A philosopher I am not.

Not in the academic sense, at least. My formal education in the subject consists of a single undergraduate class—“Reason and Argument”—which left me impressed by the contortions through which the human animal is willing to put its gray matter.

So, some fifteen months ago, when I saw a “call for abstracts” for a new anthology of philosophical essays on hunting, I had reason to doubt my suitability as a contributor. The editor welcomed abstracts from philosophy, of course, and also from a number of other disciplines—such as anthropology, political theory, and theology—in which I was equally unqualified.

Yet there was this one little phrase. They also welcomed abstracts from “thoughtful hunters.”

After a few helpful email exchanges with the editor, Nathan Kowalsky of the University of Alberta, I said, “What the heck. Why not?” and shot from the hip, firing off a 250-word description of the 4,500-word essay I would write if he and his colleagues wanted me to.

A month later, I got word that they did.

Hello. Time to step up to the plate and deliver “Hunting Like a Vegetarian: Same Ethics, Different Flavors.”

Jump a year ahead and here we are: the book, Hunting: In Search of the Wild Life, has just been released, as part of Wiley-Blackwell’s series Philosophy for Everyone.

My complimentary copy hasn’t arrived yet, so I can’t give you a review.

What I can do is tell you that the mix of voices is remarkable. In addition to contributions from a fascinating group of folks who, unlike me, are trained in philosophy (including environmentalist and vegan Lisa Kretz and weapons fanatic Jesús Ilundáin-Agurruza), there are essays, for example, by Canadian zoologist Valerius Geist, Algonquin hunter Jacob Wawatie, and historian and bird-trap builder Paula Young Lee.

I can also point you to the partial preview available on Google Books.

And I can point you to the first review of the book (review copies go out early), posted on Sustainablog by Justin Van Kleeck who, appropriately enough to my way of thinking, is vegan.

Enjoy! And I promise: my next post will not be about books, present or future.

Note: If you end up with a copy of the book in hand, and decide to read my essay, two small caveats. First, it is a smidge drier than my average blog post. Second, no sooner had the editing been finalized than I learned that some of the greenhouse gas figures given in the U.N. report Livestock’s Long Shadow, which I reference early in the essay, had been discredited. Ah well, it’s the spirit of the thing that counts.

Two years ago, it was small.

Just a glimmer of an idea. Nothing more than a flicker of movement, caught out of the corner of my mind’s eye.

Bold one moment, it would dash into full view like a blustery red squirrel. Furtive the next moment, it would skitter off into the mental underbrush. (I have underbrush to spare. A tidy parkland my mind is not.)

Within a few months, I realized it wasn’t going away. So I started reading up on it: How exactly does one go about getting a book published?

But I won’t bore you with the tedious details.

Fast forward to earlier this year: as I mentioned back in April, I found a book agent—and not just any agent, but the patient, insightful, and tenacious Laurie Abkemeier (aka Agent Obvious)—who thought I had an idea worth pursuing. Together we crafted a proposal, which she then shopped around to editors.

Just over two weeks ago, Laurie emailed me with the news. We had a publisher. (Friday the 13th is my new favorite day.) We just had to keep it under our hats until the details of the contract got ironed out.

Now it’s official.

The Mindful Carnivore: A Vegetarian’s Hunt for Sustenance will be published by Pegasus Books!

I’m psyched. I’m grateful for the support and encouragement of all my friends and family, in person and online. And I’m looking forward to working with the fine folks at Pegasus on the next leg of the journey.

The photographs, projected onto a screen in front of the room, were astonishing.

Cougars like venison too - Photo © Susan C. Morse

A bobcat crouching in thick cover. A cougar staring intently, its head dusted in snow. A black bear on its hind feet, marking a white birch.

And the words that went with them—spoken by wildlife biologist, conservationist, photographer, and tracker Sue Morse—were inspiring.

I had never heard anyone speak so passionately about the importance of habitat protection, particularly the danger of habitat fragmentation and the need to protect the travel corridors that keep wildlife populations interconnected and genetically viable.

She concluded the public presentation with yet another stunning photo of a bobcat.

“These are our neighbors,” she said.

A year later, while taking part in a habitat stewardship training designed and taught by Sue, I learned that she was a deer hunter.

What?

Sue loved wild animals. She admired them. She spent the vast majority of her waking hours working to understand and protect them. Keeping Track, the organization she founded, was working to conserve tens of thousands of acres of vital wildlife habitat across North America. How could she then turn around and kill one of them? It did not compute.

Only years later, as the possibility of hunting bubbled up into my own consciousness, did it begin to make sense. Only now, asking Sue about it, have I really begun to understand.

It turns out that she didn’t grow up hunting either.

It wasn’t until her early forties, she tells me, that she recognized a basic disconnect: what she calls her “schizophrenia” about predation. Carnivores were the focus of most of her research. When she came across signs of a mammalian predator’s successful hunt—perhaps a place where she could track a bobcat’s stealthy movements in the snow and read the story’s end in scattered turkey feathers—she celebrated, knowing the animal had survived another day.

A meat-eater, Sue had been raising lambs for years. She detested the cruelties and ecological impacts of the meat industry, and valued having a personal connection with the flesh foods she consumed.

Yet she wasn’t participating in the forest life cycles she studied.

It was, she decided, time to start.

Now, after more than twenty years as a predator, Sue’s message as a hunter is inextricably bound to her message as a naturalist and conservationist.

She wants to see some changes in American hunting.

Recent trends in the portrayal of hunting in television shows and videos, for instance, get under her skin. She sees far too much emphasis on competition, on success in bagging animals—in short, on killing. She sees far too little room left over for cherishing and respecting animals, for pausing to reflect on the meaning of hunting and killing, for allowing sorrow to coexist with gratitude and elation.

Sue, a hunter education instructor, feels it’s important for thoughtful hunters to address these things: “We have a huge responsibility to share with our non-hunting neighbors the truth about what hunting can and should be.”

But Sue has a more serious gauntlet to throw down.

“Many hunters,” as she once put it, “fail miserably at championing conservation and environmental protection causes.”

She’s well acquainted with the role that hunter-conservationists have played in the history of North American wildlife conservation, and with the programs funded by the license fees and excise taxes that hunters pay today. But she doesn’t think we should sit around congratulating ourselves.

Today’s dangers are too real and urgent.

Human activity continues to drive species over the brink of extinction, diminishing global biodiversity. In the United States alone, Sue notes, 3,000 acres of habitat are destroyed every day.

And we’re doing next to nothing about acid rain: “The Clean Air act hasn’t been strong enough after all, and the incalculable tons of filth we pump into the air do indeed fall back down upon us. Meanwhile our lakes and fish are poisoned, mercury contamination dictates that we shouldn’t eat our catch, and our forests sicken and decline in ways we can sadly measure but not fully understand.”

More hunters, Sue says, need to give back to the land. More hunters need to join organizations fighting to conserve wildlife habitat. More hunters need to work at building people’s awareness of the preciousness of all life, from invertebrates to wolves and cougars.

It’s vital, she argues, for hunters to join forces with environmentalists. We can’t afford political divisiveness.

Too often, she says, a few outspoken hunters “dominate the agenda, often opposing conservation measures, with their over-simplified and often selfish interests.” Too many hunters are distracted by what she calls “our increasing fascination with the machismo of bigger trucks, and the ease of mechanized hunting on ATVs and snowmobiles.”

Too many hunters miss the big picture: good hunting—like good birding, good hiking, and good berry-picking—has to begin with clean air, clean water, healthy soil, and intact ecosystems.

“We, of all people,” she told me recently, “really should get it. We should understand the relationship between a healthy natural environment and what makes us whole.”

Thanks, Sue, for all you do to keep the world whole. And for providing such a fine example of what hunting can be.

Notes: Sue’s organization Keeping Track, like so many non-profits, is struggling to keep afloat in these tough financial times; every donation, no matter how modest, helps. Also, Sue’s work with youth is profiled in the book The Woods Scientist, for kids age 9-12.

© 2010 Tovar Cerulli

Bear snacks

Last summer, when a mother bear and three cubs raided our apple trees at dawn, Cath and I watched, spellbound. Some broken branches and a few dozen apples were no great loss—nothing compared to the privilege of watching bruins in our front yard.

In winter, when red squirrels pilfered sunflower seeds from the bird feeders, we watched again. When I chased them off, it was merely to give the finches and chickadees a turn.

I like living peaceably with my fellow creatures. I begrudge them little.

The main exception to that peace is my hunting. A few weeks each year, I set off into the woods with bow or gun. Most of that time, I’m still watching in quiet admiration. I may not get (or take) the chance to kill. If I do, it is for food, not spite.

Lately, though—reflecting on some of the responses to one of Holly’s recent posts over at NorCal Cazadora—I’ve been thinking about other, less-frequent exceptions to my gentle interspecies relationships.

I’ve been thinking, for instance, of the three or four woodchucks that have burrowed in deep under our garden fence in the past twelve years. I killed them reluctantly, again for food: for the green beans and broccoli my furry friends were happily gorging on, and sometimes for their meat, too.

Less comfortably, I’ve been thinking about porcupines.

I have nothing against our spiny neighbors and enjoy seeing them in the woods. The harm they inflict on our apple trees is minor. The damage they do to building materials (whether part of our house, or tucked under our shed) is usually tolerable. The risk they pose to our black Lab, Kaia, is minimal; between her sense of caution and my calling her off, she has never made full contact.

Some years ago, however, things went too far.

It wasn’t any one thing.

It wasn’t just that two porcupines had been visiting nightly for weeks and that Kaia finally got quilled, in broad daylight, no less: one paw bristling with forty small, black needles.

A taste for laminates

It wasn’t just that the porcies, attracted to the resins in laminated wood, had finally gnawed right through the back corner of the plywood doghouse under the front porch, and were making more frequent forays up onto the porch to gnaw at certain spots on the decking (something salty spilled there years ago?), on the siding next to the front door (something special in the stain used there?) and on one of the 4×4 posts that hold up the porch roof (who knows?). One night they sampled a pair of rubber boots.

It wasn’t just that they were keeping us awake in the middle of the night, with chortling conversations in the trees just outside our bedroom window, or with sounds of their gnawing reverberating through the framing of the house. Yelling and throwing pebbles drove them away only briefly.

It wasn’t just that I had seen them around our vehicles of late, reminding me how they had nibbled through a brake hose a few years earlier: a problem I discovered on the way to work the next morning, when my foot went to the floor without slowing my pickup at all. I was grateful for a long driveway and a hand brake. The truck—our only vehicle at the time—was out of commission for three days while a replacement hose was located.

It was all those things added together.

Finally, late one night, wishing we had a few more fishers around, I suppressed my neighborly instincts and shot both porcupines.

Hating the killing, I told myself that I should cook them up as Bob Kimber describes doing in Living Wild and Domestic. But, in the middle of the night, I didn’t have the oomph to try butchering my first porcupines. So, with apologies, I slung them into five-gallon buckets and took them deep into the woods where no dog would find them.

Late the next night, I woke and heard noises. Not porcupine noises, surely.

Yes, porcupine noises. Groaning, I steeled myself, rolled out of bed, and went to fetch the .22.

By week’s end—surprised both by their numbers and by my knack for the dubious skill of holding both rifle and spotlight—I had killed six or seven.

I was not a hunter those nights. I was an executioner, disposing of fellow creatures whose only crimes were a burgeoning population, a territory that overlapped with ours, and a few unfortunate gustatory preferences.

I can think of only one upside to that grisly week. It worked. Though porcupines still abounded in the woods, they stopped trying to dismantle our house.

Relieved, I put away my black hood.

© 2010 Tovar Cerulli

Seeing a neighbor coming down the woods trail, I winced.

There I was, dressed in camo with a bow in hand, headed home after a morning hunt. And here he came, walking his dog.

I suspected that he, like most of my friends and acquaintances, wasn’t keen on hunting. I could hardly blame him. I had long deplored the killing of animals for food, let alone for sport.

Though I knew a respectful hunter or two, my predominant opinions had been rooted in stereotypes reinforced by personal experience: Cath’s tires slashed after we had put up a no-hunting sign, deer parts dumped alongside our road each autumn, and more.

Now, in my first autumn afield, I was still uncertain how I felt about hunting, even my own. I imagined I would have a clearer sense of it after I killed my first deer.

As my neighbor drew near, I could see surprise on his face.

“It is you,” he said. “I thought, ‘It’s some redneck out hunting and I need to watch my back.’ But no, it’s you out hunting and I need to watch my back.”

We had a polite if awkward chat. Then, only half-joking, he reminded me that he would be in the woods for a while and that his dog looked like a deer. (It would, I thought, be impossible to mistake her for anything but a young, frenetic golden retriever.) And we parted ways.

I felt that same awkwardness three years later, when my first hunting essay was published. I knew the magazine’s readership wasn’t entirely hostile to hunting. The editor sometimes wrote short pieces about his experiences in deer season. But it felt strange to publicly announce my new pursuit. Would acquaintances see the piece and be shocked? Would they give me a hard time?

Thankfully, the essay sparked no negative response. What little feedback I got was positive: an enthusiastic phone message from a conservationist friend here in Vermont, an appreciative letter-to-the-editor from a hunter in upstate New York.

I breathed more easily. I would go about my business quietly now.

In the woods, I would rarely be seen.

In my writing, I would stick to other subjects. That first, brief essay had said all I wanted to say about hunting. There was no need to return to the topic, broadcasting news of my transmogrification.

I wasn’t ashamed of hunting. I didn’t need to hide it. But it wasn’t something I wanted my name to be associated with too strongly.

Heaven forbid it should get around on the internet.

© 2010 Tovar Cerulli

In college, studying Mahatma Gandhi’s moral and political philosophy, I was impressed by the twin commitments of his lifelong quest for truth.

On the one hand, he lived according to what he saw as the truth, which must, he wrote, “be my beacon, my shield and buckler.” On the other hand, he had the humility and wisdom to recognize that his truth was incomplete, that it was only “the relative truth as I have conceived it.” Closing himself off to new insights would obstruct his search.

At the time, in my early years as a vegan, I was confident I had a lockdown on dietary truth. Lacking Gandhi’s humility, it never occurred to me that someday I might have to lay down that particular shield and buckler.

Had I paid closer attention to Gandhi’s experiments with diet, they might have been instructive. He tried eating meat in his youth, returned to the traditional Hindu and Jain vegetarian diet on which he was raised, then went vegan.

Eventually, though, recovering from an illness, he found he could not rebuild his constitution without milk. In his autobiography, he warned others—especially those who had adopted veganism as a result of his teachings—not to persist in a milk-free diet “unless they find it beneficial in every way.”

But I wasn’t ready to hear that then. Nor was I ready to hear that other great teachers of compassion—the Dalai Lama, for example—were not the vegetarians I imagined them to be.

It was only later that some faint echo of Gandhi’s wisdom tempered my certainty.

It was only when I found that my body, too, was healthier if I consumed animal products that my truth changed. It was only when I learned that the production of almost every food I ate depended on controlling cervid populations—that is, on the annual slaughter of millions of deer across North America, by hunters and farmers alike—that I began to see a bigger picture.

Now, I wonder: How would Gandhi have responded if he had found that his body, like the Dalai Lama’s, thrived on meat? What would he have done if it turned out that even the cultivation of the fruits and nuts he ate depended on the constant killing of large, charismatic, wild mammals?

© 2010 Tovar Cerulli

Kneeling beside my first deer, I had no words. I just sat there stunned, my hand on his shoulder, uncertain whether I would ever hunt again.

Finally, I whispered something clumsy: half gratitude, half apology.

The next year, when my second deer dropped in his tracks, I was shaken but less shocked. I spoke my thanks and asked forgiveness simply, without grace.

It was after my third deer fell that I knelt to lean a few small sticks against each other, then cloaked them with three fern fronds, still green in mid-November.

If I had grown up in a family of hunters, or in a culture that spoke to the wild, perhaps I would have had some prayer or ceremony at the ready. As it is, the words and gestures are still part of what I hunt for. Over time, as I find them, perhaps a ritual habit will take root in the thin soil of my few years afield.

These gestures need not be confined to the hunt, of course.

Considering all the deaths we inflict, directly and indirectly, there’s as much reason to fall to my knees by a shelf full of bread or corn chips in the grocery store, or even by a display of organic produce at the local farmers’ market.

Yet, standing in front of fruits and vegetables grown by others, I have the luxury of not knowing what cost they incurred.

Maybe the harm was no worse than the initial “conversion” of forest to tillable farm land, plus a few earthworms chopped by shovel or tractor, or some caterpillars knocked off by a bacterial insecticide.

Considering the larger impacts I know my life has, I have decided not to worry about individual invertebrate deaths. I value them ecologically and gently escort many insects out of our house. But I crush the cucumber beetles that attack our squash seedlings.

On the other hand, maybe a few toads were diced in the tilling. Maybe the field was fertilized with compost made from both the manure and the carcasses of cows. Maybe the bushels of greens on display at the farmers’ market took the life of a family of woodchucks. Maybe the flats of strawberries grew to ripeness thanks to the killing of a deer or two.

A long list of maybes: things most of us don’t know or care to know.

When I garden—uprooting weeds, mashing beetles, occasionally shooting a woodchuck—the luxury of ignorance begins to fade.

When I kneel beside a dead whitetail, it disintegrates. Yanked out of forgetfulness, I find I must offer some gesture of gratitude and apology, no matter how clumsy.

© 2010 Tovar Cerulli

Photo by Steve Hillebrand/USFWS

He loved the woods, the animals, and the hunt. What he didn’t count on were the hunters.

Following his boyhood dream, he earned his license as a Registered Maine Guide and landed a job with an outfitter.

Then came the group of hunters who returned to camp bragging about how they had chased a moose with their truck. There to hunt deer or bear, they had just happened onto the bull. They laughed, describing how close they had gotten to the animal and how wildly he had run.

Then came the hunters who used their truck to drag a bear back to camp. A half mile or more of high-speed travel over rough ground left the carcass battered: the hide torn and stripped of hair, the meat covered with dirt.

Then came the hunter who, having already taken a bear, illegally shot another one on the last day of the hunt. The tag on the animal belonged to an inexperienced and luckless companion.

Then came the hunter who wouldn’t keep his rifle pointed away from people, even when reminded.

Had these been isolated incidents, he might have stuck it out. They were not.

Had his fellow guides been as outraged as he was, the outfit might have tightened ship. They were not.

Photo by Ryan Bayne

So he left.

When this young man and I crossed paths a few years ago, he was still a hunter. But he’d had enough of prostituting his skills to guys who cared nothing for what he loved.

When I consider the future of hunting—how it will fare in the public eye, and what meaning it will have for generations to come—it’s not anti-hunters I worry about.

It’s these guys.

© 2010 Tovar Cerulli

Looking back over this blog’s first six months, I notice three items that need tending.

Photo by Steve Wright

First, a postscript to the loss of my friend Steve’s French Brittany, Kate: He brought home her two-month-old niece this past Friday. Cath and I got to meet her yesterday. Yes, she is as sweet and silky soft as she looks.

Second, some acknowledgments are in order. My thanks:

• To all of you who read the odds and ends I share here. But for you, these posts would languish in cyberspace, noticed only by the vulture-like Google bots circling overhead.
• To the fraction of readers who take the time to share thoughts here. The ideas and questions you contribute bring far greater life to mine.
• To all who have generously included me in your blog rolls.
• To all who have mentioned or linked to my blog in a post, including Melissa at Hunt. Gather. Love., Allison at Crossfit New York, Josh at Ethics and the Environment and Lands on the Margin, Eric at Fair Chase, Casey at Wandering Owl Outside, Albert at The Rasch Outdoor Chronicles, Jim at Grousers, and Daniel at Casual Kitchen.
• To those who have made a special point of highlighting my blog on theirs, including Holly at NorCal Cazadora (who sent a bunch of folks my way back in January, when I only had two posts up), Ingrid at The Free Quark, Doug at Harris’ Hawk Blog, Kari at I Don’t Wear Pink Camo to the Woods, and, from across the pond, The Suburban Bushwacker.

As a first step in paying things forward, I encourage you to check out Tamar Haspel’s delightful blog Starving Off the Land, if you haven’t already. Two years ago, Tamar and her husband relocated from Manhattan to Cape Cod. Their goal in 2009 was, every day, to eat one thing they had grown, fished, hunted, or gathered.

This fall will be Tamar’s first deer hunt. Having hunted deer on the Cape in my first season—with my hunting mentor, my Uncle Mark—I’m looking forward to hearing how it goes for Tamar. I wish her more success than I had my first year. Or my second. Or my third.

Finally, about those scavenging Google bots. As anyone with a blog or website knows, they send visitors in hundreds of wacky ways. I’d like to share a few favorite searches that led folks here over the past six months:

• “Are elf owls carnivores or vegetarians?” – Carnivores, if you count insects as carne. The swift, stealthy, typically nocturnal hunting habits of an owl would be wasted on vegetables, don’t you think?
• “Does prey suffer while being swallowed?” – If the suppositions of this blog’s readers are correct, that depends on the amount of euphoric neurotoxin involved.
• “Wild animals have no lace in the 21st century…” – I hope this was a typo and you meant “place.” If not, where can I read more about their use of fancy clothing and lingerie in previous centuries?
  

  Photo by Carl Brandon

• “Physics involved car hitting moose” – The physics involved are very, very bad. See photo at right. At highway speed, this is the best-case scenario.
• “Is hitting a moose in a car worse than hitting a pig?” – Yes. Much worse. Unless the pig is on stilts and, like a bull moose, weighs nearly as much as a Volkswagen Beetle. See physics inquiry above and photo at right.

© 2010 Tovar Cerulli

Was that the faint sound of steps? Of hooves crunching dry leaves under the thin blanket of snow?

Photo by Ken Thomas

Seated on the ground, I shifted to the right and half-raised my .54 caliber caplock.

Moments later, I saw deer some forty yards off, walking toward me among the pines. Two, three, four of them. I brought the rifle to my shoulder and eased back the hammer. My third year of hunting would come to a close in less than a week and I had yet to kill a whitetail.

The first in line was a doe. My tag was for a buck. The little parade had closed to less than thirty yards now, weaving through the trees. Heart pounding, I stared along the iron sights, watching for antlers.

If the chance came, I would probably shoot. Yet I couldn’t be sure. I had mixed feelings about the idea.

It would have sat more easily if I believed, with Descartes, that animals are senseless: nothing more than animated meat. But I don’t.

How different am I, after all, from my fellow primates? Some days I don’t feel like the brightest monkey in the forest. If my mind was not cluttered with abstract ideas, might I experience the world much as an ape does?

If I cannot exclude all non-humans from the realm of sentience, by what logic can I exclude some, drawing the line somewhere south of chimpanzee? A deer is not a primate, but it does have senses—perhaps different in kind, perhaps different mainly in degree. So does the hawk. So does the rabbit on which the hawk feeds. If we give credence to old teachings and recent science, even plants have kinds of awareness.

Perhaps the world is more complex and more beautiful than we have imagined. And more terrible.

My vegan diet had taken its toll not only on plants, but on animals, too—those displaced by the conversion of forest and prairie to farmland, those minced by the combines that harvested my grains, those gassed in their burrows to protect my salad greens, those shot in defense of the soybeans that became my saintly tofu.

Now my omnivorous diet was taking its toll on vertebrates more directly.

And here I was in the woods, wondering how willing I was to exact that price myself.

The lead doe was closer now. Looking past her, I could see that the second in line was a doe as well. The third, also antlerless, looked like a six-month-old. And the fourth?

Ah, another doe.

There would be no killing today, and no answers. Yet my heart still pounded.

The lead doe stood broadside a dozen paces away, her breath pluming in the frosty air, her ears and great, dark eyes focused on me. All four deer paused, aware of my crouching form. Unsure what I was, they hesitated. They looked and listened. Then, slowly, they turned back the way they had come.

Trembling, I sat and watched them go.

© 2010 Tovar Cerulli