Friends, last night I realized that the killing time is nigh. I have a house that needs cleaning, planters that need mulching, and a book that needs writing, but none of these will be done by this weekend. You see, I spent last night cleaning my rifle, counting my ammunition, and sharpening my oldest knife.
I'll have my rifle and knife with me on Saturday morning, before it's anywhere close to warm or light, when I will hike out to a place known to me, my family, and a few trusted friends. And if everything goes right, by Saturday afternoon my bloody hands will be lighting a cigarette, a forbidden treat that I allow myself a few times a year.
It won't be some weirdly sexualized post-coitus smoke, like Garbo with guts and gore staining her clothes. Rather, the smoke will accomplish a number of things: help me relax, memorialize another year passing, cover up the smell of blood on my hands. My stepmother died a few years back of lung cancer, and smokes remind me most of all of life and death: after the killing, I like to remember that we're all dying a little bit, every hour of every day, and that the life I've just taken will actually facilitate and accelerate more life.
It's time, you see, for hunting season. Whitetail deer, to be exact, and it won't be the first time I've pulled the trigger on an animal that I find just as cute, just as picturesque, just as -- well, for lack of a better word -- "noble" as just about anybody you know (with the exception of Peter Singer, whose work I admire and respect immensely).
Yes, friends, I'm a PWH, Progressive Who Hunts (okay, maybe I'm more of a anarcho-syndacalist-libertarian-socialist who, in deference to utilitarian calculation, knocked on a hell of a lot of doors and worked a hell of a lot of phone banks for the Democratic Party in the past five years, only to be deeply depressed by the Mukasey lovers and the apparent enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton - who hunts. But that's a hell of a lot of acronym).
I'm a PWH, but not in the Teddy Roosevelt, PROGRESSIVE WHO HUNTS kind of way: you'll find no taxidermy in my house, no photos of me sitting proudly astride a corpse with a rifle and a grin, no desire to shoot exotic species on wild distant continents. I hunt for a number of reasons, all of which seem to be misunderstood by a fair number of my fellow progressives, who are shocked -- SHOCKED!!! -- to discover that this tweedy, lefty Ph.D. spends a few days each year freezing his bony arse off in a tree-stand.
Time is short, but I just wanted to let you know reasons why I hunt, and reasons that are not a part of why I hunt: whether you're a PETA diarist or a Red State lurker who's been convinced by Faux News that I want to melt down your guns and turn them into gay-wedding-ring-dispensing- abortion-providing-espresso makers, just because I work and hope for a Blue Government (and I'm not talking Blue Dog, I'm talking an Army of Feingolds).
So, if I'm on the Left (and trust me, I'm to the Left of you on just about every single issue in the world), and if killing deer doesn't make me feel like more of a man, and if pictures of me in hunting garb are never going to surface during my Presidential campaign, why do I hunt?
Reason #1: Nutrition. Although married to a vegetarian, I enjoy having meat as a part of my diet, but I believe that factory farming and factory ranching are unsustainable, unethical, and just kind of gross. We can't afford fancy grass-fed, humanely raised and harvested organic beef, but can afford pots of coffee, a weekend with my family, and a few 30.06 shells to go in the rifle that my grandfather left to me when he died. And one cigarette.
Not Reason #2: Tradition. While I was raised hunting and fishing, and have fond memories of deer camp in Oregon with my elders and betters, arguments based on the supposed inherent value of tradition make me nervous. My grandfather, whose rifle I will use this weekend, saw combat at the age of 16 as a submariner in WWII, worked hard all his life, and valued tradition uncritically. He didn't particularly trust African-American people, for example. Valuing tradition for its own sake is at the very heart of conservative ideologies, which lead to the kinds of discrimination, hatred, and violence that we are fighting here.
Reason #3: Ecology. Overpopulated deer herds across the midwest and northeast pose a severe ecological threat. According to the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources:
Wisconsin’s deer population is about 70 percent over goal. All these deer must eat and deer browsing can cause long term (perhaps permanent) changes to the variety of plant species in the forests. In a heavily grazed habitat, the tree, shrub and other plant species preferred by deer decline in abundance after years of heavy browsing.
In addition to severe deforestation, the threat of Chronic Wasting Disease is real, increasing, and accelerated by overpopulated herds.
And no, nature will not return to its natural balance if we simply didn't hunt: the predators have all been killed off so that you can live in a suburb and let your dumb Yorkshire terrier run around without getting eaten by coyotes, and so that you can continue to grill your artificially cheap cheeseburger while decrying hunting as a risible or tragic barbarity.
Not Reason #4: Authenticity. I don't believe that killing my own meat makes me any more authentically human than anybody else, nor do I believe that it brings me "closer to nature" (or at least I'm never sure exactly what that means). I don't bowhunt, because I don't think it's particularly humane: a stabbed deer tends to run while it bleeds to death (at least compared to the two or three steps my heart-shot deer will take before expiring), and notions of "fairness" in the hunt are largely a laughable ideology. Do you sneak up on your sack of boneless chicken breasts in the grocery store?
Reason #5: Honesty. I don't particularly enjoy the actual killing part. I love sitting in the woods, I love eating the meat, but I get no particular thrill from shooting a living thing. I think it's likely that male trophy hunters - especially the ones who go on "canned" hunts - have statistically tiny penises, and are bothered by that fact. I do think that anyone who eats meat should know that they are consuming that which once was alive, and that you won't really know this unless you take the life yourself. Just once. Butcher a chicken or a rabbit, or stick your hands deep up inside the chest cavity of a deer to cut its esophagus in order to remove the viscera. There is no mistaking this body for something that randomly arrived in your freezer, sanitary (or not) and gift-wrapped. There is an analogous relationship here to why I believe that newspapers should print photographs of war victims -- soldiers and the people on whom they drop bombs or bullets -- after they've been maimed and killed, not before: if you can't look at your choices when it involves somebody else's life, you don't deserve to make those choices (you may not deserve it anyway, but here the argument veers into another diary entirely).
If you do belong to PETA or are a devotee of Peter Singer -- and these are honorable, philosophically coherent positions that I respect, even if I don't share them -- then we don't really have much to talk about: we'd be starting our conversation from fundamentally incommensurable premises, and there's no way to meet in the middle. If you're wearing leather shoes right now, or like chicken broth around your noodles, well, okay. I'll be wearing leather boots this weekend while I save your forest and your car. If you're a low-income resident of Wisconsin, I hope to get more than one deer so that I can load your freezer as well as mine with healthy, humanely harvested, organic, nutritious red meat (that is lower in cholesterol and fat than farmed turkey breast), and I hope you enjoy it.
As for me, I may not like the killing part, but I sure am going to love the sausage. And that lone cigarette.