The Mindful Carnivore (13 page)

At the time, the white backwoods hunter was seen as repulsive and dangerous, evoking in the colonial imagination, Herman argues, “images of man fallen to a state of nature, the condition of savagery … to the level of American Indians.”

What a difference a century makes.

By the early- and mid-1800s, Americans were enthralled by stories about hunters. Daniel Boone stood tall in popular imagination, his real life dramatically embellished and ennobled in print. Alongside him, in the rapidly growing mythology of American hunting, stood the wilder, more reckless figure of Davy Crockett, and also that of Natty Bumppo, the fearless woodsman hero of James Fenimore Cooper’s
Leatherstocking Tales
. As folk and literary heroes, Herman contends, these men represented a radically new kind of ideal American. Where the model citizen of the colonial era had been the industrious community-minded farmer, these were rugged individualists. They were not, however, slovenly frontier hunting rabble, the kind North Carolina had forced to plant corn hills. Portrayed as daring adventurers rather than native savages, these men of the wilds stoked the imaginations of a growing number of middle- and upper-class American hunters.

The hunting stories that appeared in magazines of the day were accompanied by lessons in natural history. As Herman illustrates, science and hunting were fast becoming intertwined. Like Lewis and Clark’s turn-of-the-century expedition, during which the men had hunted both for meat and for scientific specimens, American hunting was framed as a pursuit both informed by, and performed in the service of, scientific knowledge. This melding of hunting and scientific discovery is embodied, for example, in the figure of John James Audubon. Though now remembered as a painter and as the father of American ornithology, the French-born Audubon was a passionate hunter who idolized Daniel Boone.

As a nineteenth-century cultural icon, the American hunter-naturalist celebrated wilderness. Yet he also conquered it. Despite Bumppo’s protest in
The Pioneers
that settlers had “driven God’s creatures from the wilderness,” most wilderness hunters—including Boone—were seen as the spearhead of empire, making way for Euro-American science and settlement.

Likewise, Herman argues, the iconic American hunter celebrated American Indians and appeared to “take on the aura of the indigene,” yet he also led the westward conquest. Though the fictional Bumppo—also known as Hawkeye, Pathfinder, and Deerslayer—grew up among Indians, and though men the likes of Boone were revered for their supposed knowledge of Indian lore and woodscraft and were consistently pictured in buckskin hunting shirts, wilderness hunters were also styled as ferocious Indian fighters.

By the early 1970s, when I was born, the mythology of American hunting had permeated the culture for 150 years. Though I grew up reading J. R. R. Tolkien rather than J. F. Cooper, I recognized coonskin caps, Kentucky long rifles, and the partial adoption of Indianness as vital elements of our national origin story.

Herman offers compelling explanations for the dramatic nineteenth-century shift in the American hunter’s image. One factor was the hunter’s association with the increasingly important field of natural science. Another was the popular image of backwoods hunters—including Ethan Allen’s Green Mountain Boys from here in Vermont—as Revolutionary War heroes.

A third likely influence was the nature-oriented religious philosophy of Deism, to which several of the Founding Fathers subscribed, and the Deist-influenced thinking of Romantic philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for whom all of God’s creation—including humankind—was good, until sullied by society. In Rousseau’s social theory, the hunting societies of American Indians were idealized, for they allowed people to maintain their natural virtue and egalitarianism.

The shifting economy was a factor, too. The eager readers of the Boone and Bumppo tales were members of a growing middle class. The wilderness-hunter identity appealed to them as a way to escape their urban lives and, at the same time, provided an apt model for the kind of resourceful and manly individualism necessary for success in the expanding commercial sector. Moreover, warned sports writers the likes of Henry William Herbert, America’s wealthy classes were afflicted by “the demoralization of luxury” and “the growth of effeminacy and sloth.” Hunting, these writers claimed, would revitalize the country’s morality and masculinity. (Hunting and vegetarianism have evidently been shaped by the same cultural forces and concerns: Herbert penned his words in the 1840s, just a few years after Sylvester Graham condemned the American diet as excessively luxurious and degenerate, and just a few decades before
Physical Culture
magazine began promoting a meat-free diet as a path to muscular and moral manhood.)

Throughout the nineteenth century, the buckskin-clad hunter ascended in our national imagination. Despite our agrarian roots and the critical role played by farming in justifying our claim to the continent, we came to believe, as Herman puts it, that Americans were “a hunting people and that it was hunting that made [us] American.”

During my years as a vegan, I had seen North American hunters as authors of destruction. And hunting can, alongside habitat loss, be justly blamed for the decimation of the continent’s wildlife. Following the Civil War, the railroads expanded, taking more and more market hunters west. Birds and animals of every kind were relentlessly pursued, their meat, fur, and feathers often shipped to urban markets back east. Many species, including the American bison, were pushed to the brink of extinction. Others were driven over it.

By the early- and mid-1800s, passenger pigeons—the birds that had long darkened the continent’s skies with their multitudes—were being killed en masse. They were shot, netted, and clubbed by the tens of thousands, then sold as food for humans, as food for hogs, and even as crop fertilizer. By 1890, they were all but gone. Their final demise was eloquently mourned decades later by twentieth-century hunter-naturalist Aldo Leopold: “The feathered lightning is no more.”

There is another chapter in this history, however, one of which I had long been ignorant. When the direness of the situation became clear, hunters sounded the call for conservation. It was an avid hunter, Yale-educated naturalist and
Forest and Stream
editor George Bird Grinnell, who, in 1886, founded the National Audubon Society, aiming to halt the slaughter of wild birds for sale as food and for the making of feathered hats. The next year, it was again Grinnell who—along with Theodore Roosevelt and others—founded the Boone and Crockett Club, intended to promote hunting ethics, champion wild-life conservation, and eliminate market hunting in favor of regulated sport hunting. (Ironically, Herman points out, Boone himself was a market hunter who, with just one partner, once took seven hundred beavers in a single season. Yet, when he saw wildlife populations dwindling, Boone also spoke out against wanton killing.)

If Grinnell could see the twenty-first-century versions of the institutions he founded and worked for, he might be surprised by what they have become, and by the fault line that has fractured the ideological landscape of American conservation, splitting his legacy in two. Today, the Audubon Society is popularly associated with conservation, while
Field and Stream
—which absorbed
Forest and Stream
in 1930—is associated with hunting, and the Boone and Crockett Club even more narrowly with its system for scoring big-game trophies. In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, though, conservation and regulated hunting were unified.

I knew that the era’s hunter-conservationists could be fairly charged with excesses of their own. In
The Wilderness Hunter
, Roosevelt—who, more than any other U.S. president, made conservation a national priority—wrote of how his hunting party once killed three bull elk in a matter of minutes; when the animals were dead, the men took the heads, the hides, and the best cuts of meat, then headed back to camp. He wrote, too, of his “exulting pride” at having “procured a trophy such as can fall henceforth to few hunters indeed”—one of the continent’s few remaining bison.

I also knew that they could be fairly charged with self-interest: Their desire to preserve the hunted stemmed in no small part from their desire to preserve the hunt. Yet self-interest itself is no crime. If a group of canoe and kayak enthusiasts worked to conserve a network of lakes and rivers and, in the process, protected entire ecosystems and benefited countless species, I would not object to their self-interest. Unless I objected to paddling in the first place.

Whatever I thought of hunting, I knew that these hunters had left a legacy of undeniable importance. In alliance with non-hunting naturalists like John Muir and members of the rapidly growing movement for the humane treatment of animals, they condemned market hunting and championed wildlife protection. Recognizing the urgent need for legislative intervention and law enforcement, they agitated for harvest restrictions and scientific management rooted in an understanding of animals and their habitats. And they lobbied for federal passage of the Lacey Game and Wild Birds Preservation and Disposition Act of 1900. The Lacey Act—which prohibited interstate traffic in game taken in violation of state law—is widely credited with turning the tide for the continent’s plummeting wildlife populations.

For me, and for others who knew me, my taking up a rifle in pursuit of game would not be a simple act of predation, but a complicated shift, its meanings inevitably accented by the past.

Though the Puritans are long gone, the idea of people taking pleasure in killing still disturbs us deeply, perhaps more than killing itself. Though simplistic four-stage theories have been debunked, hunting still seems like a throwback to humanity’s preagricultural past. Though American identity is no longer being thrashed out along an unstable geographic frontier, hunters are still vivid figures in our culture wars. Hunters still inhabit a metaphorical borderland. And we still debate what that borderland inspires: self-reliant virtue or bloodthirsty vice.

7

Double Vision

I never could stomach the straight-faced reveling in primitivism, the barely concealed bloodlust, the whole macho conceit that the most authentic encounter with nature is the one that comes through the sight of a gun and ends with a large mammal dead on the ground—a killing that we are given to believe constitutes a gesture of respect.

—Michael Pollan,
The Omnivore’s Dilemma

T
he walls of the fish and game club were festooned with dead animals. Near the main entrance hung the taxidermied head of a whitetail buck with formidable antlers. Next to it, a plaque displayed the fanned tail of a wild turkey. High on one wall was a huge rainbow trout, petrified in midleap. Across the big, low room were more bucks, caribou from Quebec, and a massive moose head, its broad, palmate antlers spanning several feet. On the adjoining wall hung a more exotic collection: deer and gazelles killed in Africa.

As I sat down at one of the long folding tables, lined up classroom style with an aisle down the middle, I knew one thing for certain: I was way out of my element. Partly, it was the rows of trophy heads, their artificial eyes staring down at me by the dozens. Partly, it was the people.

I was too old. At thirty-two, I had twenty years on most of the students with whom I would be spending a few late-summer evenings over the coming weeks, completing the state hunter-education course required to get a license. Most of the other adults in the room appeared to be fathers or uncles—and, in one or two cases, mothers or aunts—accompanying members of the younger generation.

My hair was too long. I had started to let it grow in college and it now hung down to the middle of my back, bound in a single braid to keep the flyaway strands out of trouble. If you’re guessing that this marked some kind of nonconformist attitude—some affiliation with the counterculture that has taken root in Vermont over the past several decades—you’re right. No other man in the room had hair much past his ears, let alone his shoulders.

And my clothes were too crunchy. Where some guys’ chests were emblazoned with NRA-style slogans like “Give ’Em Both Barrels, It’s Your Right!,” I wore a T-shirt that depicted Mother Earth and her diverse inhabitants, from mice and crustaceans to moose and whales. I thought it safe to assume there was only one ex-vegan in the room.

When class started, the lead instructor—a small, wiry, white-haired man—cut to the chase. His main reason for volunteering to teach hunter education was to make hunting safer. When he was growing up, hunting-related shootings had been all too common: about thirty injuries and deaths per year in Vermont alone. Though the New York legislature mandated hunter safety training in 1949, Vermont didn’t pass a similar law until 1974. He told us about his first morning of deer hunting as a kid. He sat at the base of a tree, terrified, listening to shots going off in every direction. He had been told that bullets travel faster than sound.

“I sat there,” he said, “and each time I heard a shot, I thought, ‘That one didn’t hit me.’”

He followed that opening salvo by describing injuries and fatalities of every kind. Though things had gotten a lot safer in recent decades, the tragedies hadn’t stopped entirely. In the most common incidents, hunters hurt and killed themselves or each other, usually members of their own hunting party. Typical causes included handling firearms carelessly, failing to be sure of the target and what lay beyond it, or swinging to shoot at moving game and forgetting that a companion might be in the line of fire. In this last category, the instructor described how one Vermont hunter saw a deer, shouldered his rifle, followed the animal for a moment, and fired. The top of his cousin’s head was a few feet away, directly in front of the muzzle.

Leading us to a table in one corner of the room, the instructor showed us how easily such a thing could happen. On the table was a rifle, its stock and barrel cradled by a portable shooting rest, the bolt action open to show that it was unloaded. A foot in front of the muzzle stood a coffee can, the top of it clearly in the line of fire. When my turn came, I leaned over to look through the scope, its line of sight an inch and a half above the center of the barrel. I saw nothing but the wall ten feet away.