There is something about following an animal.

Here, the tracks cross a gurgling brook. There, they head for a thicket dense with softwood saplings. If you stop and look, you can almost see the animal, leaping here, pausing there.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a hunter, hiker, wildlife photographer, or all three. There’s always mystery, always a tinge of excitement.

Sometimes in winter a deer or bobcat leads you across familiar terrain. Plainly visible in the deep snow, the prints meander down a valley. They pass a cluster of young maples where bucks pawed the ground in autumn. You guess that the animal will lead you straight through the narrow saddle just ahead.

But you’re never quite certain. When the tracks turn suddenly and ascend a thick, overgrown bank in great leaps, you wonder about what a Koyukon man once told Richard Nelson: “Every animal knows way more than you do.”

This book is starting to feel like that animal.

Two years ago, it was an idea: a few chapters roughed out, the others vaguely sketched.

One year ago, it was mostly drafted.

Now, it has taken on a life of its own. No longer a creature of my imagination, it’s headed out into the world and I’ve begun to follow. There’s that mystery, that tinge of excitement.

I don’t know every place the book is going, but I believe in the questions it raises—questions about food, animals, and the human place in nature.

And I do know a few of the places it will lead. Starting in mid-February, I’ll be talking, listening, and sharing stories and ideas all around New England, from Providence, Cambridge, and Newburyport to Northampton, Middlebury, and Montpelier. My first stop, on February 16th, just two days after the book hits shelves? Concord, New Hampshire.

If you live in the Northeast—or know anyone who does—please check out my events page for details.

More events are on the way. Portland, Maine, should be on the schedule soon. Got a favorite bookstore you want to suggest? Drop me a line. During the semester, I’ll be staying close to home, with maybe a weekend run as far as the tropics of New York City. After mid-May, who knows?

I hope to see you and your friends soon.

Meanwhile, I hope you enjoy the video below. In October, Open Road Media sent a three-person crew up from Manhattan: fantastic folks. For two days, we had a blast talking, cooking, eating, and spending time in garden and woods—camera rolling. More recently, they donned their digital wizardry hats and crafted this glimpse into the terrain my book explores. (You can also read an excerpt here.)

Nice work, Open Road.

© 2012 Tovar Cerulli

The spread of adult-onset hunting (AOH) continues to worry experts.

Photo courtesy of Deborah Perkins

As noted by this author a year ago—and discussed in his recent profile of three adult-onset hunters and his presentation on his thesis research—precursor conditions and potential warning signs are alarmingly diverse.

The suspected correlation between AOH and food co-op membership has, for instance, been confirmed. Last year, an introductory hunting class was offered at Madison, Wisconsin’s Willy Street Co-op. On February 23rd, another will be offered at the Seward Co-op in Minneapolis.

Of particular concern is a newly identified correlation between AOH and tree-hugging.

Consider the case of “tree-hugging former vegetarian” Christie Aschwanden. Though she is “almost universally opposed to killing things,” she feels strongly about the ethical value of taking responsibility for her food and about the gratitude and reverence that result. So she raises and kills her own poultry. Well aware that “killing is stressful, sad and difficult work,” she isn’t certain she will be able to shoot a deer or elk. But she intends to find out.

Consider the similar case of “tree-hugging wildlife lover” Emilene Ostlind. Though she isn’t sure she wants “to stalk and kill an animal – any animal,” she, too, wants to take responsibility for her food. As she sees it, hunting her own wild meat will bring her “face to face with the reality” of her eating and will also help her be “a good environmentalist” who lives “with as small a footprint as possible.”

Disturbingly, the correlation between hunting and tree-hugging may reach far beyond AOH. This author knows a lifelong hunter, born and raised in Georgia, who says, “I hug trees every day. And sometimes I shoot things out of them.” Likewise, lifelong hunter and wildlife ecology graduate student Karl Malcolm—who taught the aforementioned class in Madison—calls himself a “tree-hugging hunter.”

If this overlap of hunting and tree-hugging metastasizes in the American psyche, viewpoints might broaden. Hardening of the categories might be reversed. Hunters and non-hunters from across the political spectrum might form indomitable pro-conservation, pro-environment alliances.

Considering the dangers, experts are anxious to keep these outbreaks contained.

© 2012 Tovar Cerulli

Main ingredient for deer-track soup

The past three years in a row, I have taken a buck in the first week of rifle season, less than a mile from home, in thick woods with few deer. Each of those years, I was too busy to spend many hours hunting and didn’t expect to bring home venison. Against the odds, though, bucks appeared.

This year, I was equally busy, with grad school and book revisions each demanding maximum attention just as deer season arrived. I was not, however, equally lucky.

During Vermont’s sixteen-day rifle season, I got to the woods on weekends, for a couple of hours each morning. I saw no deer.

During the nine-day muzzleloader season, I did the same. Still no deer.

Finally, on the last day of muzzleloader season, I went to a friend’s woodlot, a place he calls the Hundred Acre Woods. I knew the hunting was better there—the hoofed traffic more consistent and the woods more open. It was there, in fact, that I killed my first deer. Recently, I just haven’t felt I could spare the extra time. Going there adds an hour or more to every outing. At home, I can go for shorter spells, hunting within minutes of stepping out the door.

As soon as I hiked into the Hundred Acre Woods, though, I knew I should have gotten there earlier in the season. In the light of dawn, the snow told of the deer who had come this way over the past three days, beating a path along the ridge.

I sat for an hour or two, then thought I would move to a different spot. The maple leaves and thin snow crust were loud underfoot, so I took only a few steps at a time, then stopped to listen.

Somehow I saw and heard the deer, rather than vice versa. The animal was sixty or seventy yards off, broadside to me, walking.

A doe, I thought.

I had an antlerless tag, but shooting never occurred to me: Even if I had been certain she wasn’t an illegal spikehorn, she was moving, the glimpse was brief, and—with nothing to brace against—the shot would have been offhand. My desire for venison and success in the hunt is no match for my fear of wounding an animal. I would much rather regret a shot I didn’t take than one I did. I tried to draw her attention with a few fawn bleats, but she kept walking and disappeared.

With dusk came the end of my chances at venison. I was disappointed, to be sure. I wanted fresh meat in the freezer.

But hunting does not fit into the tidy logic of agriculture and industry, wherein efforts lead to results. Hunting, like angling, is filled with uncertainty: sometimes luck, sometimes lack of luck.

And isn’t that part of the allure? If I had no appetite for the unpredictable and mysterious, wouldn’t I be better off sticking to the grocery store?

Next year, maybe I’ll hunt half as often but head to the Hundred Acre Woods every time. Luck, after all, helps those who help themselves.

This winter, Cath and I will content ourselves with the precious few pounds of venison that remain in our freezer. And, having consulted with friends, we will be re-titling my forthcoming book The Hungry Carnivore.

© 2011 Tovar Cerulli

Reminders can be rude.

A few days ago, I was driving along, thinking about my time in the woods last weekend. I had hiked into the forest with a near-full moon peering down at me through the clouds, a thin mantle of snow cloaking ground and trees. At sunrise, I had enjoyed the play of light and shadow, and the sound of ravens quork-quorking overhead. I hadn’t seen any deer, but had savored the hours.

What, I wondered, might I distill from those mornings? It was, after all, high time I wrote a blog post. Caught up in twin whirlwinds—the final copyedits on my book and the final month of the semester—I haven’t carved out the time to offer thoughts here.

Then my eyes focused on the pickup truck in front of me.

Affixed to the rear window was a decal: “If It’s Brown, It’s Down—If It Flies, It Dies.”

Yanked out of pleasant natural reverie into unpleasant cultural reality, I thought instantly of that whole genre of decals and bumper stickers—“Shoot to Thrill,” “Whack ’Em and Stack ’Em,” and the like—words and images that portray hunting as a perpetual series of lusty kills, or as a military seek-and-destroy mission.

I was reminded, too, of the discussion following my April post about hunting ads that make light of killing. There, several of us noted that such advertisements are used because they make money. They sell product.

But decals like the one on the truck in front of me are different. They do not sell product. Hunters who display them don’t make a dime off it. With no profit incentive, they are making a completely voluntary statement. To what end?

Several possibilities occurred to me:

• Perhaps they’re just engaging in an unfortunately public display of dark humor and aren’t thinking about the impression made on non-hunters. (With hunters flaunting decals like these, we don’t need any help from anti-hunters to make us look evil.)

• Perhaps they’re thumbing their noses at hunting’s critics, selecting such badges of identity precisely because they’re so outrageous. (Here I’m reminded of Calvin and another decal I once saw, on my way to a workshop on hunting ethics.)

• Or, most disturbingly, perhaps these hunters really feel that birds and animals are nothing more than living targets, to be gunned down as swiftly and furiously as possible. Perhaps they really believe that wildlife exists solely to be blasted. (Though hardly unique to hunters, such callousness points to deep value-differences among us, making it impossible to think of myself as part of a universal “hunting community.”)

I’d like a bumper sticker that tells the world why I hunt and how I feel about the wild creatures whose world I share. But I suspect I’ll never be able to summarize all that in a 10-word slogan.

I had a hard enough time saying it in 300 pages.

© 2011 Tovar Cerulli

Imagine meat that not only comes in plastic, but grows there.

For years, scientists have been developing methods to grow “tissue cultures” for human consumption. Last month, an article in Mother Jones reported that these food wizards may be getting closer to bringing lab-grown meat to market, though serious obstacles remain.

Not least among these obstacles is the very idea of the stuff.

Call it what you will: “petri meat,” “lab meat,” “test-tube meat,” “in-vitro meat,” or “shmeat” (sheet of meat). It gives people the willies. For me, it conjures images of gelatinous tissue slowly filling an industrial vat, being “exercised” with electrical impulses so that the texture begins to resemble that of muscle, then being sliced, sautéed, and perhaps served up on a bed of lab-lettuce and in-vitro veggies.

As the Mother Jones article and a piece in The New Yorker earlier this year both noted, lab meat will need a real marketing makeover to get people to eat it. New Harvest, an organization that advocates “cultured meat,” claims that such food is just as natural as “bread, cheese, yogurt, and wine.” That’s some serious spin-doctoring. Last time I checked, wheat berries were not cultured in laboratory vats, nor did milk or grapes grow there.

For a moment, though, I’d like to set aside the knee-jerk yuck factor and consider the case made for the stuff. It has its merits.

• With the planet’s human population already pushing 7 billion, and with a lot of us eating meat, the environmental impacts of the global livestock industry are apt to increase. If lab meat could be produced in bulk without incurring such ecological costs, that would be a big mark in its favor.

• With many animals being raised in inhumane factory-farming facilities, the ethical costs of meat production are also high. If lab meat could take over a major share of the market, such facilities might decline or even disappear. (Enticed by the possibility of reducing animal suffering, PETA has offered a $1 million reward to the “first person to come up with a method to produce commercially viable quantities of in vitro meat at competitive prices by 2012.”)

• With concerns growing over food safety, lab meat could also eliminate the risks posed by mad cow disease, E. coli contamination, and the like.

I grasp the logic. These issues—ecology, ethics, and health—were at the heart of my decisions to become a vegan and, years later, a hunter.

Other thoughts nag at me, though.

What are the implications of making meat in a laboratory? What would it mean for us to take yet another step away from nature? What would it mean to dispel the quandary that human omnivores have faced for millennia, the moral difficulty inherent in taking an animal’s life?

How would it affect our consciousness, and our understanding of what it means to be human here, on Earth? What would it mean for our souls?

Maybe this is the future of food. Maybe, as we continue to outstrip the planet’s capacity to sustain us, we will end up sucking hot dogs out of test tubes.

But I’m glad that day has not yet come. I’m grateful to live in this world, where lettuce and carrots come from garden and farm, where I can hike into the November woods and sit with my back to the trunk of an old hemlock, waiting for hours, listening for hooves crunching the frosty leaves, praying for an animal to appear.

If I am going to eat meat, I want it to come from a creature who, like me, inhabits this world of air, soil, and water, of leafy plants and living, breathing beings. A creature who, like me, is animated by spirit. A creature who, like me, is more than mere flesh.

© 2011 Tovar Cerulli

Are Vermont hunters an endangered species? Fellow writer and hunter Matt Crawford thinks so, and his new article in Vermont Life presents compelling evidence.

Crawford notes, for instance, that resident hunting license sales in the Green Mountain State have dropped from more than 89,000 per year in 1993 to an estimated 70,000 today. The decline continues despite what he accurately terms “a generally accepting culture” that includes “the most lenient” gun-ownership laws in the country.

Why is that?

The article suggests that one factor is the arrival of newcomers—non-hunters who have moved to Vermont from urban and suburban areas. Crawford quotes me on this point:

The obvious answer to the question about the biggest threat to Vermont’s hunting culture is ‘people from away.’ There are a lot of folks like me who move here, buy land and either don’t have a connection to the culture of hunting or, in some cases, who don’t approve of it. It’s very much a tension point between new Vermonters and those who’ve spent their lives here doing things in an accepted way.

This is indeed an “obvious answer.” Some lay the blame for the decline in Vermont’s hunting culture squarely on an influx of outsiders.

But how much influence do newcomers really have on local traditions?

Some newcomers certainly disapprove. I was one of them when Cath and I moved back to Vermont in the late 1990s. (Whether I’m “from away” is open to interpretation. I grew up in both New Hampshire and Vermont, but my family is not from here: My parents grew up in Connecticut and New Jersey.)

To what, though, does such disapproval and tension lead? Does it erode local hunting culture? Does it lead to a tighter grip on tradition in the face of a perceived threat? How many kids or adults are discouraged from hunting because of disapproval from “flatlanders”?

Some newcomers learn to respect local traditions. Some of us even take up hunting. As Crawford notes in the article, the local food movement is generating new interest in hunting and new respect for rural ways of life.

There are no anti-hunting referendum votes in the Green Mountain State and there probably never will be: We don’t have a referendum system. The only public protests in recent memory were over so-called “coyote tournaments,” a practice to which some hunters also objected. And, as Crawford notes, hunting has enjoyed constitutional protection in Vermont since 1777.

Some newcomers close their land to hunting. Whether due to safety concerns, a dislike of hunting, or both, some mark their property boundaries with “No Hunting” or “No Trespassing” signs. In most of Vermont, though, it still isn’t hard to get permission to hunt private land. And there’s a fair amount of public land, too. The bigger threat to hunting access, as Crawford indicates, is land development, by native Vermonters and outsiders alike.

Maybe newcomers are a significant factor in Vermont’s hunting decline. But I’m not convinced.

I think we’re witnessing a much broader, more complex erosion of rural traditions. Crawford notes, for instance, that Vermont is experiencing a parallel decline in farming. As far as I know, no newcomers to the state are opposed to agriculture.

The decline in hunting is a complicated puzzle, long studied by the likes of sociologist Jan Dizard and anthropologist Marc Boglioli. Crawford’s article quotes Boglioli, whose outlook for the future of hunting is not optimistic:

According to the people who run these numbers and make these projections, there’s just no way we can imagine that in 100 years we’ll have hunters anywhere near the numbers we have now. I see hunting as being farther removed from mainstream society. It’ll be kind of this Sturbridge Village of leisure activity. Nobody will be threatened by it. We’ll be nostalgic about it by then.

The article in Vermont Life points to several related dangers.

One is the resulting loss in revenue for habitat conservation. (I think the current system—of funding wildlife agencies almost exclusively with hunter-and-angler dollars—is a fiscal dead-end in need of a serious overhaul, but that’s a topic for another day.)

Another danger is decline in economic activity. According to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates, hunting boosts the Vermont economy by $258 million annually.

My greatest concern is the third danger Crawford points to: disconnection. This is not just about hunting as a practice or even as a cultural tradition. (Despite frequent paeans to Vermont deer hunting as a tradition that reaches back into the ancestral past, the state was nearly devoid of whitetails in the late nineteenth century.) It’s about hunting as part of a broader set of activities that keep us engaged with nature.

Crawford cites Richard Louv, whose books Last Child in the Woods and The Nature Principle point out that people need more nature-exposure than they’re getting. Entranced by technology and distracted by busy lives, children and adults alike are spending less and less time doing anything outdoors: hiking, fishing, hunting, canoeing, bird-watching, you name it.

Ebony jewelwing

The risk we run—as Louv argues, and as the film Mother Nature’s Child suggests—is not only to our own psychological, spiritual, and physical health, but also to the health of the natural world. We conserve and protect what we care about. If we don’t even know what a grouse or a leopard frog or a whitetail or a jewelwing looks like, we won’t care much.

If we don’t care much, where in our hearts can a serious conservation ethic possibly take root?

© 2011 Tovar Cerulli

For some people, hunting for “sport” implies frivolity: killing for fun.

For some, it suggests wastefulness and a lack of respect for animals: taking a whitetail’s antlers and cape for a trophy mount, and leaving the meat to rot.

Those are two reasons I don’t call hunting a “sport.”

When I talk or write about hunting and why I do it, I want people to understand what it’s like for me to take a deer’s life. I want my words to bring them to where I kneel beside the fallen animal, my hand on his still-warm shoulder. I want them to feel some faint ripple of the soul-deep wave that shudders through me.

I want my words to bring them to where I stand in the kitchen, separating muscle from bone and, later, sautéing tender slices of backstrap. I want them to sense what that venison means to me, taken so close to home, from woods I know.

I don’t want them thinking I get my jollies through a rifle scope.

For some people, “sport” implies a contest between hunter and hunted, or among hunters.

For some, it suggests highly structured competitions like professional team sports or the Olympics.

Those are two more reasons I don’t use the word.

When I talk or write about hunting, I want people to understand what it’s like for me to be in the woods. I want my words to bring them to where I sit watching sunlight break through frosty pine needles, to where I kneel and reach out to touch the edge of a fresh deer track. I want them to see ferns and moss. I want them to feel the immediacy of that connection to the earth that feeds us.

I don’t want them thinking I see animals as opponents. I don’t want them thinking Astroturf. I don’t want them thinking I’m out to bag a bigger buck than the next guy.

Many hunters, of course, use the term “sport.”

For some, it is simply habit—a word they grew up using, a word they’ve read a million times in books, in magazines, and online.

For some, hunting does feel like “fun,” or like a contest with animals, or like a competition with other hunters.

For some, the word is an important link to the late nineteenth century, when “sport hunting” denoted the importance of skill, and adherence to a rule-bound code of respectful, chivalrous conduct. Unlike the “market hunter” and the “pot hunter,” the “sport hunter” would never stoop to snaring or poisoning game animals. And “sport hunters” the likes of Theodore Roosevelt and George Grinnell were laying the foundations for America’s wildlife conservation legacy.

Fair enough. I don’t waste time arguing that people shouldn’t call their hunting “sport.”

But I do object when people insist that “sport”—or “recreation”—is the right term for virtually all modern hunting, including mine.

Take my friend Jim Tantillo, for instance, a professor of philosophy at Cornell University who wrote his dissertation on hunting. He maintains that hunting falls into two categories: hunting for survival, and hunting for other reasons. So far, so good.

If you hunt for survival, he says, then “hunting is work.” But if you choose to hunt, then “that very choice makes it fundamentally a form of recreation.”

I don’t think the language fits. “Involuntary” and “work” aren’t quite the same. And “voluntary” and “recreation” definitely aren’t the same.

A gardener may opt to grow a substantial portion of his family’s food. A volunteer EMT may squeeze herself into mangled cars to save lives. Both act by choice. And both probably enjoy aspects of what they do. But I doubt any of us would call their actions “recreation.”

In some dictionary somewhere, perhaps “recreation” means nothing more than “voluntary activity.” (In mine, it means “refreshment” and “enjoyable relaxation.”)

At some moment in time, perhaps “sport” meant nothing more than “rule-bound.” (Today, my dictionary says it means a host of different things, including “athletic activity,” “amusement,” and “recreation.”)

In the end, however, the meanings of words do not really exist in dictionaries; they exist in use and interpretation. Nor are meanings locked in history; they are constantly changing. (If I was the first to pen the lyric, Don we now our gay apparel, no modern American would picture cheery Christmas duds.)

As you can probably tell, I’m not interested in coming up with a label that applies to everyone’s hunting. I doubt such a word exists, except for “hunting” itself.

What I’m interested in is making my hunting comprehensible to others. And in a world like ours, where discussions of hunting are already full of pitfalls and confusions, “sport” and “recreation” only get in the way.

Notes: First, thanks to all who responded to my recent questions about “sport” on Facebook and Twitter. Your thoughts were of great help. Second, my apologies for the hiatus between posts. I promise that my attentions are being devoted to a good cause—I’m in the thick of book edits.

© 2011 Tovar Cerulli

Photo by Ken Thomas

Some hunters pursue and eat birds, rabbits, and deer, but draw the line at bears. For them, bruins resemble humans a little too much: They’re intelligent omnivores. Their eyes face forward. They can stand on two feet and climb trees.

I haven’t ever pondered bear- hunting, but I may be one of these hunters. Though I understand the need to manage bears and to keep them from getting too comfortable in people’s backyards, I’m not sure I would squeeze the trigger myself.

Vegetarians draw the line at fish, birds, and mammals (or, in the case of vegans, anything derived from them). One reason is that these creatures resemble humans a little too much: They have faces and vertebrae. They walk, run, swim, and crawl. They have the capacity to suffer.

Most people in this part of the world won’t eat cats or dogs. These animals may not resemble us any more than pigs do, but culturally we have embraced them as members of the extended human family.

In short, I think everyone holds some version of the same conceptual category: “Fellow creatures about whom I care too much to eat.”

I think everyone also holds some version of the opposite category: “Life forms I eat without concern.” Some people don’t trouble themselves about animals, domestic or wild. Most of us don’t fret about plants. Despite the indications—from ancient teachings and modern science alike—that plants sense far more than we give them credit for, few of us worry that a tomato vine is traumatized by being stripped of fruit.

When I was a vegan, those were the only two categories I saw. The line I drew was absolute: Above it, sentient beings I cared about and would not eat. Below it, non-sentient edibles about which I need not care. Black on one side, white on the other. A tidy dualism.

The world, however, does not conform to such a convenient moral order. For most of us, there is a third and more troubling category: “Creatures I care about, harmed by my eating.”

How do we handle this messy middle ground?

One option, of course, is not to admit it. We can sit down to a burger or a steak and refuse to acknowledge the steer or the slaughterhouse. We can sit down to a fruit salad or a veggie stir-fry and refuse to acknowledge the deer, rabbits, mice, and birds injured and killed in orchards and fields.

But what if we want to acknowledge it? What then?

In Arctic Dreams, Barry Lopez wrote:

No culture has yet solved the dilemma each has faced with the growth of a conscious mind: how to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in all life, when one finds darkness not only in one’s own culture but within oneself.

I wonder: Are we any closer to solving this dilemma than our ancestors were?

© 2011 Tovar Cerulli

The Mindful Carnivore has been spotted in the wild.

First, came the Facebook page. Before I even had the thing properly set up, it was discovered by fellow vegetarian-turned-hunter Anthony Lynn, out in British Columbia. He “liked” it. (If Facebook was a truly social medium, I think he would—at the very least—have had the option to “love” it, “hate” it, or “not give a damn.”)

Second, came the online bookstores. The first sighting was made, yes, out in British Columbia, by Anthony. How the book slipped over the border—appearing on Amazon.ca days before it showed up on any U.S. website—is a mystery to me. Maybe Canada has a special program for carnivores seeking dietary asylum.

Now the book is popping up all over the place. Here in the U.S, you can reserve a copy through Amazon, Books-a-Million, or Barnes & Noble. And Powell’s should be listing it soon. (The February release will also include multiple eBook formats.)

Or you can get your local bookstore to pre-order the hardcover for you, through Indiebound or by asking directly. I love the idea of hundreds of bookstores across the continent getting pre-order requests for a book they haven’t even heard of yet.

Third and last, comes the renovated website. You’ll see the book cover on the sidebar and a brief description on the new home page.

In redesigning the site, I’ve done some tidying and reorganizing. With the exception of the blogroll, links have been cleared from the sidebars and now have their own pages. All the old resources are there, and then some. The list of recommended books, for instance, has expanded to almost fifty. If you come across any glitches while navigating the new site, please let me know.

By the way, Anthony, I don’t know whether or not you spotted this new website design at the “sandbox” url where I’ve been tinkering over the past couple weeks. Either way, I’m impressed by your knack for finding things. I could use a hunting companion like you. Whatever your method, it beats the one I’m most familiar with: blind luck.

(Note: Thanks to Ken Thomas for permission to use his photo of a white-tailed doe in one of the randomly rotating header images above.)

© 2011 Tovar Cerulli

What would your ideal, sustainable world look like?

The question—asked by Ingrid in the comments on my last post—made me stop and think. Ingrid wondered what solutions I see: solutions that would bring humanity into a balanced relationship with ecological systems, and reduce the suffering we inflict on our fellow creatures.

Years ago, I had a vision for such a world. In it, everyone would be vegan and all would be well.

In one sense, I no longer have that kind of vision. I don’t know how many humans the planet can support or for how long. I don’t know what resource conservation-and-management approaches might work globally.

Take food, for instance. I don’t subscribe to any universal “sustainable food” paradigm. (Over the years I’ve let a lot of subscriptions lapse, to magazines and ideologies alike.) I don’t know how to feed 6.9 billion people. In fact, I don’t think there is any one way. I’m more inclined to think in terms of specific, local approaches.

In the Arctic, for example, I imagine hunting will continue to be central to a sustainable food system. In places like Vermont, hunting will play a much less significant role. Though wild meat is central for some families, Vermonters drag home only a million pounds of deer and moose meat each year—less than two pounds of meat per state resident.

Moose track

In another sense, though, I do still have a universal vision, for today, for tomorrow, and for whatever future comes our way:

• I’m convinced that our behavior ought to be rooted in respect and reciprocity, restraint and compassion. I think that all of us—humans, other animals, and the planet—will benefit if we Homo sapiens cultivate genuine regard, for ecological systems and for individual creatures.

• I also believe that our relationships with nature ought to be rooted in celebration, in a deep appreciation for the material world and our participation in it, for all the lives and deaths intertwined with ours.

That’s part of why I hunt. Hunting is one of the ways I cultivate that attitude of respect, that awareness and compassion, that sense of mindful engagement and appreciation.

© 2011 Tovar Cerulli