Ha ha! It's great to always find your comments, Matt! You ask about a hunting story?
I suppose I should spill the beans about it. A friend of mine who has known me since my childhood read my post about hunting and said essentially.
"Adam, you're a vegetarian, and you always have been. Why the sudden change? If you want low impact food you can eat beans and rice! Say it ain't so!" This happened to be the mayor of Montpelier Mary Hooper.
The mayor reads my blog. It's no big deal.
Anyway, here's my reasoning for hunting, followed by my story about it.
(1) RESPONSIBILITY
I demand to interact with my food. Aldo leopold said "Heat doesn't come from the furnace and pork doesn't come from the supermarket." People who don't realize that should forego their right to vote and speak. It is essential for a citizen to appreciate and understand food production.
(2)ENVIRONMENTAL
The production of any food can be calculated in units of food per unit of human effort. It's often done in terms of pounds per man hour or the like. Well, think of the inputs into hunting as opposed to farmed meat. The game just farm themselves so to speak, so the human inputs are much much lower (factor in the administration of the fish and game department, gasoline, the hours of work you did to afford the seven dollar orange vest...) Also the herd needs to be controlled for the good of the deer who survive, and thus the herd as a whole.
(3)CHALLENGE
I am an aspiring naturalist/ecologist. I need to learn constantly about nature. Hunting adds an element of success and failure to the outdoor experience. Stumbling on some deer is very different than finding them or tracking them down intentionally through reasoning, skill, and humility. This added challenge increases my learning curve for the woods. Sure you can identify a flower, but what if it's not around? Can you find it? Two very different skills, one is hunting, the other is observing. Hunting leads to great knowledge about the connections of the forest.
(4)INDIGENY
Can I ever become indigenous to this land or any other? This is my best chance. Search around through it. Suffer in it. Get lost in it and start to develop beliefs about it. Ill never be an Indian, but I can stubbornly be myself until I somehow fit in better.
It's late and I'm... not doing french homework.
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Tu n'etude pas la langue maternelle? Tu es tres mechant.
or as we used to say in our execrable Peace Corps French, "Ca souce a etre toi."
Well, though I am vegetarian, I will not give you any grief about your hunting (provided you spill the beans and tell the story). I admire a meat-eater who will look his dinner in the eye. While it still has eyes, that is.
I became a vegetarian when I saw a chicken slaughtered for the first time. It was on a communal farm in the Ozarks mountains that I was visiting during Spring Break my freshman year. I had just spent the day digging out a year's worth of manure from their chicken coop (approximately twelve inches deep). The manager came by to check on me and found a sick chicken that would not move. Without a word, he picked it up by its feet so that it was dangling upside down, put his boot on its head, and yanked until the wings stopped flapping.
I decided then that if I wasn't willing to do the dirty deed myself (and apparently this was a rather tame butchering compared to how industrial meat is processed in this country), then I wasn't going to let someone else do it for me.
And just because I can't leave well enough alone - my two favorite quotes about vegetarians:
"You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Vegetarianism is harmless enough though it is apt to fill a man with wind and self-righteousness." - Robert Hutchison, address to the British Medical Association, 1930
though tracking and "hunting down" an animal are good skills to have, i think the most important hunting skill to have is to be able to match your energy/intentions with the forest and be thankful. then the animals show themselves to you. it's not really accurate to say that they "bump into you." it's more accurate to say that you are not scaring animals away by projecting intense, chaotic, invasive human energy into the forest. this is a belief i have, but it's also been verified by stories of hunters who are solely focused on killing an animal for meat, and never see a thing in the woods. it's also an idea that jon young talks about in the "native eyes: learning the language of nature" tapes.
hey you can disregard my latest email to you since I was asking you about hunting and here you`ve answered my questions. except one.
Adam your approach to hunting is the best one that I could have hoped for. The fact that you invest so much time and effort into the act of eating high on the food chain sort of nullifies the act of eating that high up? I think that`s what you`re saying.
What I believe is that you have to cherish meat. The reason meat has become an industry is because humans have allowed themselves to take it for granted, pushing the consumption of it into a black hole of harmony. It`s not hunting, it`s not subsistence, it`s perversion. The american diet is skewed and to balance it, people need to know how precious meat is. If people knew how valuable living things are they would respect them. If they respected them, they would treat them properly and the standard of life would rise.
Life is only the counterpart to death and to explore death is to gain a new understanding for life. Understanding can bring respect and harmony. So to kill... a deer was it? is more intimate than buying a frozen hunk of mutant cow meat from across the country. You are bringing yourself closer to the whole of existence when you respectfully merge your life with that of a deer.
And learning all that is necessary in order to kill the deer should hopefully instill some respect for nature`s complexity in hunters.
Maybe you can make me some deer-bone bones. Are bones ever made from actual bones?
oh yeah, the question you didn`t answer. did you go yet or what?
You can definitely get real bones made of bone. I've never played them myself, but here's a place you can get them: http://www.bonedrymusic.com/default.asp#
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