The Mindful Carnivore (11 page)

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.

I wasn’t sure that the ancientness of human predation had much bearing on the question either. We reject traditions all the time: the treatment of other human beings as property, for example, or the denial of voting rights on the basis of gender or skin color. Why, then, should the ancientness of hunting traditions provide a meaningful justification for its practice in modern times?

Had I—in adopting veganism and morally setting myself above the predator-prey relationship—lost sight of my unity with other animals, with nature as a whole, and with my heritage as a human? Or was I now—in fishing and in entertaining the possibility of hunting—losing sight of the very thing that made me human, the ability to reflect on my own needs and instincts and to make moral choices?

If I simply wanted a face-to-face reckoning with my meat, I could volunteer to help a chicken-raising friend on slaughter day, wielding the knife and seeing how it felt. If I wanted to experience the whole process from beginning to end, I could raise chickens myself. Had I lived in a suburban or urban setting, I might have gone that route, as many Americans have in recent years. Here in the hills of north-central Vermont, though, with the woods just a stone’s throw from our front door, this disconcerting notion kept stalking my thoughts: hunting.

When I imagined Uncle Mark hunting, I did not think merely of the killing. I knew, in fact, that he spent most days and weeks afield without taking a shot. Only once a year, on average, did he drag a deer out of the woods.

I thought mainly of Mark’s relationship with the land, his knowledge of the places he had hunted, his familiarity with the habits of the creatures who lived there. I recalled walking into his room when I was a boy, marveling at the bows and arrows, the powder horn and pelts and antlers. Would hunting teach me to see these wooded ridges and valleys differently? Would it sharpen my attention to the nuances of terrain and breeze, of vegetation patterns and animal behavior, the way fishing had attuned me to the interplay of current, stone, and sunlight? Would hunting help me feel more like a participant in nature and less like a spectator? Would it give me some sense of belonging, of communion? Would it remind me of the largeness and wholeness of the world, and of my tininess within it?

To be honest with myself, I had to admit something else, too. I had been glossing over the presence of predation not only in nature, but in my own psyche.

The year after we moved to Vermont, on opening weekend of rifle season in mid-November, I had dreamed of a deer. And of a cougar, watching intently. Predator and prey circled each other, round and round, until finally the deer brushed by within inches of the great cat. Not yet hungry, the cougar let the white-tail pass. Still a vegan, I woke, jotted the dream in a notebook, and thought of it no more.

Two years before that, in what little snow we had gotten at Bird Cottage, I had once found deer tracks in the woods on the far side of the brook. I followed them, slowly at first, then faster and faster, running, weaving through the trees as the deer had done, pursuing the hoofprints for the sheer fun of it, feeling like the boy I had once been: fascinated with the ways of wild creatures, delighted to find signs of their passage and to have the chance to make plaster casts of their tracks. At the time, following those tracks near Bird Cottage, the feeling seemed nothing more than excited curiosity, the thrill of tracking and not knowing where the chase would end.

But was it not a hunter’s excitement?

6

Hunter and Beholder

When men and women put on blaze orange hunting vests or camo, they temporarily lose their individuality beneath the layers of symbolism loaded on the image of
hunter.

—Jan E. Dizard,
Mortal Stakes

W
ho would I be if I hunted?

After so many years of sticking to veggie burgers, could I really picture myself striding into the woods with a lethal weapon in hand, intent on shooting down a wild animal and dragging its bloody carcass home for dinner? Who would I become in my own eyes? Who would I become in others’ eyes?

Where Cath’s views were concerned, I was fortunate. Though my return to fishing had surprised her, as it had me, she could relate. Just as I could conjure memories of spring outings with Willie when the quarry was still half covered with ice, or of dropping my line into its cooler, shadier corners in midsummer, she remembered fishing with her brothers when they were kids, catching suckers in Rippleton Creek, the little waterway that ran near their house. They fed the small ones to the barn cats and brought the big ones home for their grandfather to cook.

Though Cath had no interest in angling now, she took mine in stride. She knew how enjoyable fishing could be and understood my desire to have a hand in procuring the flesh foods we were eating.

And though hunting was alien—except for her brother’s pursuit of the occasional cottontail, no one in her family had hunted, and the regular dispatching of woodchucks in the garden had been a simple extension of agriculture—she was keeping an open mind. If the vegan she had fallen in love with eight years earlier wanted to learn to stalk his own meat on the paw or hoof, she would adjust to the idea. For that, I was grateful. In an e-mail, Uncle Mark mentioned that his wife, who now looks forward to venison each autumn, was an anti-hunter when they first met. “Things were kind of stressed when I brought something home from the woods,” he wrote. I could well imagine.

In Cath’s eyes, then, my hunting would not precipitate a catastrophic fall from grace. Nor would my mother, sisters, aunts, uncles, or grandmother see it that way. Though Mark was the only hunter in my immediate clan, his annual pursuit of wild meat was well respected, and no one but me had ever taken up veganism.

I was less sure about our friends. My return to angling—the idea of me tossing flies and treble-hooked lures to unsuspecting trout or bass—had been a bizarre enough surprise. The image of me in a blaze-orange vest with a deer rifle slung over my shoulder would be far worse.

But why? Why should fishing, a thoroughly predatory activity, be so much more socially acceptable than hunting, and so much more popular? Nearly 30 million Americans fish each year, while only 12.5 million hunt.

Is it because we see fish as “other,” but perceive mammals, and to a lesser degree birds, as kin? As the late anthropologist Susan Kent noted, in traditional hunter-gatherer and hunter-farmer societies, “animals are classified as intellectual beings. They are therefore placed in the same macro-category as humans, whereas plants and fish are not.” Here in the modern West, we tend to make sharper distinctions between
Homo sapiens
and other animals, often claiming that humans possess something that animals do not: typically a capacity for reason, or a soul. But don’t we still identify more closely with hairy, warm-blooded fellow mammals than with scaly, cold-blooded fish? More with Bambi than with Nemo? (Ironically, the average American eats well over a hundred pounds of beef, pork, veal, and lamb each year, and less than twenty pounds of fish.)

Or is our greater discomfort with hunting rooted in its violence, so much more sudden and final than that of fishing? For the individual angler wielding rod and line, killing is not essential to successful fishing. Whatever we may say about the practice of “catch-and-release” angling—whatever praise we heap upon it for conserving fish populations, whatever criticism we level at it for causing pointless suffering and unintentionally killing some fish—we can agree on the simple fact: It can be done. We can fish, catch, and then decide the fate of our prey. We can even snap a quick photo before the rainbow, brown, or largemouth swims away. In hunting, our predatory implement is not a hook that can be removed, but a bullet, or a blast of shotgun pellets, or a razor-tipped arrow: a projectile that captures by killing. If a hunter shoots, there is no throwing the animal back to live another day.

Differences can also be heard in our idiomatic uses of the words “fish” and “hunt.” When we say someone is fishing for something—information, perhaps—we evoke an image of a line dropped quietly into water, or a net cast out, a subtle gesture toward an uncertain end. The fisherman waits, receptive, not knowing what, if anything, will take the bait or lure, or appear in the net. Hunting for something—a job, perhaps—is different. Pointed and aggressive rather than patient and fluid, the hunter doggedly pursues his or her goal. If Simon and Andrew had been hunting along the shores of the Sea of Galilee, rather than casting a net, Jesus could hardly have said unto them, “Follow me, and I will make you hunters of men.”