The Mindful Carnivore (14 page)

Far less common, but even more disturbing, were the cases where nonhunters were injured or killed. Less than a year earlier, just a few miles from where we now sat, a man—sitting in his living room watching the New York Giants play the Tennessee Titans—had been struck by a bullet. The hunter, shooting at a deer, had been more than half a mile away. The bullet missed the animal, flew thousands of feet, tore into the man’s mobile home, and hit him in the head as he sat in front of the television. He died a few days later. Some had considered it a freak accident. But our instructor was clear: It should never have happened. A hunter has to be absolutely certain there is a solid backstop before firing a rifle.

Our instructor also talked about the 1988 shooting of Karen Wood in Maine. Fifteen years after the fact, he was still outraged, both by her death and by the 1990 acquittal of the deer hunter who squeezed the trigger. At the time, some had tried to blame Wood, who was killed less than fifty yards from her back door. She should have been wearing blaze orange, they said, and she shouldn’t have been wearing cream-colored mittens that a hunter might mistake for deer tails. Our instructor was having none of it. In his view, it hadn’t been a mere accident. It had been criminal negligence.

The first and longest chapter of the course manual was aimed at preventing such injuries and deaths. Reading those pages, we learned how various rifle and shotgun mechanisms worked, and how to handle, operate, and transport them safely. In class, we paraded around the room, demonstrating different ways of carrying a firearm, always with the emphasis on muzzle control: keeping the gun pointed away from humans. We read about establishing directional “zones of fire” when hunting with others, to keep from shooting each other. We reviewed the critical importance of identifying animals from head to tail, never shooting at a flash of movement, a sound, or a shape. And we talked about rifle ballistics—a bullet can travel for miles—and the imperative to never shoot at an animal “skylined” in an open field or on the crest of a hill above you.

Again and again, the instructor hammered the message home: “You have to be absolutely certain. Once you fire, you can never call that bullet back.” The thought was sobering.

On the one hand, the course manual pointed out that hunting was safe. Statistics bear out the claim: Eight reported injuries per year per hundred thousand hunters. Hundreds—even thousands—of injuries per year per hundred thousand people who skateboard, ride bicycles, or play sports like baseball, soccer, and football. Annual firearm-related fatalities among hunters are less than one in a hundred thousand; more hunters die from car accidents driving to and from their hunting locations and from heart attacks in the field. And the more precautions hunters take—handling firearms with strict discipline, wearing blaze-orange clothing, and so on—the safer their pursuit becomes. The chance of a nonhunter’s life ending at the hands of a hunter is less than one in a million; it’s at least fifteen times more common to be killed by lightning, at least fifty times more common to be killed by hitting a deer with your car, and thousands of times more common to be killed by a careless driver.

On the other hand, hunting was optional. I might have to drive to work or to the grocery store, but I did not have to carry a lethal weapon in the woods. That was a choice. Weighing the heavy responsibility that came with it, I was only half sure it was one I wanted to make. Safety statistics couldn’t dispel the images from my imagination: two cousins standing near one another moments before a deer appeared, a man watching Sunday football in his living room, a young mother stepping out her back door in Maine. Did I really want to hunt? More precisely, did I really want to mess with guns?

I knew some people who saw guns as sinister, alien objects. In their eyes, firearms were instruments of death and destruction. Looking at a rifle or pistol, they saw extreme danger, perhaps even a manifestation of evil. They would no sooner pick up a shotgun than a live cobra. Weren’t guns the primary implements used by the powerful to oppress the powerless? Didn’t they make conflict and warfare immeasurably more lethal? Historically, wasn’t it guns that enabled European domination of American Indians and of so many other peoples around the globe? Today, wasn’t it guns that made crime so violent?

I knew other people who saw guns as reassuring and familiar. In their eyes, firearms were instruments of self-defense, self-reliance, and sustenance. Looking at a gun, they saw a powerful weapon that ought to be respected and handled with care. They would no sooner give up their Second Amendment right “to keep and bear arms” than their right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Weren’t guns the only implements with which the powerless could resist the powerful? Didn’t they secure American liberty in the first place? Historically, wasn’t it guns that allowed frontier hunters and settlers to provide for their families? Today, wasn’t a gun in hand the only defense one truly had against violent crime?

I didn’t stand in either camp. Though my father hadn’t really been into guns, he had owned a few: a scoped .222 rifle, an old bolt-action .410 shotgun, and the six-shot .22 revolver he used to dispatch the occasional hen-killing raccoon. He didn’t encourage me to be interested in firearms, but he did want me to be at ease with them—careful and unafraid, respecting them for their explosive power, seeing them simply as a kind of tool. As a boy, I enjoyed hours of innocent fun, plinking cans. In middle school, I built a simple pine gun rack in shop class, hung it on the wall beside the bunk bed Willie had made, set my father’s long guns and my .22 rifle into the three felt-lined holders, and slept easily.

Yet as a boy I had also watched a family friend and Vietnam Special Forces veteran close his trembling lips around the blued steel end of a rifle barrel. When he sat down on the rock and asked me to hand him his .22, I had no idea what was coming. I don’t remember anything he said. I just remember him putting the muzzle in his mouth and sliding one hand down toward the trigger. I stood there, transfixed, taking what reassurance I could from what I knew: He wasn’t going to die if he squeezed the trigger. I had been carrying the gun and was certain there was no cartridge in the chamber. A long minute later, he withdrew the barrel, his hands and face trembling. He pointed the rifle at an old tree stump nearby and squeezed. At the click, he laughed: a small, choking sound.

In college, shortly before getting rid of my .22 and my father’s few firearms, I had volunteered for a nonprofit that advocated peace and nonviolence, and had worn the organization’s emblem pinned to my jacket: a tiny rifle, broken in half.

More recently, reconsidering guns, I had talked with Willie. He told me how he occasionally walked from his apartment just outside Boston to a local indoor shooting range, his fold-up .22 rifle in a briefcase. The shooting centered him, demanding that he focus. When he was off center, it gave him clear feedback. “The target doesn’t lie to me,” he said. Another friend—an engineer who had been a competitive shooter and occasional hunter in his youth—expressed a similar view: “I’ve never had any experience more meditative.” I recalled my boyhood shooting and that focused, still-minded zone I had come to know, the one that kept my bullets consistently in the center of the target or kept the plinked can spinning, struck again before it could come to rest.

Just a few months before the hunter-education course, I had purchased a used bolt-action .22, nearly identical to the one I’d had as a teenager. It was disorienting to own a firearm again, after more than a decade away from them. Yet it was also familiar. Taking time to adjust the rifle’s sights and get to know it well, memories were triggered: the smooth feel of a hardwood stock, the image of a front sight just below the target’s center, the sharp smell of gunpowder. Though Cath had no fondness for guns, she did not object, provided I put safety first.

As far as I could tell, my fellow hunter-education students shared none of my ambivalence. Once, an instructor led us outside to where he had set up two targets depicting silhouettes of a wild turkey’s head. With the class safely behind him, most of us covering our ears, he fired an old-style 12-gauge. The standard-length shell gave an emphatic blast, spraying the target with pellets. The kids smiled. Then the man fired a second, more modern gun. The magnum shell roared with pyrotechnic power and the target rocked as if struck by a baseball bat. The kids oohed and ahhed, laughing and nodding their approval.

Only dimly, in the recesses of memory, could I recall a time when I might have shared their wholehearted zeal. Now, I found it too easy to imagine the consequences of such a blast, should a human be mistaken for a game bird. We had been warned that turkey hunters—sitting on the ground, imitating turkey sounds, and wearing full camo to elude detection by the birds’ sharp, color-sensitive eyes—had to be extracareful not to shoot each other.

Another chapter in the course manual addressed the topic of “hunter responsibility.” This encompassed legal responsibility, of course: the cut-and-dried business of understanding and obeying hunting regulations. But it also encompassed the broader—and, in my view, more engaging—arena of ethics.

Hunters, the manual stated, must “think and care about wildlife, landowners, other hunters, and themselves.” The guidelines for thinking and caring about myself included the obvious: Handle firearms carefully and don’t hunt with folks who treat them like toys. The guidelines for caring about other people were straightforward as well: Respect others’ ways of hunting, ask permission before hunting on private land, respect people’s property and privacy, don’t litter, and, again, handle firearms safely.

But what about that first proposed object of thought and care—wildlife?

As both a longtime vegetarian and a would-be hunter, animals were at the forefront of my mind. Yet the chapter on responsibility and ethics offered just one guideline for thinking and caring about them while they were alive—make a “clean kill”—and one for thinking and caring about them once they were dead—remove the entrails promptly to cool the body and keep the meat from spoiling.

I don’t suppose I had expected much more. Like most U.S. hunter-education courses, Vermont’s only totaled about thirteen hours and focused on preventing the accidental shooting of humans. Unlike some European courses, this one would not involve extensive study of wildlife biology. Yet it struck me as odd that the manual had so little to say about the living beings to be hunted.

Even the manual’s discussion of making a swift, “humane” kill was marked by clinical detachment. It was important, the manual said, to kill with a single shot that minimized destruction of meat. It was a way of showing respect for the animal. Making such a kill required that the hunter know the anatomy of his or her prey, as well as his or her own limitations. The hunter must shoot only when the animal was close enough to insure a direct hit to vital organs, and only when nothing obstructed the flight path of bullet or arrow.

During one class, students had the opportunity to shoot laser guns at animals on a video screen—part of a training package intended to help new hunters learn when to shoot and where to aim. Watching the kids happily squeezing the triggers, I thought of my own boyhood enjoyment of arcade games. And I wondered: Were these youngsters getting the point of the exercise, or was it suggesting to them that hunting was as harmless as a video game?

Other than a vague reference or two to the risk of “crippling” an animal, the manual said nothing about the consequences of failing to make a clean kill. There was not one statement about how animals might suffer, not one mention of compassion. The word “humane” was the only tacit acknowledgment of philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s centuries-old point—that animals
can
suffer. In studying firearm safety, we had watched a video reenactment of a shooting accident in which a boy killed his best friend. In studying the importance of making a clean kill, might not video footage of a few injured animals help drive the point home?

To their credit, the instructors did talk with us further, encouraging a sincere ethic of care. But I wasn’t convinced that every student took their words seriously. Each time ethics were mentioned, one father would roll his eyes and lean over to whisper in his young son’s ear. The boy would laugh.

One evening, I stayed after class to chat with the lead instructor. I asked him about the ethics issues we had been discussing in class, particularly concerning animals. He said he thought most hunters took them seriously. Most took care to make clean kills and ate the meat. But he told me about a moose that had been shot illegally and left to rot in Groton State Forest, just a few miles from where I live. It had been deer season and the hunter just wanted to kill something.

“I know some of these families,” the instructor said. “As soon as some of these kids leave the classroom, I know they’re being told, ‘Don’t listen to any of that stuff.’” There was a frustrated edge to his voice. “Their dads and uncles will tell them, ‘If you see a deer on posted property, just shoot it in the gut and it’ll run a long way to somewhere where you can get it.’” Thirteen hours of formal hunter education would not, I thought, put much of a dent in thirteen years of informal family training.

One section in the chapter on responsibility and ethics was titled “Positive Public Image.” As part of being a responsible hunter, it said, “there are certain things one must do to project a positive image of hunting to the public.” The items in the checklist below—obeying laws, being safe, respecting other people, picking up litter, eating the animals you kill, not abusing alcohol or drugs, and so on—were, I agreed, vital to hunter responsibility and ethics.

What did it mean, though, to couch them in terms of “public image”? As the hunter I was becoming, I certainly intended to abide by this code of conduct and wanted my fellow hunters to do the same. And I knew, having long been a member of the non-hunting public, that hunting had an image problem.

But the phrase “project a positive image of hunting” raised my hackles. It smacked of PR. What I wanted to see change was reality, not representation. I had no interest in helping to craft an image that in any way obscured the ugliness of a moose killed senselessly or a deer dying slowly of a shot to the gut.