by The Mindful Carnivore: A Vegetarian's Hunt for Sustenance
Setting aside the fact that some sport hunters do seem quite interested in “the death of the game,” I agreed with Ortega, if only in part. There would, I imagined, be far more to hunting than the death of the animal. From personal experience, I knew that fishing could be compelling in and of itself. Part of the point was to be on the water in an old, battered rowboat, to learn the habits of the fish I sought and to master techniques that would fool them, to watch the complex, cross-patterning of riffles as the breeze changed direction, to stand on a bridge with an old friend at sunset. The process of the hunt could, I imagined, be equally compelling.
But, here again, Ortega misses something, for utilitarian hunters also find enjoyment in the hunt itself. As anthropologist Richard Nelson wrote in reflecting on a year he spent living in the Alaskan coastal village of Wainwright, “Inupiaq men lived to hunt as much as they hunted to live.” In his attempt to establish a simplistic binary model of hunters and their motives, Ortega divorces means and ends, obscuring complexity and truth. Inupiaq men enjoyed hunting, and they also aimed to bring home an animal—a seal, perhaps—and to eat it. I enjoyed fishing, and I also intended to bring home fish, make use of my fillet knife, and take down one of our cast-iron skillets from where they hung beside the kitchen window.
Ortega’s celebrated sportsman might 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 killing of the animal is the natural end of the hunt and that goal of hunting itself, not of the hunter. 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.
That last bizarre line—enough to make one wonder about the accuracy of the translation from Spanish to English—may be Ortega’s most frequently quoted phrase. On first reading it, printed there inside the front cover of the hunter-education manual, I had no words for the feelings of irritation and offense that welled up within. If I could have articulated a reply in the moment, it would have been far less civil than Edward Abbey’s: “Not good enough.”
Ortega’s ideal sportsman kills not to eat, but to fulfill some kind of symbolic necessity. The animal’s death is a “sign” that the hunt is “authentic” and “real.” To my ear, such insistence on authenticity suggested one thing clearly: The philosopher’s hunter was out of touch with reality. Why else would he need a sign of it? Would the Inupiaq kill seals or other creatures merely to assure themselves that they were really hunting? What kind of deranged angler would I be if I beheaded trout so I could think, Ah, now I have authentically fished?
The philosopher’s sportsman, moreover, seems to be above mere killing. Killing is “the natural end of the hunt and that goal of hunting itself, not of the hunter.” What are we to make of this hunt that apparently hurtles toward a natural end of its own accord, without a hunter who really wants—let alone needs—to kill? What are we to make of this sportsman who does not hunt to eat, who—immune to such contamination—has risen above the base realities of life and death?
Ortega’s case for the superiority of sport hunting over utilitarian hunting stems from a fundamental cultural arrogance. Tribes who depend on hunting for survival, he 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 is his own ignorance—of tribal cultures such as the Inupiaq of the Arctic and the San of the Kalahari, and of their enormously complex “utilitarian” hunting traditions—that Ortega demonstrates.
I was thankful to find a kindred skeptic in Robert Kimber. His book Living Wild and Domestic helped clarify why Ortega’s attitude toward utilitarian hunters and “primitive” tribes bothered me so intensely. “It is the utilitarian hunter dependent on the hunt for sustenance,” Kimber writes, “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.”
The sport hunter, Ortega admits, is never as skilled as the true subsistence hunter: “Today’s best-trained hunter cannot begin to compare his form to that of the sylvan actions of the presentday pygmy or his remote counterpart Paleolithic man.” He even allows that the modern European subsistence hunter is more skilled than the sport hunter. But, for Ortega, that modern subsistence hunter is an uncivilized brute: “the poacher,” an “eternal troglodyte” who “always smells a little like a beast.”
Call me a troglodyte then. Unlike the Inupiaq, I did not need to hunt to survive. But it was for food—not for a sign that my hunting was real—that I would take aim at a whitetail’s heart.
Prowling through a local used bookstore one day, I paused in front of the small shelf devoted to hunting and fishing. My eyes fastened on a beige-and-yellow spine bearing the title A Hunter’s Heart. As soon as I opened the book, I knew I was in good company.
In the introduction, I learned that Richard Nelson—whose account of the vast numbers of deer killed to protect agricultural crops had brought me up short in my latter days as a vegan—had grown up opposed to hunting. As a boy he had believed that “hunting was entirely evil—no matter who did it, how they did it, or why.” Yet, living among native peoples in Alaska, he had learned to hunt. Now, in middle age, he found hunting for food to be a vitally important part of his life, an activity that served to remind him that he was not separate from his fellow creatures but “twisted together with them in one great braidwork of life.”
In the essays that followed, I encountered dozens of hunters—and a few nonhunters—willing to ask hard questions, to write honestly about animals and killing and eating. In one essay, philosopher Ann Causey tackled a deceptively simple question—“Is hunting ethical?”—and contended that there is no simple answer. In another, outdoor writer Mike Gaddis rejected the premise “that life other than human is devoid of feeling and is, individually, of small consequence.” In yet another, farmer and professor George Wallace—having shot an animal badly—stated bluntly, “If elk would scream, the woods would have fewer hunters.”
For me, the book opened up a whole landscape of recent hunting literature. One essay, for instance—about hunting during a brutally cold winter on the northern Great Plains when deer died of malnourishment and froze solid—had been penned by women’s studies professor Mary Zeiss Stange. The essay led me to Stange’s intriguingly titled book, Woman the Hunter.
As a college student in Manhattan, I had studied feminism. During that period, I read only one article about hunting. In it, the author contended that hunting (violence against animals) and environmental destruction (violence against nature) were both akin to violence against women. All three were, in essence, rape. The parallels made sense to me.
If I had come across other feminist critiques of hunting in those years, I would almost certainly have agreed with them as well. I would have been especially taken with activist Marti Kheel’s essay “License to Kill,” in which she argues that all attempts to justify hunting, and to link it to environmental ethics, serve a sinister purpose: “to camouflage and to legitimate violence and biocide.” Kheel gives special attention to what she calls the “holy hunter,” who uses the language of spirituality to mask his psychosexual urge to dominate and kill.
Ten years later, I still cared deeply about animals. And I still embraced the values summed up by the button I kept pinned to my backpack in college: “Feminism: The Radical Notion That Women Are People.” But now I was reading Stange alongside Kheel.
Kheel emphasizes that hunting has always been a predominantly male pursuit. Stange points out that one in ten American hunters is female and that hunting is becoming increasingly popular among wom
en. Kheel contends that hunting is, in essence, a “quest to establish masculine identity in opposition to the natural world.” Stange argues that such a simplistic understanding fails to account not only for women’s hunting, but for men’s hunting as well. Kheel, disturbed by the apparent similarities between the (presumably evil) ideology of the “holy hunt” and the (presumably good) ideology of ecofeminism, seeks to demonstrate that the two are diametrically opposed. Stange embraces these similarities, arguing that a meaningful understanding of women and men—indeed of all human existence in the greater natural world—must be rooted in a more complex moral framework.
Stange acknowledges that hunting—framed by the cultural myth of Man the Hunter—has long served as a metaphor for men’s relationships with other humans, nonhuman animals, and the world in general. In short, men have been associated with aggression, domination, and the violent subjugation of other beings and of nature as a whole. Women, in contrast, have been associated with passivity, victimization, and the violently subjugated natural world.
This metaphor and its associations have, of course, been useful to defenders of the male-dominated status quo. If men—as hunters—are naturally aggressive, and women—as men’s gathering and cooking helpmates—are naturally passive, then long-standing inequities can be explained and even justified. As Stange points out, however, ecofeminist critics like Kheel are retelling the same story. In valorizing women as nature-loving nurturers, ecofeminism romanticizes the natural world and perpetuates stereotypes about women’s moral purity. Simultaneously, it perpetuates stereotypes about men as nature-hating killers; that is, as hunters.
In my college years, I would have resisted the idea that women can, and perhaps should, act just as violently as men. Now, though, I understood that Stange was making a far more complex point. The figure of Woman the Hunter has the potential to disturb both the male-dominated status quo and its ecofeminist critics. She can, and perhaps should, force us to rethink our cultural assumptions about women, men, and the human place in nature.
Considering the case Stange made, I realized that a female hunter had, in fact, helped open my eyes to what hunting could be. Cath and I met wildlife conservationist Susan Morse shortly after moving to Vermont and were immediately impressed. I had never heard anyone speak so passionately about the importance of habitat protection, particularly the danger of habitat fragmentation and the crucial need to protect the travel corridors that keep wildlife populations interconnected and genetically viable. Her love for wild animals was palpable.
“These are our neighbors,” she said.
The next year, while Cath and I were taking part in a series of training sessions with Sue, learning how to collect field data on wildlife habitat, I discovered that she was a deer hunter. It did not compute. How could she spend the vast majority of her life working to understand and protect her wild “neighbors,” and then turn around and kill one of them? Only years later, as the possibility of hunting began to bubble up into my own consciousness, did it begin to make sense.
In her early forties, Sue had recognized a basic disconnect: what she calls her “schizophrenia” about predation. Carnivores were the focus of most of her research. When she came across signs of a mammalian predator’s successful hunt—perhaps a place where she could track a bobcat’s stealthy movements in the snow and read the story’s end in scattered turkey feathers—she celebrated, knowing the animal had survived another day. A meat eater, Sue had been raising lambs for years. She detested the cruelties and ecological impacts of the meat industry, and valued having a personal connection with the flesh foods she consumed. Yet she wasn’t participating in the forest life cycles she studied.
By the time we met Sue, she was an avid hunter and hunter-education instructor who spoke candidly of her discomfort with the popular portrayal of hunting in television shows and videos. She saw far too much emphasis on competition and success in bagging game, far too little room left over for cherishing and respecting animals, for pausing to reflect on the meaning of hunting and killing. Even more vocally, she challenged hunters to become more active conservationists, to give back more to the land, to work at building people’s awareness of the preciousness of all life, from invertebrates to wolves.
Sue pointed out that good hunting—like good birding, good hiking, and good berry picking—begins with good habitat. “Such habitat,” she said, “includes the air that’s breathed, clean waters, and productive soils, which grow the abundance and diversity of foods needed by deer and countless other species.” And our vision of good habitat, she said, should also include people, with “our uniquely human capacity to partake of nature’s harvest while steadfastly guarding its future.” She contended that hunters, of all people, should understand “the relationship between a healthy natural environment and what makes us whole.”
Echoing many of Sue’s sentiments, another essay in A Hunter’s Heart took hunters to task. It is high time, argued writer Ted Kerasote, to stop pretending that American hunting is always the conscientious, respectful activity it claims to be. Rather than denying the careless and gratuitously brutal attitudes and behaviors that characterize some hunters—ones that lodge themselves in the memories of nonhunters—Kerasote acknowledged that many of the charges leveled against hunting are well founded.
But he pointed out that disrespect of nature and animals is not unique to thoughtless hunters. As a whole, our society operates with little regard for its impacts. From rapacious development and logging to ecologically devastating agricultural practices and the application of toxic herbicides to suburban lawns, we inflict enormous damage—most of which we never see. A careless hunter’s behavior may be visible and upsetting, but it is merely one facet of larger cultural patterns.
In his essay, Kerasote offered several ideas for reforming American hunting. He suggested, for instance, that hunter-education programs should be made more rigorous, with far more attention given to ethics, ecological knowledge, and shooting skills. (In his book Bloodties, Kerasote specifically suggests that U.S. hunter education should emulate the central European model, in which students must develop expert marksmanship and must also devote up to one hundred hours to studying wildlife biology and forestry.) Such a change, he acknowledged, would be hard to make. Many American hunters would protest, noting that participation is already declining, and arguing that another barrier is the last thing we need. State wildlife agencies would need to increase license fees or find alternative funding sources. And objections from the hunting-equipment industry would need to be overcome.
Having once become a vegetarian in an attempt to “outwit” the pain caused by his own eating, Kerasote also suggested that hunters publicize a more accurate accounting of the ecological and animal costs incurred by American diets and lifestyles. He suggested that women’s participation in hunting be welcomed and encouraged. He suggested that the pursuit of record-book trophies be de-emphasized, and that killing competitions be condemned.
And he suggested that hunters reconsider the ways they talk and think about hunting, moving away from words like “sport” and “recreation.” The concept of hunting as “sport” goes back to the ancient Greeks and the nobility of the Middle Ages, in whose agrarian societies hunting was no longer a matter of survival and had started to become a ritualized, rule-bound game. The term itself is an abbreviation of “disport,” which goes back to the Old French word desporter, meaning to amuse or divert oneself—literally, to “carry” the mind “away” from serious matters. In the history of the idea and the word, Kerasote sees antecedents of the modern connotations of “sport,” invoking everything from frivolous, individual amusement to the National Football League. Even in antiquity, hunting had been stripped of its original and most serious meaning: food.
But Kerasote’s recommendations went deeper than specific fixes. He argued that the reformation of American hunting depends on recreating it as “the disciplined, mindful, sacred activity it once was for our species.” Likewise, he su
ggested that the redemption of our culture as a whole depends on bringing greater compassion and restraint to our relationships with animals and nature, on returning to an attitude of reverence, humility, and mutual regard. And he contended that such a cultural reformation can only be accomplished if more of us participate in “the world that feeds us”—whether by hunting, fishing, gardening, or growing a bit of lettuce or basil in a pot by a window.
I concurred with Kerasote on many points, including his suggestion that hunting should be rooted in reverence. In taking an animal’s life, I should be mindful not only of that creature’s physical form—and its bodily capacity for suffering—but also of its spiritual essence. Matters of spirit, however, led me onto tricky ground.
Growing up, I’d had three allergies. In order of increasing severity: cat dander, dust mites, and organized religion. The first two might have been passed down genetically. The third might as well have been. My mother, raised Catholic, had rejected the church in her youth. My father, raised Protestant, had become a devout atheist. In his world, everything could be explained by science.
Before I was old enough to think about such things, some sense of mystery must have inhabited me. As I sit here writing, I pick up a small black-and-white photo from my desk. About four years old, I stand under the eaves of my father’s house. A thin mantle of snow covers the ground. In the background, pines and white birches. I’m dressed in boots, pants, and hooded jacket. Pinned to the back of the jacket is a bird outfit made of white fabric, forked tail extending below my knees, wingtips reaching out beyond my hands. You can see that I’ve been decorating my regalia with a magic marker. On the left wing, the jumbled scrawlings include three mammalian figures. Behind the right shoulder is an oval with angular, finlike wedges radiating from one end; it might be a glyph for “fish.” Affixed to the jacket’s hood, a gauzy white mask envelops my face. Eyeholes are cut above the great beak. I’m looking up at a birdfeeder and the winged creatures that flit there. My hands are raised over my head, as if in supplication.