Here in north-central Vermont, the earth is just beginning to thaw. By May, though, my wife Catherine and I will be planting tiny seeds in the circular bed at the center of our garden. A few weeks later, we will kneel there with scissors, snipping lettuce—oak leaf, red sails, blushed butter, merlot, and troutback—into a basket, along with the blossoms of heartsease pansies and lemon-gem marigolds.

Back in the kitchen, I will trim silverskin from a piece of venison. Sautéed, then sliced thin and arranged over greens, the steak will complete the salad.

Then, on the back porch, warmed by the late day sun, we will sit. Before eating, we will reach out to clasp hands and pause for a moment of thanksgiving: a moment to reflect on interconnectedness, on what Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh calls “interbeing.” Our bowls, after all, hold more than lettuce and meat.

In each green leaf are the rains of recent weeks and the life-giving energy of the sun. In each is the sandy soil that tops this little plateau along the upper reaches of the Winooski Valley: soil that settled here some 12,000 years ago in the shallows of a glacial lake. In each is the composted manure we added to that soil, and in that manure are the lives—and, ultimately, the deaths—of local dairy cows.

In each leaf, too, is the work of human hands. In each is Catherine’s turning of the soil, when it first thawed and I was tied to my desk by work. In each is the heft and heave of shovel and bucket as we unloaded manure from the trailer. In each are dairy farmers’ long days.

In each slice of venison is the life of the whitetail buck I shot last November—“the bounce, the swish,” as American poet and environmental activist Gary Snyder put it, “of a great alert being with keen ears and lovely eyes, with foursquare feet and a huge beating heart.” In each is everything the deer ate—leaves and twigs, blossoms and bark, corn and clover. In each is the current of the small stream from which the whitetail undoubtedly drank and the wetland from which that stream flows.

In each slice are all the places this deer lived: the fields where he browsed on summer evenings, the thick woods where he sheltered on winter nights, the places where he ate and slept and mated. In each, too, is the place where he died, a bullet through his great heart, the spot where I knelt beside him that morning, my hand on his still-warm shoulder. In each are the long hours I spent at the kitchen counter, separating muscle from bone.

The greens and meat are made of all these things, all these places, and more. And so, too, are we, as we ingest them.

Fork in hand, I am reminded yet again that we are part of a vast food web, members of a great community of life. I am reminded that though we had a hand in bringing these foods to our bowls, we did not make them. They were made by the miraculous world, the planet and places on which we depend for everything. And someday, upon our deaths, our bodies will feed that world in turn. The making and unmaking goes on.

Taking that first bite, I am reminded that eating is an act of communion. I am reminded that we are not merely on this earth, but of it.

© 2013 Tovar Cerulli

(Note: The video below is an Earth Day tribute to Rachel Carson, produced by Open Road Media. I’m honored to be part of it, alongside Richard Ellis and Jean Craighead George, one of my favorite childhood authors. The tree and landscape footage was mostly shot near our home here in the upper Winooski Valley.)

Suppose you knew someone who was asked to write an encyclopedia entry.

The topic: hunting in the United States today.

The encyclopedia: a new three-volume, million-word tome on Food Issues.

The goal: to give readers—mainly high school and college students—an overview of

• issues, controversies, and fascinating things about hunting
• the range of perspectives on hunting
• who hunts and who doesn’t
• related laws and regulations
• the current resurgence of interest
• and so on.

All in 3,000 words or less.

A foolhardy mission, perhaps. But I accepted.

So here’s the question: If you pulled this encyclopedia off the shelf, what would you hope to see mentioned there?

© 2013 Tovar Cerulli

I once knew a man who had a small horizontal sign above his front door frame, up against the ceiling. If you looked up, you saw it just before you stepped outside: “You never know.”

The more time I spend in the woods, the more sense the motto makes.

Four years in a row, I was genuinely surprised when I killed a deer: the first time because I had begun to think it might never happen, the second because it had happened again so soon, the third because it had happened twice in a row in the same spot near home, the fourth because it had happened a third time in that spot and in the first hour of the season.

Each year, I thought, “Well, I guess you never know.”

By 2011, though, taking a deer in that spot had begun to seem almost inevitable, even with limited hunting time. So last fall I set out with something like an expectation, almost like I knew it would happen again. (Foolishness.)

Through rifle and muzzleloader seasons, I doggedly hunted that area. I didn’t see a single deer, let alone a legal buck. When snow finally came, I could see why: there weren’t many tracks. On the last day of muzzleloader season, I finally went to what my friend calls his Hundred Acre Woods, where I had taken my first buck. There, I saw more tracks, plus a deer in the distance. But I ended the season without any venison.

This fall, I told myself I would hunt smarter. As rifle season approached, the woods closest to home showed few signs of hoofed traffic. So I decided to take the extra time to go to the Hundred Acre Woods. On opening morning, my friend and I were both there.

Serendipity struck early. At sunrise, I heard the sharp report of his .300 Savage. The season had barely begun and he already had his buck. He said that had never happened before. But you never know.

While he hiked out to deposit his rifle and pack at home and fetch my drag sled, I sat and waited. I didn’t expect to see anything. Soon, though, three does and a fawn traipsed by within twenty yards. You never know.

The next morning, I was thrilled to watch a young black bear pass within fifteen yards of where I sat. I had never seen a bruin in those woods and never expected to. But you never know. (Though a bear tag came with my license and the season was open, I never considered raising my rifle. Even if I wanted to hunt bears, which I don’t, it wouldn’t be right to kill one in the Hundred Acre Woods.)

Five days later, I hiked back in at first light and sat down at the base of a maple, exactly where I was sitting when I took my first buck five years earlier.

After an hour or so, I glimpsed a deer seventy yards south of me, crossing the little valley I sat in. The light breeze was in my favor. Through binoculars, I thought I saw more than ears. But were there two points on one side, making the animal a legal buck? I couldn’t be sure. I blew a grunt call. The whitetail paid no heed. At a steady walk, the deer passed the few reasonable openings in moments and moved behind a thicker screen of branches and blowdowns. Soon, the animal was far up on the ridge behind me.

Forty-five minutes later, another deer appeared, following the same path as the first. I could see a gleaming arc of antler and knew in a flash that this was a legal buck. My rifle came up. As the buck stepped into an opening, I blew the grunt call. But the whitetail kept moving, walking even faster than the first deer had. As he crossed another narrow opening, my finger hesitated on the trigger. He was walking fast. I didn’t like the odds.

Soon, I was watching him through that same screen of branches and blowdowns. I blew the grunt call louder and louder. He was trotting by the time he ascended the ridge.

As he vanished, I wondered: Should I have taken a shot through one of those first openings? I wanted venison in the freezer this winter, and I would only have a couple more mornings in the woods during rifle season. What were the chances of getting a better opportunity in what little time I had left to hunt?

On the other hand, I really didn’t want to wound a deer. I had been thinking about my post on not-so-clean kills. I did not want to turn it into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I decided to sit there for another hour, then head home. I had plenty of work to do. And I’d already had all the luck I could hope for in one morning. That was one thing I knew for certain. (Foolishness!)

Half an hour later, I heard leaves crunching behind me. Looking back over my shoulder, I saw a deer less than fifty yards off. More astonishing, I saw forked antlers. Guessing he was going to cross behind me, I risked a slow pivot on my woods stool and braced my left shoulder against the tree behind me. Seconds later, he stepped into an open spot twenty-five yards away.

I made a grunting sound in my throat. He stopped and looked right at me. I squeezed the trigger.

He ran, but not far. The copper bullet had taken him in the heart.

Kneeling beside him, I took a few moments to say prayers of thanks and apology and to let the startling, unexpected event sink in.

Six weeks later, I bought my 2013 hunting and fishing license. Slipping it into my pack, I tucked a note in with it, a reminder in case I forget: “You never know. Beware of thinking you do.”

© 2013 Tovar Cerulli

Photo by Ken Thomas

Had I, he asked, ever wounded an animal but failed to kill and recover it? If so, how did I deal with that?

He was contemplating taking to the field for the first time, and didn’t know how he would handle such an experience. Yet he knew it might happen someday. The thought troubled him.

My answer, thankfully, was no. That hasn’t happened. Though my first, foolish rifle shot at a whitetail failed to kill, I’m ninety-nine percent certain it was a clean miss: The bullet struck a spruce branch, the animal pranced off with his tail high, and two hours of examining the area yielded not one sign of injury. Since then, I have fired four bullets in the woods and dragged home four deer.

To the larger, implied question—how would I deal with wounding an animal?—I had to say I wasn’t sure. It’s a question I have wrestled since I started hunting, but not one I have resolved. So I remain a cautious hunter.

Our e-mail exchange reminded me of my book talk in Omaha a month earlier. There, someone had asked about wounding. I said I dreaded it, had managed to avoid it so far, and thought it less likely to occur if a hunter is skilled and experienced. An experienced hunter spoke up, pointing out that the longer you hunt, the higher the chance that you will wound an animal eventually. From reading my book, he knew one of my early thoughts on the matter:

If even longtime hunters could be sickened by such an incident, I had a good idea how this greenhorn would fare. If my first shooting of a deer resulted in an endless blood trail, it would be my last.

He asked how I thought I would react if it happened now, with several years of hunting under my belt. I replied that I did not know.

In choosing to hunt, I have accepted the risk of wounding an animal. But I have not accepted, and do not want to accept, the reality of it.

I run a similar risk, of course, every time I get into a car. Driving down a back road or cruising down a highway, I might maim a squirrel, raccoon, or deer at any moment.

In hunting, though, there is intent.

As a hunter, I can set aside that intent, by choosing not to shoot when I see an animal. When that happens, no harm is done.

I can also enact that intent well, by killing swiftly. When that happens, the pain, if any, is mercifully brief. I can make my peace with that more easily than with all the other harm I do—all the messy, unintended, often-unseen ravages of my driving, eating, and living.

But what of intent gone wrong? What of a deer struck in the leg or abdomen, running deep into the woods, perhaps to recover, perhaps to linger in pain until death comes? How would I react to that? Could I hunt again the next day, or even the next year?

Would I look upon local farmers’ chickens with renewed appreciation, knowing that none of them will ever escape on slaughter day, maimed and limping?

As this hunting season approaches, I still don’t know. The possibilities trouble me. I hope they always will.

© 2012 Tovar Cerulli

Photo by Ken Thomas

The question puzzles me. Hunters, after all, have a wide range of interests, motivations, and backgrounds.

Some hunt deer, some hunt rabbits, some hunt waterfowl, some hunt upland birds, and some hunt all of these and more. Some hunt a few days a year, some several months a year. Some hunt to procure wild meat, some to immerse themselves in the natural world, some to enjoy time with family and friends, some to carry on a tradition, some to experience challenge and excitement, some to bag trophies, some for all these reasons and others. Some grew up hunting, some grew up opposed to hunting, some grew up indifferent.

Though U.S. hunters are predominantly white males, some are female, American Indian, African American, Latino, or Hmong. And even among white men, viewpoints vary dramatically.

Just over a week ago, while down in Mississippi to present at a Professional Outdoor Media Association (POMA) conference, I spoke with one white male hunter who emphasized the need for conservationists and environmentalists of all kinds, including hunters, to work together to protect habitats, ensure healthy wildlife populations, and so on. A day or so later, I overheard another white male hunter talking about how “tree-huggers,” “environmentalists,” and other “whackos” are the cause of many a problem.

When someone asks me about the hunter’s perspective on such-and-such, I can only tell them my perspective.

I can understand, of course, how people on the outside—non-hunters—might assume that everyone on the inside shares certain sensibilities. It even gives me some vague inkling of what it’s often like to be a member of other minorities: being perceived as part of, and being expected to speak for, an imagined monolithic group.

I find it more intriguing when I hear hunters make similar assumptions about each other.

Sometimes it’s just an assumption about what fellow hunters think or feel, or what their interests are. I recall a magazine article, for instance, in which the author said he figured all hunters shared his aspiration to hunt large, dangerous animals like grizzly bears. I have no such aspiration. I know plenty of other hunters who don’t either.

Other times, it’s an assumption about how fellow hunters should think or feel, if they don’t already. In these kinds of statements—often about how all hunters should defend every imaginable form of hunting, should share the same views on gun politics, or should treat a certain group as a sworn enemy—I hear a plea (and sometimes a demand) for unity.

I can understand that kind of call, especially in a world where hunters are so vastly outnumbered by non-hunters. And I can understand the strategic sense it makes: People don’t want to be divided and conquered. Better to circle the wagons.

I’m leery of it, though. Making people toe a line tends to shut down conversations and silence important questions. Closing ranks can provide a sense of solidarity within some portion of the so-called “hunting community,” but at what cost? What better way to alienate people, including other hunters, than by telling them what to feel and think?

I prefer ongoing conversations and open questions. I think they lead to better relationships, more creative solutions, and stronger coalitions. As I quipped on Twitter some weeks ago, “To understand, listen. To be understood, invite others to listen. To keep things as they are, preach to the choir and yell at everyone else.”

I think it’s worth considering that the universe of hunting—from hunters themselves to hunting organizations to the hunting industry—may be far more ideologically diverse than most of us suspect. The POMA conference, for instance, might seem like a bastion of hardcore hunting and carnivory. But there I was, talking about my journey into and out of veganism, discussing common values and common ground, fielding questions from a wonderfully receptive audience.

After the session, a young hunter came up to me and said he could relate to a lot of what I was saying. He said he had known a lot of vegetarians, had tried the diet briefly himself, and was a lot more “arty” than most of the hunters he knew.

Then another hunter approached. He said he worked for a hunting conservation organization and mentioned that their graphic designer is a non-hunting vegetarian.

Then a young woman came along and told me that she works for a company that sells products to hunters. She, however, is a non-hunter and hardly ever eats chicken or fish, let alone red meat.

Contemplating these encounters, I wondered: Is this kind of diversity all that unusual? Or is it often right there in front of us, blending in, as many animals do, simply by not drawing attention to itself?

© 2012 Tovar Cerulli

You never know how a conversation will reverberate, or what shape its echoes will take if they return to you.

Late one night this spring, a reader sent me an email. A few hours earlier, she had been at one of my book discussions.

In her email, she explained that she had grown up with a negative view of hunting. But as she read the book—and as she listened that evening, both to me and to a lifelong hunter who spoke from the heart—her perspective began to shift.

Driving home after the discussion, she had a thought:

After seeing you speak in person and hearing you talk about your uncle and reading about him in the book, the analogy I thought of on the way home was of someone who has never spent much time with a gay person and thinks there is something wrong with that way of life.

Then they meet and talk with a compassionate, considerate, thoughtful gay person whom they can relate to on many levels and realize their preconceptions were unnecessarily narrow. . . .

I think it’s always good to have one’s mind broadened.

I doubt this parallel would have occurred to me. Sexual orientation and hunting are such radically different topics. I can think of all kinds of contrasts between the moral objections raised against homosexuality and the moral objections raised against hunting. Once the parallel was drawn for me, though, I recognized that the basic point was on the mark.

Prejudice is prejudice. It is made up of preconceptions which are, as she put it, “unnecessarily narrow.” And it tends to collapse when challenged by a meaningful encounter with a thoughtful, three-dimensional human being.

So my thanks go out to this reader, for showing me something I had not seen before, and simply for taking the time to write. For this author, heartfelt words like hers are the greatest reward.

© 2012 Tovar Cerulli

You know those posts where I raise some question about food, animals, or human relationships with nature, and do my best to engage folks in an interesting conversation?

Well, this isn’t one of them.

This is a shameless plug.

To date, all my book events have been here in New England. In the coming weeks, though, I’ll be leading discussions about The Mindful Carnivore and related topics in several westerly locations. I’ll be signing books, too.

If you live in or near one of these cities, please stop by, with friends in tow.

If you don’t live within striking distance, please pass the word to folks who do!

• Denver, CO: Thursday, May 10, 7:00 pm at West Side Books
• Berkeley, CA: Monday, May 14, 7:30 pm at Pegasus Books Downtown
• San Francisco, CA: Tuesday, May 15, 7:30 pm at The Green Arcade
• Seattle, WA: Thursday, May 17, 7:00 pm at Elliott Bay Book Company
• Omaha, NE: Wednesday, June 13, 5:45 pm at Soul Desires

© 2012 Tovar Cerulli

Maybe you saw the recent New York Times op-ed about the “myth” of sustainable meat and the need for us all to be vegans. Several rebuttals have already been written, including one by Joel Salatin, who rose to the occasion with his usual flair. So you can breathe easy: I’m not about to launch into one of my own.

In that op-ed, though, one phrase jumped out at me. Late in the piece, in censuring farmers for the inefficient production of manure fertilizers, the author protests that slaughters occur “before animals live a quarter of their natural lives.”

I knew what he meant, of course, but I wondered: How long would a chicken’s “natural life” be here in rural New England without someone supplying food, shelter, and protection from predators? Why does extending a bird’s life count as “natural,” yet ending its life does not?

It would be silly to make much of one phrase in one essay. But it isn’t alone.

It reminded me, for instance, of my sister’s comment, years ago, about a giant lake trout caught by an angler here in Vermont: “Too bad it didn’t get to die naturally.” I imagine that the fish’s death seemed less than natural because the creature was killed by a predator—a human, no less—rather than dying quietly in the deep.

Photo by Joshua Barnett

It reminded me, too, of one vegan’s response to a line in my book. In Chapter 5, I write about how a ruffed grouse—despite its efforts to stay alive—will, in the end, “be plucked from the air by hawk or owl, or from the ground by bobcat or fox.” The reader responded by asking rhetorically, “Is this truly the fate for every grouse . . . or other prey animal? Do none of them die from old age or disease? Are they all only and always prey?”

I sympathize with his sentiment. It’s unpleasant to think that Mother Nature is always “red in tooth and claw,” as Tennyson put it. And she isn’t always.

For grouse, though, here’s the deal:

• Chicks, like the young of many species, have an extraordinarily high mortality rate. Many become food for predators. Many also die of pneumonia-like conditions, especially in cold, damp spring weather, thus becoming food for scavengers and microbes.

• Adult grouse, like the one I was writing about, almost always end up as prey. About 95 percent are killed and eaten, the vast majority by winged and four-footed predators, not humans. (Disease and other health deficiencies contribute to grouse mortality mainly by making the birds more vulnerable to predation.)

• The chances of a grouse dying of old age? Basically nil.

What, I wonder, is so compelling about the idea of life lasting until an organism gives up the ghost of its own accord?

It occurs to me that most of us have a particular vision of a “full” and “natural” human life: one that lasts seven or more decades, ending in “old age or disease.” On a coroner’s certificate, I bet death by grizzly bear or alligator would not be chalked up to “natural causes.” We think and speak of ourselves as being above the life-and-death cycles of nature.

And I suspect that some of us have begun to extend these ways of thinking and speaking beyond ourselves. I think some have begun to imagine that, for all animals, “natural lives” end in “old age or disease,” not in being killed and eaten.

It seems a strange disconnect. We do not, after all, need to be terribly observant to recognize that becoming prey is one of the most common and natural ways to die, if not the most natural way.

Photo by Ryan Poplin

I can see it from our front porch. Right now, robins are snagging earthworms near the flower beds. Before long, raccoons, crows, ravens, hawks, and blue jays will be snagging robins’ eggs and nestlings.

Tragic? Yes, since I empathize with robin nestlings and am moved by parents’ calls of distress as a little one is carried away. Less so if I also empathize with hungry hawk nestlings.

Unnatural? No.

© 2012 Tovar Cerulli

Photo by Ken Thomas

“Did becoming a hunter change how you see wildlife?” The question came during a recent book talk.

No, I thought.

In my thirty-plus years as a non-hunter, I enjoyed watching all kinds of wild creatures, from goldfinches and squirrels to rabbits and herons. I still enjoy watching them.

In those three decades, I also took care to avoid causing inadvertent harm. In June, for instance, I kept an eye out for the painted turtles who crawl up from the pond to lay eggs along our driveway, lest I run one over. I still take the same care.

The second part of the question was more focused: “Now, when you see deer, do you see meat on the hoof?”

“No,” I said and began to explain.

As a non-hunter, I took aesthetic pleasure in seeing whitetails. I marveled at their beauty and grace, glad to know that these beings were among my wild neighbors. I still do.

I now have a deeper appreciation for how deer live, eat, and thrive, for how they interact with each other and with other animals, for the difficulties they face each winter. And I have become more attentive to their tracks, to the places where they tend to cross hiking trails, to their patterns of movement across the landscape. Most of the year, though, I simply enjoy seeing them.

As a non-hunter, I also took care to avoid harming deer. Driving at night, I watched roadsides, lest a whitetail suddenly leap in front of the car. I still do. Though aware that hunting season might bring me into a very different relationship with a particular deer, I do everything I can to avoid indiscriminate harm.

And I’m not alone. In my experience, hunters hate the idea of killing a whitetail outside the bounds of hunting, and hate the idea of wounding one in any context. One deer hunter told me how, while mowing the tall grass in front of his hunting cabin, he once came upon a tiny spotted fawn. He stopped cutting immediately, relieved that he had noticed the animal.

A few weeks each autumn, I do contemplate taking a deer’s life. Sometimes I actually kill, and then begin the deliberate ritual of dismantling that body, packaging meat that will feed our bodies through winter. In my eyes, though, deer are much more than food.

That’s one of the many truths factory farming obscures: Animals are not just meat.

© 2012 Tovar Cerulli

Photo courtesy Charles & Clint Robertson

I haven’t known any of the deer I’ve eaten.

I may have been intimately familiar with how whitetails moved through that stretch of woods. I may even have seen that particular deer before. But I haven’t spent an extended period of time getting to know the individual animal, letting him get to know me.

This comes with the territory of hunting wild creatures. But what are the implications?

Over the past few weeks I’ve been talking with folks around New England about all kinds of things. Not surprisingly, one of the recurring themes has been the killing of animals: what it means, the conflicted feelings it evokes, how I and others handle it, what we make of it, and how we integrate it into our lives.

We have talked about commonalities between raising animals for food and hunting them. People have talked about the sadness they feel when slaughter day comes for the chickens they raise, or the wave of deep shock that rolls over them when they kill a cow: emotions very much like what some hunters experience at the end of a successful hunt.

Yet a difference has also been noted. As one friend put it, “When you take a deer, aren’t you killing a stranger?”

Yes, I am indeed killing and eating a stranger.

I respect and admire deer. I feel compassion for them. I feel an intense relationship with the particular animals I kill and with the venison that results, but it is clearly a predator-prey relationship. It is not a relationship of mutual affection. It is not friendship.

And that has me wondering: Emotionally speaking, what are the differences between hunting wild animals and slaughtering domestic ones?

For thousands of years, cultures around the world have surrounded hunting with ritual. There is, after all, something fundamentally unsettling about violence toward animals, especially large fellow mammals. What shifts, I wonder, happened in those rituals when people started herding?

Today, our modern culture is far more comfortable with the idea of farming animals than with the idea of hunting them. Hunting somehow seems more extreme.

Photo by Ernst Vikne

In at least one way, though, isn’t a homestead-style farm slaughter more troubling?

I know hunters who can’t imagine raising animals for food. Some simply prefer, as I do, to see animals living free, rather than in captivity. But others know they couldn’t bring themselves to raise an animal—getting to know his or her individual personality, quirks, and moods—and then betray that relationship by killing.

There are many reasons why I hunt rather than raising chickens or other animals. There’s my distaste for the distance and forgetfulness inherent in our industrial food system (wherein we buy the meat of strangers who were raised by strangers, slaughtered by different strangers, shipped to us by still other strangers, and sold to us by yet more strangers). There’s my love of being outdoors, focused on woods, landscape, and the ways of wild creatures. There’s the unpredictability of hunting, the appeal of uncertainty. There’s the fact that having domestic animals makes it harder to take off for the weekend—chickens won’t ride shotgun the way our dog will. The list goes on.

But I still buy local poultry, raised and slaughtered by others. And I wonder: In part, do I hunt because I’d rather not eat friends?

© 2012 Tovar Cerulli