"Why I Eat Wild Meat"

By DAVID PETERSEN

By any honest comparison to the factory-produced, chemical-drenched, fat-laden, pseudo-meat that so many Americans grow obese on today, wild meat—fish, fowl, or red—is a brilliantly natural, inimitably healthy, and morally superior alternative. Since the pros and cons of catch and release is a topic unto itself, today I want to talk about hunting, which I practice with a burning passion for both the act itself, and the prey.

But how can that be, ask hunting’s critics. How can one who kills earnestly feel compassion for his prey, the “victims” of the hunt?

To this reasonable question I respond (in the world’s longest grammatically correct sentence): Which would you rather be—a pig in a small wire cage whose neighbor in the next-door cage tries to eat your tail in frustration, and you his … a steer standing knee-deep in feedlot manure fattening for undignified mass slaughter … a production-line chicken whose beak has been burned off to keep it from pecking its mates to death, again in hopeless frustration … or a deer, elk, pronghorn, or anything truly wild: born free, living and eventually dying as instinct demands—and for the lucky ones, killed swiftly by well-placed arrow or bullet launched by a true hunter; one who cares about wild animals and their dwindling wild world and who isn’t merely killing for ego and antlers, and who in the end gratefully consumes your flesh? Which would you rather be?

Neither nature nor evolution is motivated, much less steered, by a sense of “kindness.” Life on Earth could not exist without predation. Given today’s sad absence of large four-legged predators from most of North America, if hunting were banned or unwisely restricted, rather than improving the welfare of hunted wildlife as our critics imagine, we would see rapid overpopulation and its horrific spawn, including increased collisions with automobiles, disease, overgrazing of habitat, depredation of agricultural crops and, in the bitter end, mass starvation.

Done right, hunting and killing wild game is as natural and moral as making love (another unpopular activity in some uptight circles). Because the dying is often visible and the blood is literally on the hunter’s hands, hunting, especially close-range traditional bowhunting, demands an incomparably greater connection to the reality of our food than does a thoughtless trip to the local market.

“Daddy,” a friend’s young son recently asked, “Where did this chicken we’re eating come from?”

“Uh … a farmer raised it, I guess” my bushwhacked friend heard himself stutter, though he knew it was a cop-out. “As soon as he’s old enough to understand,” he assured me, “I’ll set the boy straight.”

Let’s hope that’s not too late. When I was in grade school, back mid-century, a normal part of elementary education across much of America was a field trip to a slaughterhouse. By comparison, today’s typically overprotective parents don’t want their tender kinder to experience that gory reality check, and the commercial meat industry has learned better than to spill its guts so garishly in public.

In making honest moral judgments about the getting of our daily meat, I believe the first question we must ask ourselves is: “What do we owe to the animals we eat, if anything?” Most urban Americans today, responding with their purchases, clearly reply: “Nothing!” At the opposite extreme, animal rights zealots howl: “Leave the animals entirely alone; they are exactly like us!”

The majority response is willfully ignorant and immoral.

The animal rights response is biologically ignorant and, like all fundamentalism, intellectually inept.

Here is what I say: First, we owe the animals we kill and consume, at the least, the freedom to exercise their bodies and basic natural instincts. Pigs need to root and wallow in dirt and mud. Poultry need to peck for bugs in the dust and flap their wings at will. Cattle need to graze freely, then lie in the shade and chew mindless cud. Game-farm elk and deer need to be set free, as they are not domesticated and suffer greatly, as would we in captivity, making both “hunting” and eating them ethically indefensible.

Second, we owe the animals we eat a quick, humane end, as free as possible of emotional stress and physical suffering.

And in both of these essential measures of our moral duty to our sentient food—the exercise of natural instincts, and a humane death—fair-chase hunting of free-roaming wild game is hands-down superior to the commercial flesh factories and charnel houses where the blood runs so deep workers wear rubber boots.

I eat wild meat because it’s the healthy thing to do, mentally as well as physically. As members of a species that evolved through thousands of generations of subsistence hunting—relying on personal skills and our evolved predatory instincts, rather than on hyper-technology and other purchased shortcuts— true hunting remains among the most physically and intellectually challenging, viscerally engaging adventures we can know. Wild meat contains no antibiotics, growth hormones, or other poisons, and is among the most perfect of all foods. Deer and elk meat is lower in fat than even the white meat of factory turkey; nobody ever died of clogged arteries from eating too much venison or trout.

I eat wild meat because I prefer doing for myself.

I eat wild meat because I find it philosophically and morally agreeable.

But mostly, I eat wild meat because I like it.

David Petersen is the Colorado field director for Trout Unlimited’s public lands conservation programs. For more of Dave’s  introspective thoughts on “wildlife, wild places, wild people, and wild ideas,” check out www.davidpetersenbooks.com.