The Ethics of Hunting

I had an epiphany the other day, and this is how I arrived at it: We are growing a garden, which is an excellent, environmentally sound way to procure food. But, even though it is rewarding--Sonora and I poke around the garden every day and take note of the most minor of changes--it still has a minor negative impact because we use city water to water it. City water takes electricity to refine and to pump; electricity is generated using coal or radioactive material, both of which have unhealthy side effects, and so forth and so on. Wild plants, however, grow from rainwater and require no electrically-powered pump to water and no fossil fuels to run a tractor to plant their seeds. So, I realized, if we could live from wild plants that we collected on foot within walking distance of our house, we could live without much of a negative impact environmentally. This is unrealistic, of course, for many reasons, but I liked the idea and pursued it further.

What about meat? was my next thought.

For a brief moment following this question, I had an image of plucking chunks of meat from raspberry bushes, which is also unrealistic, but then it hit me: hunting is harvesting wild meat. This elementary realization shocked me because I had long ago written off hunting.

I used to go deer hunting in Colorado with my brothers and my dad when I was a kid. We weren't one of those die-hard hunting families with 50 different rifles and extra chest freezers just to hold the three elk we'd "bagged;" if they were lucky (and a deer unlucky), one of the males in the family would kill and bring home one deer a year. They would gut it out and bring the carcass home and hang it up-side-down in a tree to age for a few days in the cold October air. They would slit the skin around its ankles and pull down, as if trying to pull a blanket away from a reluctant child, carving with a knife the white membranes that held the skin to the muscle; the sound it would make was similar to the sound of pulling plastic wrap off a bowl. Then we would bring large chunks of meat and bone, sawed from the main body, into the house, where this animal flesh would bleed onto the kitchen table as it was chopped into steaks and roasts and jerky strips.

It was all pretty gruesome and the house smelled gamy for weeks. I didn't ever like the process very much, nor did the sagebrush-fed meat taste very good to me (I did like the jerky). When I went hunting with my dad or my brothers, I never shot a deer; I don't even remember pointing a rifle at one, but I observed because I thought the knowledge might be important some day. That is, until the last hunting experience I had with my dad.

He shot a doe. It was an easy shot across an open field and she went down. But when we got to her, she wasn't dead and my dad had to finish her off. He took out his knife and approached her, and she stared at him calmly as he approached. Her dark, round, moist eyes peered at him, perhaps at his soul. He straddled the does neck and then plunged the knife through her throat, severing her arteries and opening her esophagus. As she bled out, she stared at him until her eyes went dull.

My dad was silent and when I approached him, he turned his head away. He was crying. I could tell this, though I think he was ashamed. "I hate this part," he mumbled in explanation.

After that, I decided hunting was too painful, for the animal and for the hunter. I figured hunting must cause the hunter to become jaded, insensitive to death, insensitive to his or her own humanity.

The thing is, however, that every time we eat meat, we participate in the death and killing of an animal, of some cow or chicken or pig somewhere in the world that also has searching eyes. The difference is, we don't have to look at them. We get the plastic-wrapped bundle without having to hear the plastic-wrap sound of the skin being torn off. But isn't that jaded? Isn't that insensitive?

And there is the environmental factor to consider. Most meat sold in a grocery store (some co-ops excepting) has been grain-fed--highly inefficient--and given a steady regimen of antibiotics and hormones on a feedlot in the U.S. or New Zealand or somewhere else, shipped to a slaughterhouse, cut up, shipped to a packing plant, packaged, shipped to a grocery store, purchased, and shipped home to a refrigerator. A lot of energy has been wasted on this roast.

A deer or elk feeds on wild, organically-grown plants (unless the animal gets into a farmer's fertilized, insecticized, herbicized crops), lives a relatively fulfilling life, and then it is shot by a hunter; she or he will have to see the animal whose life has just seeped out of it. Unless this hunter is a trophy hunter (a despicable thing, trophy hunting), the hunter will know what she or he is eating and that it cost a life; this person can not hide behind the ignorant screen of cellophane and Styrofoam that suggests that meat costs only money.

There is the economic benefit of hunting as well: $50 or so will buy a license. An adult deer would yield somewhere between 50 and 120 pounds of meat, an elk a lot more. Of course, to have the full savings, instead of taking the carcass to a meat packing plant, you've got to skin it and butcher it yourself, which is messy and time consuming but valuable in that the family knows they are eating an animal that is dead and bleeding on their table because of them.

The thing is, though, that hunting is highly unappealing to me. I hate killing things, even insects. I've forgotten most of what I learned as a boy about gutting and skinning and butchering and packaging. But the more I think about it, the more convinced I become that hunting is more morally correct than consuming meat purchased at the grocery store. I am becoming convinced that I have two choices: hunting or becoming vegetarian. Elizabeth and I were vegetarians before for a few years and it was difficult to give up meat, but it might be easier than buying and using a rifle.

What do you think? Is hunting more ethical, more moral than just buying meat at a store, or is this recent mode of thought misguided?

Death of the Family Vacation?

So a few weeks ago, while we were on vacation in Utah, Elizabeth and I heard a blurb about an upcoming story on NPR about the passing of the "Golden Age of the family vacation," as if family vacations are now dead or at least past their prime. We were going to meet a friend at a park in Salt Lake City, so we didn't get to hear the story, but here is what I think they were going to say: Disneyland, airplanes, in-car DVD players, and high gas prices have killed the great American family roadtrip. Maybe they said nothing of the sort, but I'm going to proceed on the assumption that this was the premise of their story.

Of course, I'm not sure I know what a great American family vacation looks like. Here is my image: the family, packed into a car with stuff strapped to the roof, driving to some National Park, or along a historic route, or to see family members who live far away; along the way, the parents lead the children in all manner of time-consuming games to keep the kids from fighting and whining: playing I spy; singing show tunes and children's songs; passing out books and puzzles and yarn; etc. Most of these activities work only for a short while and then the kids are fighting and Dad is yelling and threatening to turn the car around and go home--a stupid threat, even he knows this, but it is tradition and an easy thing to say when he is angry. Through the road trip, the kids get to know their country more fully, bond with their family, and receive mental bookmarks to place in their memories as they become self-actualized.

I am certainly glad for some of the trips we went on when I was a kid. Mind you, we were poor and my experiences reflect this. Some of the experiences I remember were not necessarily pleasant, but I'm still glad for them. Here are a few that stand out in my mind right now:

I don't remember where we were going or how old I was (young), but I remember mountains of snow on either side of the car. We stopped and got out. The road was at the bottom of a seven-foot deep white canyon. The day was fairly warm and the snow was densely packed and taller than both my parents. My dad lifted each of us kids individually up onto the towering snow. Somehow this unexpected snowy encounter became a main attraction in the trip, something we talked about as much as whatever it was we were originally going to see.

On another trip, the family was driving during the summer to some desert location. We traveled in my dad's beat up 1965 baby blue Ford truck. My parents and the baby sat up in the front bench seat. The rest of us rode in the bed of the truck, protected from the wind by a camper shell. On this trip, my parents had left us a case of Shasta soda to quench our thirst, but we worked our way quickly through it and we were beginning to get thirsty again. I also needed to pee. We banged on the window to let my parents know they needed to stop, but they had had enough stopping on behalf of whiny kids (with seven kids, it must have seemed as though every twenty minutes one or the other of the children needed to stop). When I got no response from my parents, my older brother, Clinton, suggested I just pee in one of the empty soda cans, which I did with great relief. When I was finished, I decided to dump my urine out the window. But Dumoan, my oldest brother, grabbed the can from me. He was thirsty and didn't want me wasting the remainder of a soda; apparently he hadn't seen me quietly relieving myself in the corner. I started to tell him that that warm fluid in there was not soda pop, but Clinton shook his head as if to say: "Let's just see what happens." Dumoan took a deep draft of the warm, salty hint-of-ammonia Shasta and then spit it out in horror. Clinton was laughing heartily while I chuckled in disbelief. Dumoan punished us both that day; he failed to see the humor that kept us laughing even while being pounded with fists.

In that same blue truck, we took a trip to a couple of the National Parks in southern Utah. Zion NP stands out in my mind, mostly because it seemed somehow otherworldly, exotic, pre-historic. I remember water falls and trees and weird rock formations. I also remember a shirtless man whose entire torso and arms were covered in tattoos. He was a hairy, tan, big-bellied man and I hiked close behind him, trying to untangle all those images from each other. I had seen tattoos before, but never in this quantity; they were like cave paintings: stories that couldn't begin to tell themselves to me but held some meaning anyway, overlapping stories, some grotesque, some beautiful, some scary, others comforting. All kinds of human emotions wrapped up in ink impregnated in a fat man's skin.

When I was eleven or so, we took a trip to Vegas and stayed in a hotel, an unusual treat for us. My parents, being frugal, chose the cheapest hotel they could find. The whole family slept in a single room with one queen-sized bed. Most of us were strewn out on the dirty carpet, using a pair of pants or a couple of shirts for pillows. Our poor sleep that night, however, was not due to physical discomfort, but rather to the rhythmic knocking of our fellow patrons next door. My parents are fairly sure our neighbor was a prostitute with a customer. They were annoyed and embarrassed to have all their kids hear that display. I can't say for sure what the profession was of the person next door, but I do know I was intrigued by the whole thing.

In southeastern New Mexico, I saw my first cockroach; it was crawling up the shower wall in another inexpensive hotel the whole family slept in. We were on our way from Colorado to Texas. Somehow seeing the cockroach was validating. I had seen thousands of commercials for cockroach killing chemicals and contraptions, but never seen the actual creature that caused Americans to spend millions of dollars to control them. On that trip, I knew we had gone somewhere.

For spring break when I was fourteen, we went to St. George, Utah to visit my maternal grandma. We didn't know that St. George was a spring break Mecca for college and high school students. We went to "the narrows" above the town to shimmy our way up a long crack in the sandstone. It was fun, but what I enjoyed most were the hundreds of physically mature girls sunning themselves in swimsuits on the rocks. I had never seen anything like it.

When I was eighteen, I took a trip with my dad. Since it was just the two of us, I don't know if it qualifies as a family vacation, but it had the feeling of one. This time, however, I did most of the driving while he sat in the passenger's seat. We didn't sing songs or play games. We talked, like we had never talked before. We talked about relationships and love and sex and religion and sorrow and life. When we spoke, I noticed he did not hold back in the discussion; his words and ideas were not sanitized and carefully chosen. They were honest. Our relationship was not like the father and son relationship I had become used to; we were now peers. I was now an adult, and that was the first time I had felt like one.


On this most recent family trip Elizabeth, Sonora, Rowyn and I took, we visited friends in Boise, spent time with Elizabeth's family in Utah, I went backpacking with Clinton, we went camping, to the Lagoon amusement park and to family reunions in Blanding and Logan, Utah. It felt like a family vacation: I snapped at Sonora a couple of times; we stopped occasionally to feed Rowyn or change her diaper. Sonora helped entertain Rowyn, sang songs with us, started learning to play "I spy," and spent lots of time playing with her cousins. She also participated in paper boat races, rode a horse, rode a roller coaster, picked peas and raspberries, learned to fly a kite, went to the dinosaur museum, and saw all of her grandparents. I wonder what, in 30 years, she will remember from this trip.



I certainly hope the family vacation is not dead; if it were, I think we as a nation would be poorer for it. Family vacations provide rare moments in time by which we can gauge the progression of our lives, our development as individuals and as part of a family unit.