The Mindful Carnivore (12 page)

If I really thought about it, I had to admit: My problem had never been with hunting itself.

Oh, in my most righteous vegan phase, I
had
been certain that hunting, like other forms of animal murder, was wrong. Yet, at the same time, I had mourned the extermination of indigenous hunter-gatherer and hunter-farmer cultures around the world. If someone had pointed out that contradiction—the fact that I wished for the survival of traditions like those of the Kiowa and Cree, and of the Yupik I had first read about in
Julie of the Wolves
, all of which involved hunting—I probably would have argued that such cultures, like ours, could make moral progress away from slaughter and meat eating. (It’s frightening to think that I might have made a good missionary.
)
If pressed on the point, however, I suppose I would have conceded: I didn’t object to human predation in all times and places.

Shortly after our move to Vermont, Cath and I borrowed David Attenborough’s series
The Life of Mammals
from a local public library. The final episode depicts an ancient form of hunting, the persistence hunt, as traditionally practiced by the San people of the Kalahari Desert. In the show, three hunters find the tracks of a group of kudu. When the animals are spotted, the pursuit begins. Alternating between walking and running, the three men focus on a single bull. Where tracks are visible, the hunters follow them. Where they are not, the men attend to subtler signs, in places relying on little more than their imagination, their ability to see the terrain from the kudu’s perspective and know where he would have gone.

Hours later, when the kudu begins to slow, the final stage of the hunt commences: the chase. One man runs in the blazing heat, pursuing his prey. But for the sneakers on his feet, the plastic canteen he carries, the steel of his knife and spear, and the unseen presence of a camera crew, the scene—man chasing animal—could be from ten thousand years ago. For hours, they run, the hunter’s expert tracking skills keeping him on the trail, his extraordinary stamina gradually overcoming the kudu’s.

Evolutionary biologists Dennis M. Bramble and Daniel E. Lieberman have speculated that this method of hunting—historically used to take deer and antelope in North America, kangaroos in Australia, and a variety of species in Africa—may, along with competitive scavenging, have influenced the evolution of the human body. Though we lack the speed of large quadrupeds, we have astonishing endurance, due to the musculoskeletal specializations of our bipedal form and our unique capacity for evaporative cooling.

Eight hours after the hunt began, man closes in on animal. Both walk slowly. Finally, the great antelope’s legs give out, and he lies on the ground, unable to rise, head up and alert, watching the hunter. From only a few yards away, the man launches the slender spear, striking the animal just behind the shoulder.

When the kudu lies still, the hunter scatters handfuls of sandy earth over the body, like a priest sprinkling holy water. Crouching, he caresses the animal’s face, looks into its eye. With his finger, he scoops saliva from the corner of the kudu’s mouth and rubs it into the skin of his own legs to relieve the pain of the long run. He gives thanks for the life he has taken, for the meat that will feed his family.

In watching that extraordinary segment, I saw the hunt as natural. Despite the artifice of film editing, the piece expressed something elemental, something true. The man was undeniably a part of nature: an intelligent, highly developed predator, to be sure, but only one among many. The moment of the kill—and the sorrowful, respectful moments just after it—made my heart ache.

No, my problem wasn’t with hunting. It was with hunters.

On one hand, for me the word “hunter” conjured images of the San’s reverence for the kudu, and of Uncle Mark. As a boy, I had grasped that Mark was gentle and sensitive. Now, as we corresponded about hunting, that perception was confirmed. “Killing,” he wrote, “is not something to be taken lightly.” Even after four decades as a hunter, he felt a wave of conflicting emotions at every kill: sorrow mixed with elation and gratitude. I imagined him crouched beside a fallen animal, touching it gently, as the San hunter did. He was glad to hear of my curiosity about hunting, but didn’t push me in that direction. Hunting wasn’t for everyone, he knew. “Everyone has to do what they are comfortable with,” he wrote. As a young man, he had sometimes felt the need to apologize for his affinity for hunting. Now, though, he embraced it. Hunting felt deeply right for him—a kind of spiritual pursuit.

On the other hand, the word “hunter” conjured other scenes.

It made me think of
Julie of the Wolves
: the shots fired from airplanes, the animals killed for entertainment.

It made me think of the young buck Paul and I once found near a small brook, while logging a suburban woodlot. The whitetail had taken a bullet in the chest but was never recovered by the hunter. The tail appeared to have been torn out by dogs or coyotes, perhaps as they ran the wounded animal down.

It made me think of the deer parts unceremoniously dumped along our road each autumn, pushed over the steep embankment above the brook where I had been catching trout. Finding those bones and scraps, I would silently curse the slobs who had discarded them, typically in garbage bags. Twice I carried a doe’s head home, left it in an anthill until the flesh had been stripped away, then set it in the woods, at the base of a spruce where I sometimes went to meditate.

“Hunter” made me think of shooting mishaps, both those that have ended in tragedy and those that might have: the Wisconsin woman killed in 2001 by a neighbor who thought he saw a deer, and the stray bullet that Cath told me had come through a window in her girlhood home and lodged in the wall of the upstairs hallway. Though such events are relatively rare, they make an indelible impression. As sociologist Jan E. Dizard notes in his book
Mortal Stakes: Hunters and Hunting in Contemporary America
, “even hunters themselves are not all that trusting of other hunters.”

And “ hunter” made me think, too, of the one autumn Cath and I had spent at Bird Cottage. The driveway connected to a trail that led back into the woods. When deer hunters armed with shotguns started walking down the driveway, passing within forty yards of us, we put up a no-hunting sign. A week later, we found Cath’s car slouching to one side, two tires slashed.

Hunters, it turns out, have occupied a complicated place in the Anglo-American psyche from the very beginning.

In seventeenth-century Europe, as historian Daniel Justin Herman documents in his book
Hunting and the American Imagination
, the New World was said to be a land of plenty: full not of the gently flowing milk and honey of a new Canaan, but of elk and deer, turkeys and waterfowl, and pigeons that darkened the skies with their uncounted millions. Such a wealth of wild meat appealed to the investors who were funding commercial explorations of North America. It also appealed to commoners, for the privilege of pursuing European game had long been reserved for the elite.

The New World’s wild plenty was matched by its wild terrors. One English sailor reported on its “many Tygers, monstrous and furious beasts, which by subtletie devoure and destroy many men.” As historian Andrea Smalley has noted, most reports about the New England and Virginia colonies downplayed these dangers, so as to avoid discouraging colonization. But longtime residents were aware of the impression the continent made on newcomers. What could they possibly see upon their arrival, asked William Bradford in his account of the early days of the Plymouth Colony, but a “hidious & desolate wildernes, full of wild beasts and wild men?”

As European colonists established a foothold along the eastern shores of North America, they took advantage of the abundant wildlife. Birds and mammals of every shape and size—from pigeons and ducks to beavers and deer—were netted, snared, trapped, clubbed, and shot. For those who did the killing, wild animals provided food. They also provided the opportunity for economic profit, as meat and hides could be sold at market.

Yet hunting stories are remarkably rare in colonial lore. Herman draws our attention to New England as an example. “How was it,” he asks, “that New England could be so full of game at the outset of colonization and yet produce so few tales of hunters and hunting?”

In some areas, perhaps colonists simply did not hunt much. At Plymouth, some twenty-five miles north of where Uncle Mark now hunted deer each fall, the archaeological evidence suggests that the Pilgrims were, in Herman’s words, “lackluster hunters.” Though they apparently consumed a fair number of wild ducks, they ate few wild mammals and almost no turkeys. In 1621, at the feast now commemorated as the first Thanksgiving, the main course was apparently venison, supplied by Wampanoag Indians.

More generally, colonists simply did not think of themselves as hunters. There was ample reason for them not to. With a few notable exceptions, such as the Finns who settled in the Delaware Valley, they had not been hunters in their homelands. For generations, they had primarily eaten the fruits of the field and pasture, not of the chase.

Nor had they come from hunting religions. Take the Puritans, for instance. In seventeenth-century England, they campaigned against hunting and cockfighting because they believed that such activities, like drinking, gambling, and pagan celebrations, were unchristian. In the words of British historian Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay, Puritans hated bear baiting—a form of entertainment in which bears were chained to posts and tormented by dogs—“not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.” In England, the Puritans had seen hunting as evidence of the gentry’s moral corruption. In the New World, they saw native peoples’ hunting in a similar light. “They believed,” writes Daniel Herman, “that Indians, like English aristocrats, were gamblers, fornicators, and ardent hunters, men who repudiated steady work habits and godliness.”

In stark contrast to American Indian religions, which placed humans within the complexities of life’s web, Puritanism cast us as radically separate from nature. Distinguishing
Homo sapiens
from other species—and the spirit from the body—was an obsession for ministers like Cotton Mather, who apparently couldn’t even pee without a fit of theological apoplexy. In 1700, foreshadowing the deep-seated fears of animality that would be articulated by vegetarian evangelist Sylvester Graham more than a century later, Mather wrote in his diary,

I was once emptying the cistern of nature, and making water at the wall. At the same time, there came a dog, who did so too, before me. Thought I; ‘What mean and vile things are the children of men.… How much do our natural necessities abase us, and place us … on the same level with the very dogs!’…

I resolved that it should be my ordinary practice, whenever I step to answer the one or other necessity of nature to make it an opportunity of shaping in my mind some holy, noble, divine thought.

Herman points out that religious doctrine also provided a cornerstone for colonial expansion. In Genesis, after all, God had commanded humans to subdue the earth and to eat the plants of the field, earning their food by the sweat of their brow. Though the native peoples of eastern North America planted crops around seasonal settlements, few were full-time farmers. As hunters, they had not “subdued” the land on which they lived. Therefore, the colonial argument went, they were not really using it. According to the logic of
vacuum domicilium
—“vacant abode”—land became the rightful property of the men who farmed it.

Roger Williams, convicted of sedition and heresy for his many “ dangerous opinions” and banished from Massachusetts, pointed out one major problem with this logic: Indians, like English nobles, managed their land to increase the availability of deer and other animals. Did not the former use and own that land as much as the latter? Not according to most colonists.

The dominant view held that it was permissible, even godly, to occupy North American soil and put it to “proper” use. This politically convenient religious concept of hunters’ and farmers’ different relationships with land complemented contemporary ideas about the development of civilization, particularly the “four-stages theory.”

Propounded by scholars such as Adam Smith, the Scottish author of
The Wealth of Nations
, this theory contended that human societies progressed through four stages: hunting, herding, farming, and commerce. For many four-stages theorists, Herman notes, “the third stage, or a mixture of the third and fourth stages, was ideal,” for farming was seen as the foundation of both virtue and prosperity. “Those who labour in the earth,” wrote Thomas Jefferson, “are the chosen people of God.”

For most colonists, hunting was secondary to farming. It might be necessary, as a way of providing food and eliminating pests and predators. And it could be enjoyable, as a diversion. As a way of life, however, it was barbaric and indolent, posing a threat to the industrious foundations of agrarian civilization. Hunting-based lifestyles made the frontier socially and morally dangerous, leading—in the words of Charles Woodmason, an Anglican who preached in the Carolinas—to “one continual Scene of Depravity of Manners … being more abandoned to Sensuality, and more Rude in Manners, than the Poor Savages around us.”

Herman suggests that the frontier presented more complex problems as well. What if degenerate whites joined Indians in resisting government authority? And what if a large number of whites chose a life of subsistence hunting? Could white farmers take land claimed by white hunters by invoking the logic of
vacuum domicilium
, arguing that they—like Indian hunters—weren’t really using it? Or would the absence of racial distinction between white farmers and white hunters bring that logic to its knees? Disturbed by such perils, colonies enacted legal reforms to curb them. In 1745, for example, North Carolina required that every deer hunter either possess “a settled Habitation” or produce written proof “of his having planted and tended Five Thousand Corn-hills … in the County where he shall hunt.”