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

Photo by Steve Creek

The Mindful Carnivore lifts off today.

In reality, it has been landing on shelves for a couple weeks already. But today it’s official. The book is out, in hardcover and all flavors of eBook.

In the Acknowledgments section of the book, I thank many people, including you:

. . . all the readers of my blog, for commenting on my posts and engaging each other in spirited and civil debate, for opening my eyes to new perspectives and challenging me to reconsider my own.

I mean that. This book would not have happened without you. Or, if it happened, it would have been a lesser creation. I am in your debt.

And—because I believe in this book and the questions it raises—I’m willing to add to that debt by asking two favors.

• First, if you’re inclined to buy the book, please consider doing it in the next few days. I’m told that moving the sales needle in the first week really matters. (If you can make it to one of my upcoming book events here in New England, please consider buying a copy there, to support the independent bookstores hosting me.)

• Second, please help spread the word. Over coffee or over a meal, at a meeting or online, please mention the book to a few friends—or a few hundred. Word-of-mouth is powerful.

Many thanks.

I’ll keep you posted on the conversations that get sparked as the book spreads its wings. I look forward to bringing those conversations right back here.

© 2012 Tovar Cerulli

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

Note: If you enjoy the video, you’re more than welcome to share it. To embed it in a blog post or web page, click the “Share this” button in the bottom-right corner of the video frame and grab the embed code. It works just like YouTube.

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