The Mindful Carnivore (15 page)

Hunters, I realized, face a problem shared by many minorities: identity in the eyes of the majority. No single set of behaviors can be ascribed to them all, yet nonhunters often identify them as a singular group. If hunting was more common—like driving, say—we would make more sophisticated distinctions. Just as we can encounter bad drivers without drawing conclusions about all drivers, we would be able to encounter bad hunters without drawing conclusions about all hunters. Just as we can criticize drunk driving and road rage without condemning all driving, we would be able criticize poaching and cruelty without condemning all hunting.

Later in the manual, another section title jumped out at me: “Would It Survive Without Hunting?” I did a double take. I knew that “it” meant animals. In my years as a vegan and anti-hunter, such a question would have struck me as more than a little bizarre. And it still did. Now, though, I genuinely wanted to understand this brave new world of hunter-speak.

The question was posed in the context of a brief lesson in the history of North America’s wildlife conservation model. The chapter noted how sport hunters rallied against nineteenth-century market hunting, championed wildlife conservation, and helped bring about the Lacey Act of 1900.

It highlighted how hunters, including Aldo Leopold and Theodore Roosevelt, advocated scientific wildlife management, and also how hunters have funded that management. In 1937, the Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Act—commonly known as the Pittman-Robertson Act—instituted an excise tax on firearms and other hunting equipment. Since then, revenues have provided states with over $4 billion for wildlife research, habitat protection, and hunter education. (A parallel excise tax on fishing equipment, initiated in 1950, has similarly funded fisheries research and restoration.) And hunting and fishing license fees have long been the core funding source for state fish and wildlife agencies. Additionally, hunters support a host of nonprofit conservation organizations. Ducks Unlimited, for instance, has conserved over twelve million acres of North American waterfowl habitat since its inception in 1937.

The intended take-home messages were clear. First, hunting can benefit wildlife. Regulated hunting does not threaten or endanger wildlife populations. Rather, it serves as an effective wildlife management tool and makes huge contributions to successful conservation programs. Second, the North American model is a democratic system that makes hunting widely accessible to citizens. With the instruments of law and science, wildlife populations are managed as a sustainable public resource. It was, I thought, a good reminder of the oft-forgotten roles played by hunters in the past century of this continent’s faunal history.

The word “resource” bothered me, though. When I started logging a few years earlier, I had felt uncomfortable thinking about living trees as mere volumes of material. I felt even more uncomfortable thinking about animals that way.

In the hunter-education manual, one diagram depicted wildlife as liquid overflowing a vat. Since habitat (the vat) can sustainably support just so many animals, there is an annual “surplus” in animal “production.” This surplus of extra animals is drained off through various leaks and spigots: starvation, disease, car accidents, animal predation, and hunting. Considering the image, I wondered what implications such an economic and scientific framework might have for us, for our fellow creatures, and for our understanding of them. I didn’t know what it would be like to kill and eat a wild animal, but I was sure it would feel nothing like opening a spigot. (Nor, reflecting on the manual’s euphemistic references to “harvesting,” did I think it would feel much like picking a zucchini.)

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 fish 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.