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?