Lloyd: You've called hunting "our genetic dictum." How so?

Petersen: Humans evolved as wild animals among other wild animals in a wholly wild world. Sociobiologist Paul Shepard is the father of the field of human ecology, and in his book Coming Home to the Pleistocene he says humans reached ecological perfection during the Pleistocene, from 1.6 million to about fourteen thousand years ago. Then the climate changed, and their megafaunal prey died out. (Subsistence hunting was certainly a factor in the extinctions, but not the primary cause.) After that humans went from seminomadic foragers to sedentary farmers. But until that point, every human alive had been a hunter-gatherer.

Natural inclinations and aversions evolve over a very long time. Since we began farming, there's been just enough genetic change in our gut to allow us to better digest grains, but behaviorally, physically, and nutritionally we haven't changed one iota from our Pleistocene forebears. Ten thousand years of agriculture cannot supplant 6 million years of evolution. We are still the same human animals. So, though this inclination to hunt may be a disturbing mystery to some of us, and though it doesn't make logical sense as a means of feeding all of us, it remains an urgent biological imperative in many humans today, though often sublimated because of the culture and lack of wild surroundings.

Lloyd: Some people believe we have evolved enough by now that killing meat for food is obsolete.

Petersen: It depends what type of "evolution" you're speaking of. Certainly, from a cultural-evolution point of view, modern, well-nourished First World citizens have no need to hunt or raise our own meat. But the majority of us still eat meat. Is it a moral gain or loss to relegate the bloody task of making meat to slaughterhouse professionals doing their unpleasant work behind closed doors and off camera? As an alternative we can become vegetarians, but even vegans must accept responsibility for the deaths of the plants that nourish them. Life is eat-and-be-eaten. Unless you can acquire all your nutrients from the air, killing for food can never be avoided.

We human animals split from a common ancestor with chimps and reached our present form of mind and body millions of years later, only after having perfected hunting and meat eating. None of the several prehuman Homo branches that were strict vegetarians lasted. Our large brain developed thanks to the specific combination of fatty acids found only in meat. Without hunting and meat eating, we'd still be fruit-and-berry-eating apes. The world, in many ways, would be better off.

Lloyd: Why, in a culture that glorifies violence, do some recoil at the notion of killing an animal to feed oneself?

Petersen: I don't know that I can answer that to anyone's satisfaction, especially my own. As a culture, we glorify fictional violence to escape from and harden our hearts against the reality of a truly violent world. And some hunters hunt from a comic-book mentality, trying to enact violent fantasy in a legalized and somewhat culturally acceptable fashion. The end result is the objectification of all nonhuman life. Modern humans are strange, deracinated animals living in an increasingly unreal "reality." But hunting is as real as the red blood on my hands after hauling home an elk.

Lloyd: What's your opinion of veganism as a philosophy and way of life?

Petersen: Veganism is a morally valid, albeit nutritionally extreme, attempt to live ethically in an overcrowded world of finite material resources and seemingly infinite cruelty. But is it worth the bother in the big picture of life and death on earth? Biologically speaking, the human animal, like our brother the bear, is an opportunistic omnivore. We have a predator's front-set eyes and an omnivore's gut, teeth, and nutritional needs. But at least vegans are thinking about life's problems and experimenting with theoretical solutions, which is more than I can say for most people, including most hunters.

There are many hidden ecological and economic costs of veganism and vegetarianism. Ted Kerasote, in his well-researched book Bloodties, coined the term "fossil-fuel vegetarianism" to describe what's going on today. If someone wishes to forgo meat -- either for moral reasons or because they believe eating meat is unhealthy -- I say more power to them. But how many vegetarians grow or gather all their own food? Practically no one falls into that category, which means you're buying farmed products. Somebody has cleared land, costing many birds and animals their homes. Maybe that land was cleared a hundred years before you were born, but you're a direct beneficiary of that destruction of the wild. Then there are all the chemical fertilizers. Even if you're using organic fertilizer, it has to be shipped using fossil fuels. Every spring a big diesel tractor will be used to till the soil and will smash burrows and kill countless moles and mice and burrowing owls and even deer fawns. This considerable carnage is all conveniently invisible.

Lloyd: Is predation ethical?

Petersen: Absolutely! But civilization has a broad bias against hunters and predators of every stripe: The Big, Bad Wolf. Jaws. Elmer Fudd. The list goes on. Remember, we didn't evolve only as hunters but as prey too. Before we learned to pick up a stick or rock and throw it at something good to eat, we were being chased, killed, and eaten by an impressive assortment of megapredators. It's no surprise that many of us tend to think of the predator as the bad guy, and to side with the underdog, the weak, the "helpless" and preyed-upon. What a wonderful world this would be if only the lamb could lie down with the lion. But what are the lion's choices at dinnertime?

One of my favorite cult movies, Arnold Schwarzenegger's Predator, plays on this theme of the hunter as pure evil. It's dismissed by most as a stupid, macho divertissement, but this testosterone-drenched flick is also a surprisingly subtle sendup of trophy hunting.

My point is that, in our culture, in order to even entertain the idea of an ethical predator, the observer must approach the subject with an open mind. Ethical hunting is predicated on dignity and respect: Dignity in our private thoughts and public words as well as in our actions afield when, as hunter Aldo Leopold pointed out, nobody is watching us. And respect, not only for the animals we hunt, their habitats, and the greater natural world, but also for ourselves as hunters and human animals. Carry those two blessed burdens in your heart, and you will do no moral wrong as a predator.


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