The Mindful Carnivore (17 page)

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 women. 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 suggested 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.

Now, examining the photo thirty-some years later, turning it to the light, I’m not sure what I was doing. Disguised as a bird, maybe I was simply hoping for the delicate, thrilling pinpricks of a chickadee alighting on my hand. Or maybe, never taught to pray at any other altar, I was appealing to the visible powers about me, seeking communion.

As an older boy and teenager, I adopted my father’s atheistic views. I respected the moral teachings common to all religions, but had no patience for superstitious window dressing, let alone institutions that condemned other systems of belief, proselytized aggressively, exerted control over the faithful, preached peace while sanctifying brutality, and proclaimed themselves to be necessary intermediaries between people and their deities.

Once, in high school, my U.S. history teacher divided the class into two teams, each assigned to one side of the historical debate we were studying: slavery. It disturbed me to be assigned to the proslavery faction, arguing that white folks like me had the prerogative to enslave black folks like Willie. Nonetheless, I set about helping my team build its bigoted case. Like nineteenth-century slave owners, we turned to the Bible, and had no trouble finding precedent and justification for the ownership of fellow human beings. The ease with which we won the debate reminds me of the bumper sticker “Jesus called. He wants his religion back.” (I’m sure the Prince of Peace isn’t the only one. Mohammed has almost certainly left a similar message at Theology Central.)

Religion could, I knew, be separated from spirituality. Cath had parted ways with the Roman Catholic Church early in life, yet had kept her sense of the mystical alive. Willie had done the same. During our long talks in Boston that weekend when he returned my fillet knife, he told me that he had still been a boy when he recognized the hypocrisy of the church—the conceit that only Catholics went to heaven, the rolling out of the red funeral carpet for a New York Mafia boss while Willie’s mother, a divorcee, was refused Communion. As an adult, he rarely set foot in church, but every night he got down on his knees to pray.

In my twenties, years after my father’s death, I had begun to reconsider the question of spirit, of mystery. I realized I was not an atheist, but an agnostic. The concept of the “supernatural” still made no sense to me: Why banish the inexplicable upward, beyond the realm of nature? But I began to suspect that “nature” ran far deeper than the visible surface of the world, that webs of unseen force and meaning might connect all things. And I began to have experiences for which I had no language but that of spirit.