Hunters

I'm not a hunter, at least in the common sense of the word. Hunting in our culture seems anachronistic. Why should we need to go out and slaughter the dwindling wildlife that so many folks are attempting to preserve when we have set up more efficient ways of feeding ourselves? We have bred the natural instinct to escape out of our food stock, so why should we submit more sentient wild creatures to the misery of an unnatural death?

I was raised in an urban society where killing other living beings was considered bad vibes. I was further set in this position at an early age when, while hitch-hiking across the country I was invited by a cattle trucker to help him unload his cargo of forty head - up the ramp to slaughter. I got paid well, but the whole affair was gruesome - the terror of cows subdued by a "tranquilizer" that allowed them to be herded willfully but prevented them from willfully stopping their forward movement to the slaughter chute. It took less than five minutes to convert a terrified cow leaving the truck into a skinned carcass hanging over a knee deep mass of blood and viscera; definitely not a polite thing to talk about over dinner. I realized that I didn't want my food treated that way and vowed never to eat the stuff again.

Somehow in the shock of all of this killing, I had grouped industrial beef ranching and hunting together into the act of killing for food. I am coming to realize that hunting is a different thing. Hunters are a largely misunderstood group. It has not helped that the act of hunting has been used as a hot-button issue in the politics of firearms. In the same way I grouped hunting and ranching together, politics has grouped hunters and the military together. In many circles hunters are viewed as beer-slugging shit-howdys - all men - who pick off terrified deer, frozen in their headlights. As I look into it more I find that this characterization is pretty far from typical. It is akin to viewing all teenagers as gun-toting gang members.

Arguably, hunting has been around with us since before language; that hunting strategies helped craft language. As we adapted to our environments and the food that roamed in it, we developed languages to represent how it all behaved. We cultivated our languages to share observations and strategies with others, the better to insure our species' survival. The act of hunting is no longer represented by encounters with saber-tooth cats and woolly mammoths. For most of us it is not even represented in encounters with ducks and deer; but hunting is still a deep part of our human incentive. The hunters I have met seem to understand this.

Most hunters are not inclined to just go out and shoot any living creature to put on their table, they are specialists. A hunter of Elks will not be inclined or equipped to hunt Snow Geese, a hunter of Ducks is not typically interested in hunting Wild Turkeys. Each of these hunters will be compelled to chose an animal and learn about its ways; to know its habitat and feeding patterns; learn to read its tracks and see how it sees. They attempt to understand how it lives and thrives. The more the hunter knows about the quarry, the more likely their success in bringing it in. You might say that the hunter's relationship to their quarry is totemic - that to some degree they become their quarry in order to capture it. In some ways this is akin to worship - a continuation of our early animistic spirituality. It may seem counterintuitive, but hunters want their animal species to survive and many become deeply committed environmental activists for this reason.

The common interests I share with hunters has not inspired me to equip myself with bows and arrows, rifles or shotguns; but I am beginning to acknowledge and understand their perspectives. By virtue of this I am beginning to acknowledge and understand my own hunting instincts. I am seeing how my interest in exploring nature and my attempts to understand it is similar to the strategies of the hunter. My desire to share my experience of nature with others is compelled by my desire for nature thrive - and my own instinct to survive.