
In some ways, the system’s bias toward game species resembles what native peoples were doing long before Europeans set foot on this continent. Recall, for instance, that their periodic burning of the forest understory in what is now Massachusetts appears to have been aimed at increasing populations of deer and elk and making them easier to hunt. The contexts are different, however. Very few present-day New Englanders subsist on wild meat, and our obligations to the flora and fauna around us have become more and more complex, as we impose threats that would have been unimaginable five centuries ago. The Massachusetts Audubon Society estimates that in 1986, at the peak of the housing boom, more than eighty acres of open land—most of them forested—were lost to construction every day. By the early 2000s, that rate had dropped to twenty-two acres per day, but that still adds up to more than twelve square miles each year.
Whatever the ecological merits or failings of the hunter-and-angler-funded conservation model, its most pressing fault today is financial. The percentage of Americans who hunt has been waning for decades. Resulting revenue declines have impaired wildlife agencies’ conservation, research, education, and law-enforcement efforts and have left states without the matching funds necessary to claim much-needed federal money. At the end of fiscal year 2006, for instance, Vermont left $2.9 million in federal funds on the table.
A few states have taken bold steps to spread the burden of conservation funding beyond hunters and anglers. In 1969, for example, Aldo Leopold’s son A. Starker and two other consultants conducted a study of the Missouri Department of Conservation. They concluded that the state’s conservation programs lacked the money necessary to safeguard the outdoors against development and to provide recreation opportunities for residents. Seven years later, the citizens of Missouri did the unthinkable: They voted to tax themselves. In a public referendum, they approved an amendment to the state constitution, increasing the sales tax by one-eighth of a cent and dedicating the resulting funds to conservation programs. In 1996, Arkansas followed suit, passing a nearly identical measure.
In 2002, both states published progress reports. In twenty-five years, Missouri had accomplished a great deal. Conservation education facilities had been constructed near all of the state’s major population centers, access to 530 new lakes and 290 new sections of rivers and streams had been established, nearly 1,000 hunter-education classes were being offered annually, dozens of long-term habitat research projects were under way, free forest-management education and assistance were being provided across the state, and the list goes on. In just five years, Arkansas had purchased over 20,000 acres of new public-use land, completed the first of four planned nature centers, added thirty officers to its warden force, and more. A little public funding—in these cases, a mere eighth-of-a-cent sales tax—goes a long way.
What struck me most about the chapter on conservation, though, had nothing to do with ecology or economics. Reading those pages, I felt as if I had entered an alternate reality. After more than three decades of living in a world where hunting was said to be not good for much, I had stepped into a world where hunting was said to be good for everything.
Regulated hunting, the manual stated, was a crucial force for conservation and had brought about the resurgence of an entire continent’s wildlife. When such resurgence was too successful—as in the case of white-tailed deer, which are now heavily overpopulated along the Eastern Seaboard—regulated hunting served as a crucial management tool, helping to keep animals wild and to bring populations back into balance with habitat and with human use of the landscape. (There was no mention of how humans ended up being the only predators available to keep deer populations in check, no mention of our systematic extermination of wolves and cougars, starting here in New England and working our way west.) The chapter even noted that hunting helped foster the American pioneer spirit.
True as that all might be, I couldn’t help thinking of philosopher Abraham Kaplan’s oft-quoted law of the instrument: “Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.”
And something else caught my attention, too. Behind the explicit claims about the positive roles played by regulated hunting, I sensed two other suggestions.
The first was obvious. If the Lesser Prairie Chicken might not survive without hunting, or if white-tailed deer might become too numerous, then hunting must be necessary. As a society, we have to hunt. Considering what I knew about the number of whitetails killed each year to keep North American agriculture viable, I realized there was some truth to this.
A second suggestion seemed to follow, however: Individual hunters hunt because they must. The manual never actually stated that hunters were motivated by a sense of duty to conserve or manage wildlife, but the notion seemed implicit. I balked. Hunters might genuinely love and appreciate the natural world in all its splendor and diversity, but it seemed terribly unlikely to me that many hunters took to fields, woods, and marshes to save animals from extinction, or to prevent damage to farm crops or flower gardens.
In a 1990 paper, Cornell University researchers Daniel J. Decker and Nancy A. Connelly argued that hunters needed to know more about deer overpopulation and be more effective in alleviating it. They noted that few hunters identified wildlife management as a reason for hunting when it was presented in a list with other reasons. “Although hunters commonly use the notion of ‘hunting as a management tool’ to justify hunting,” the authors observed, “they generally do not seem committed to this purpose.”
Was the hunter-education manual intended, in part, to arm hunters against criticism, to help them justify and explain their hunting? No, let me amend that: Was it intended to help me justify and explain my hunting, to arm the hunter I was becoming against the antihunter I had been?
Thinking about it, I realized that the hunter-education course didn’t mention motive at all. The topic wasn’t addressed in the manual. Nor did it come up in class discussions.
Not that this silence surprised me—any such talk would involve difficult tracking through the complex terrain of the human heart. But there was an irony to it, given that public opinions on hunting depend heavily on perceptions of why people do it. According to a 2006 survey by the natural resources research firm Responsive Management, 85 percent of Americans approve of hunting for meat. In contrast, only 53 percent approve of hunting for sport and only 28 percent approve of hunting for trophies.
Looking around at the taxidermied heads on the fis
h and game club walls, I wondered how the hunters who had done the killing saw those mounts. Did they see them as proof of their capacity for domination? Did they see them as ways of honoring the animal they had killed, or as ways of preserving the memories of those days, those moments? It would be easy to assume that these hunters were what social ecologist and Yale University Professor Stephen R. Kellert—in a classic 1978 study of American attitudes toward wildlife and hunting—termed “dominionistic” hunters: people who hunted primarily to compete with and master animals. But perhaps some were what he called “utilitarian” hunters: people who hunted primarily to obtain food. Perhaps others were “nature hunters”: people who hunted mainly to experience close contact with nature. It was impossible to know.
Looking around at the boys—and the few girls—in the class, I had no idea what motivated them either. Would they, most of them following in their fathers’ or uncles’ footsteps, hunt primarily for the challenge of it? Would they hunt for a sense of connection to food and land? Would they hunt for camaraderie, for the pleasure of sharing an outdoor tradition with friends and family? Or would they hunt for all these reasons and more?
Kellert’s threefold typology of hunters—“dominionistic,” “utilitarian,” and “nature”—was a useful analytic tool, allowing him to make comparisons among various groups. He observed, for instance, that dominionistic hunters and antihunters shared an intriguing characteristic: Both scored quite low on questions measuring their knowledge of animals. But, as Kellert noted, these three “ideal” types were artifacts of sociology. Each described only some of the attitudes and motives of any single hunter.
I knew there must be motivational differences among hunters. I could not imagine that the hunger felt by those hunters who, in at least a few corners of the world, still truly depended on wild animals for subsistence resembled the hunger that drove trophy hunters aiming to get their names in record books. Nor did I think that Uncle Mark was drawn to the woods by the same forces that motivated the father and son who guffawed at the instructors’ discussions of ethics.
Yet I also knew that even my own motives could not be neatly divided and compartmentalized. I would be hunting to confront the death of fellow vertebrates, yes. And I would be hunting to learn about myself and the place I inhabited, to be nourished by the land and participate in its rhythms, and to answer a call for which I had no name. I could not separate these things. Together, my reasons formed a complex web. Why should other hunters’ motives be any different, any simpler? Perhaps their reasons, too, like the interdependent organisms of the forest—hare and bobcat, maple and deer, ant and woodpecker—were deeply intertwined, impossible to understand in isolation.
On a Saturday morning in mid-September, we gathered for the final class. Following a multiple-choice exam, we headed out to the shooting range. There, under the close supervision of an instructor, who handed us live cartridges one at a time, we each fired five shots with a .22, aiming at a paper target twenty-five yards away. Keeping the rifle pointed downrange was required. Operating the bolt, safety, and trigger mechanisms without mishap was also required. Hitting the mark was not. Though most of the group’s shooting was good—bullet holes clustering in and around the bull’s-eyes—at least one target survived without a single blemish.
Passing the course was, I reflected, no proof of preparedness to hunt. The real education of American hunters still depends on the traditional transmission of knowledge and skills from one generation to the next. I hoped that the kids who had completed the course alongside me would have good guidance—in safety and in ethics—when they spent their first eager days afield.
At the conclusion of the live-fire exercise, the head instructor handed us each a blaze-orange Hunter Firearms Safety card, the document required to purchase a hunting license. One man looked down at his young son and asked, “Do you think we could possibly get to the store and buy that license fast enough?” The round-faced boy grinned widely and shook his head: No, not even sixty miles an hour would be fast enough.
I wasn’t in that kind of hurry. Though Vermont’s most popular hunting season—the two weeks of rifle hunting for deer—was still two months off, I had no plans to hunt that autumn. I wasn’t equipped for it yet, in all kinds of ways.
8
A Hunter’s Prayer
No culture has yet solved the dilemma each has faced with the growth of a conscious mind: how to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in all life, when one finds darkness not only in one’s own culture but within oneself.
—Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams
That fall I hunted through Uncle Mark’s eyes.
In mid-October, he sent an e-mail about his first outing in archery season on Cape Cod, recounting the quiet pleasure he took in watching the woods come to life at dawn. Chickadees landed on branches within arm’s reach, calling dee-dee-dee. A gray squirrel scolded as a big hawk swooped low. Shafts of early sunlight pierced the woods, illuminating a nearby patch of yellow ferns. After a day of rain, the fragrances of pine needles and oak leaves were strong.
In November, he sent pictures from his annual pilgrimage to Virginia, where his longtime buddy Jay has a cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains. One photo showed their old-fashioned caplock muzzleloaders, crafted from do-it-yourself kits years earlier: the reddish stock of Mark’s nearly as dark as mahogany with a crescent brass butt plate, the wood of Jay’s nearly blond, its butt plate carved of moose antler.
Another photo was of a vulture. The first morning of the hunt, Mark had let two deer pass, neither close enough for him to feel certain of a clean kill. The second morning, another had appeared in thick cover nearby. It had taken ten minutes for the young buck to wander into a tiny clearing where Mark could finally take a twig-free shot, enough time for his heartbeat to double and his hands to start trembling. “There was also plenty of time,” he wrote, “to say the hunter’s prayer about a dozen times: ‘Lord, let me kill clean … and if I can’t kill clean, let me miss clean.’” The buck had gone down on the spot. In the photo, the vulture stood by the bones and scraps that Mark returned to the woods. Mark had jotted a caption on the back: “Nature’s recycling.”
Back on Cape Cod, Mark sent an e-mail describing the last morning of archery season. Over the previous six weeks, he had hunted his favorite spot ten times without seeing a single deer. That last morning, though, after several hours of waiting, he heard a whitetail coming. The four-point buck strolled within twenty feet, so close that Mark could see his eyelashes and whiskers as he pawed the ground, then lifted his head to lick an overhanging branch. The buck paused in a shaft of morning sunlight, his coat shimmering with golden highlights. Then he took a few steps and stood broadside to Mark, his entire head behind a tree. It was a bowhunter’s dream shot—the angle perfect, the deer unable to see the archer raise his bow. “I never did draw an arrow,” Mark wrote. “It was just wonderful to be so close to such an incredible animal.”
That, I thought, was how I wanted to hunt. Appreciating everything I saw, heard, and smelled. Admiring my fellow creatures and enjoying their presence. Not caring too much whether deer came my way. Often letting animals pass by. Choosing my shots carefully. Killing swiftly.
I was not my uncle, though. He had been hunting for nearly forty years, having started in his teens. In my teens, I had been on the brink of veganism. Hearing Mark’s experiences and insights was helpful as I thought more seriously about becoming a hunter. But I had my own sorting out to do before I took to the woods, bow or gun in hand.
How would the compassion and respect I had for animals inform my hunting? Having grown up without a hunting tradition of any kind—in a broader culture that saw nature and wildlife as little more than scenery—what meanings would frame my experiences afield?
Inside the front cover of the hunter-education manual, I had come across a quote from one José Ortega y Gasset. As the manual’s one oblique reference to hunters’ motives, i
t annoyed me from the start: “To the sportsman the death of the game is not what interests him; that is not his purpose.”
I soon discovered that the Spaniard was a luminary of hunting philosophy. His little volume Meditations on Hunting—originally published in 1942 as a long-winded prologue to another man’s book—is quoted so often in the literature of hunting that it has taken on near-scriptural status. Reading it, I decided I was a heretic. Here and there, I wanted to underline a sentence, noting my emphatic agreement. Mostly, I wanted to cram the margins with question marks, exclamation points, and words of protest. (Unable to mark up a pristine hardcover the way I would a paperback, I did neither.)
Working my way through Ortega’s flowery prose and convoluted logic, I could see why Edward Abbey referred to him as “that sly sophist.” Ortega celebrates the “exemplary moral spirit of the sporting hunter” who hunts for diversion, but looks down on the “utilitarian” hunter, who, like “Paleolithic man … 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 misses a crucial point. What the utilitarian hunter seeks and values is not death. It is life: food. But Ortega goes on.
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. Therefore what was before only a means to an end is now an end in itself.