The Good Hunter

By Jeremy Lloyd

SUN is a highly respected national "literary" magazine with a broad cross-section of readers, including some who happen to hunt. However, SUN appeals primarily to well-educated urban readers (a.k.a. "intellectual liberals"). While I was paid nothing for the interview, I accepted the offer to participate as an opportunity to go beyond "preaching to the converted" and get the message of true, ethical hunting out to interested nonhunters and to gently confront extreme vegan/antihunters. DP

The Good Hunter
David Petersen On The Ethics Of Killing Animals For Food
By Jeremy Lloyd

Why is it that so many of my favorite subjects are conversation killers? Politics. Religion. Hunting. In my social circle the statement "I'm going hunting next week" tends to bring any discourse to a halt.

Though I grew up in Pennsylvania, the deer-hunting capital of North America, I never went hunting as a boy. Today I live in rural Tennessee -- inside a national park, in fact -- and I work at an environmental learning center. "In wildness is the preservation of the world," Henry David Thoreau said. But in the twenty-first century we relate to wild nature mostly as mere visitors to it. Several years ago, wanting a relationship with wilderness that was closer to the one Native Americans and early European settlers had, I went deer hunting for the first time. Two years ago I killed my first deer. I spent the next year eating the meat I'd hunted myself. In the process I deepened my connection with the land -- land that hadn't been cleared for crops but instead had remained wild.

The U.S. Census Bureau reports that the number of hunters in this country has been in gradual decline for the last two decades. In 2006 only 5 percent of the population identified themselves as hunters. This worries state fish-and-wildlife agencies, which depend on revenue from license fees to buy land and improve habitat. (Wildlife watchers and nature enthusiasts usually pay nothing for their enjoyment of these lands.) Fewer hunters means fewer memberships in organizations like Ducks Unlimited, which since 1937 has conserved more than 11 million acres of wetlands. But hunting entails picking up a weapon, aiming it at a living being, and sending a bullet or arrow through its heart. And many view this as cruel and barbaric.

David Petersen would like to change their perspective. His book Heartsblood: Hunting, Spirituality, and Wildness in America (Johnson Books) explained to me both the sadness and the powerful feeling of connectedness that I experienced when I killed a deer. "Nothing could be more in tune with nature," he writes, "and thus more moral, than to follow our omnivorous instincts, needs, and 'God-given' talents as hunters, openly and gratefully acknowledging the deaths that go to nourish our lives." He wades fearlessly into ethical debates with vegetarians and animal-rights advocates, and he lives what he believes.

Before giving up a conventional life in order to live closer to the wild, Petersen was a helicopter pilot in the U.S. Marines, the managing editor of a national motorcycle magazine, a mail carrier, a beach bum, and the western editor of Mother Earth News. He has written nine books (www.davidpetersenbooks.com, including Elkheart: A Personal Tribute to Wapiti and Their World (Johnson Books) and On the Wild Edge: In Search of a Natural Life (Holt). Petersen was a close friend of nature writer Edward Abbey, who died in 1989, and he has edited Abbey's journals, poetry, and letters. He is currently the Colorado field director for Trout Unlimited's Sportsmen's Conservation Project and co-chair of Colorado Backcountry Hunters and Anglers (www.coloradobackcountryhunters.org). Though Petersen has little use for what he calls "man-made" religion, he holds to a strong personal spirituality that he describes as a respect for all life on earth, rooted in ancient practices and informed by modern science.

I sat down with Petersen for several hours in the Strater Hotel in Durango, Colorado. Afterward he took me to the cabin he'd built in the San Juan Mountains. There he and his wife, Caroline, treated me to a delicious steak supper of elk and pronghorn antelope, both of which Petersen had shot with a simple longbow.

Lloyd: Other than food, what type of rewards does hunting bring: Physical? Spiritual? A sense of place?

Petersen: All of the above and more. But as with all "good work," to use poet Gary Snyder's term, hunting can open these doors only if we think about what we are doing and why; only if we work at it honestly, with no loutish shortcuts; and only if we intend it to be physically, spiritually, and even aesthetically rewarding. We take from hunting what we put into it, just as with the rest of life.

Not all hunting is the same, and not all hunters are the same. One hunter may walk up the mountain to hunt like a real human animal and carry the meat back down; another may ride up the mountain on an all-terrain vehicle [ATV] and haul the meat back effortlessly. Spiritually, hunters can study and internalize the natural histories not only of their prey but also of our own omnivorous species, at once empowering and restraining themselves with empathy. Or hunters can think of their prey merely as potential scores in the record book, stuffed heads on the den wall, which is the antithesis of spirituality and even basic human decency.

Growing up on the Great Plains, I hunted and ate cottontails, squirrels, and bobwhite quail, because that's what was available there. For the twenty-nine years that I've lived in the Rockies, I've hunted elk, because it's the most abundant and delicious wild game around. I do almost all of my hunting near my home. I walk up the mountain and kill an elk and have meat all winter. This is the norm for me, as it is for a majority of American hunters, if you replace the elk with white-tailed deer.

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