On Killing

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Dead ducks on a tailgate.
Photo by Holly A. Heyser

UPDATE: I want to thank everyone who has responded to this post, both below in the comments section and to me directly via email. More than one of your responses has been so moving it’s stopped me in my tracks. And Zane from Cleveland, your letter choked me up pretty bad. It is rare for me to write about such things; doing so feels like opening a vein in public. I am glad to know that I am not alone out there. Thank you.

I have been dealing a lot of death lately. I’ve hunted five of the past eight days, and have killed birds on each trip. My larder is filling, and Holly and I are eating well. Lots of duck, some pheasant and even a little of the venison I have left over from the 2010 season. That is the good side of all this, the side of hunting that most people can embrace. I hunt for a lot of reasons, but for me the endgame is always the table.

It is the journey to that table that can sometimes give people pause. What I do to put meat in my freezer is alien to most, anathema to some. In the past seven years, I can count on one hand the times I’ve had to buy meat for the home. This fact alone makes me an outlier, an anomaly. And that I am unashamed — proud, really — of this seems to cause a lot of folks I meet to look at me funny: I am a killer in their midst.

Not too long ago, I was at a book signing event for Hunt Gather Cook when a young woman approached me. She was very excited about foraging, and she had loved that section of my book. Then her face darkened. She told me she’d also read my section on hunting. “How can you enjoy killing so much? I just don’t understand it. You seem like such a nice person, too.” It took a few minutes for me to explain myself to her, and I am grateful that she listened. She left, I think, with a different opinion.

A few weeks later, I was at the University of Oregon talking about wild food to some students. When I mentioned hunting, I could feel the temperature in the room drop. It occurred to me that no one there was a hunter, nor were they close to any hunters. I called for a show of hands. One guy raised his. I asked him briefly about his hunting experience, and it was obvious that it had been traumatic for the poor kid. I let the topic slide and moved on to mushrooms.

When I was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I spoke with more than 100 diners during my book dinner at the excellent restaurant Craigie on Main. Only four were hunters, although a few more wanted to start. Over the course of the night, I fielded weird question after weird question from diner after diner. Have I ever shot someone? Did I actually eat what I shot? Wasn’t I afraid of diseases? It was a stark show of ignorance. Not stupidity, mind you, just an utter lack of knowledge of what hunting is all about.

To be sure, these encounters were in college towns among a certain set of people. I had some book events, notably those in Montana, Pittsburgh and Austin, where most everyone who attended either hunted or was at least familiar with it. And in most places I could be assured of a healthy smattering of fellow hook-and-bullet types or farmers, who are equally familiar with the death of animals.

But the fact remains: Most people reading this have never killed anything larger than an insect, and among those who have it’s usually a been fish, or an accident — like running over someone’s dog. Most people have no idea what it’s like to take the life of another creature, let alone why someone would actively seek to do so. Let me try to explain to you the way I did to my young foraging friend on book tour. Let me tell you what it means to kill, at least for me.

To deal death is to experience your world exploding. It is an avalanche of emotion and thought and action.

Armed with a shotgun, it is often done without thought, on instinct alone. A flushing grouse gives you no more than a few seconds to pull the trigger before it disappears into the alders. A rabbit can leap back into the brambles in even less time. Unless you are perfect in that split second, the animal wins. And being human, we are far from perfect. Even with ducks, where you often have plenty of time to prepare for the shot, their speed and agility are more than adequate defenses. We hunters fail more than we succeed.

This is why we will often whoop it up when we finally bring a bird down: We are not being callous, rejoicing in the animal’s death. It is a hard-wired reaction to succeeding at something you have been working for days, months, even years to achieve. In some corner of your brain, it means you will eat today. This reaction can look repulsive from the outside.

Should you arm yourself with a rifle, you then must wrestle your conscious mind. Buck fever is real. A huge set of antlers will hypnotize the best of us, man and woman alike. Even if the animal lacks antlers, as mine often do, you have to contend with The Twin Voices: On one shoulder sits a voice shouting, Shoot! Shoot! You might not get another chance! On the other shoulder sits another voice, grave and calm: Be careful. You must not put that bullet in a place where the animal will suffer. Better to pass a shot than wound an animal.  A wise hunter does not kill lightly.

In that moment when the game shows itself and you ready yourself to shoot, all that matters is that you do your job correctly. And that job is to kill cleanly and quickly. The animal deserves it; we would want no less were the tables turned. And make no mistake: A great many hunters, myself included, do this mental table-turning with some frequency. Seeing animals die so often makes us think of our own death, and I can assure you most of us would rather die with a well-placed shot than wither in a hospital.

We also know all too well that we are fallible creatures. When we fail to kill cleanly, when we wound the animals we seek, it is our duty to end their suffering ourselves. If there is a moment in this whole process that breaks my heart, it is this one. Everything wants to live, and will try anything it can to escape you. We see ourselves in this struggle, feel tremendous empathy for the struggling bird, the fleeing deer. It is a soul-searing moment where part of you marvels at the animal’s drive to live — to escape! — at the same time the rest of you is consumed with capturing it as fast as possible so you can end this miserable business. This internal conflict is, to me, what being human is all about. A coyote or a hawk has no remorse. We do.

I am not ashamed to tell you that I have shed a tear more than once when I’ve had to deliver the coup de grace to a duck. I’m not sure what it is about ducks, but they affect me more than other animals. I always apologize to it, knowing full well that this is a weak gesture designed mostly to help me feel better. But it does help me feel better. At least a little. So I keep doing it.

As the moment of killing fades, death rides home with you in the back of the truck. Once home, you must transmogrify the animal you killed into meat. The transformation is a mystical one, and every time I “dress” game — such a pleasant euphemism, that — I marvel at how fast my mind toggles from hunter to butcher to cook.

It is a necessary process, and one that is vital to why I have chosen this life, why I am a hunter.

I look down at my keyboard and see death under my fingernails. I smell the fat and gore and meat of dead ducks upon me; it’s been a good week of hunting. And because I eat everything on a duck but the quack, I have become intimate with the insides of waterfowl. Over the years, I’ve gutted and taken apart so many animals that I know the roadmap blindfolded. And that road leads to meals long remembered. I reach into a deer’s guts without thought: I want those kidneys, and that liver. I turn my arm upwards and wrap my fingers around its stopped heart, slick and firm. It will become heart cutlets, or jaeger schnitzel.

Once plucked and gutted, I can take apart a duck in 90 seconds. Maybe less. My fingers intuitively know which way and how hard to pluck each feather from a pheasant’s carcass. I know just where to put my boning knife, sharp as lightning, to slice the tendons that hold a hog’s tongue into its head. I use the same knife to caress its hind legs, separating the natural muscle groups apart along each seam. Some will become roasts, others salami. Animal becomes food. The pop of a goose’s thigh bone disjointing from its body no longer sickens me; all it means is that I need to slip my knife under that bone and around the coveted “oyster,” the best bite on any bird.

Wasting meat is the sin I cannot forgive. When I kill an animal, its death is on my hands, and those animals to whom I’ve had to deliver the coup de grace are especially close to me. There is a bond between us that requires that I do my part to ensure they did not die for nothing. This is why I spend so much time creating recipes for every part of the animal. Nature wastes nothing, and neither should I. It pains me to know that some hunters do not share this feeling, that they care only for backstraps or breasts — and while I know that coyotes and buzzards will eat what we do not, I do not hunt to feed those creatures.

You might ask me that with all this, why bother eating meat at all? Why deal with all the moral and emotional implications? In the face of such constant death, is it not better to be a vegetarian?

For me, no. It is a cold fact that no matter what your dietary choice, animals die so you can eat. Just because you choose not to eat the flesh of animals does not mean that their homes did not fall to the plow to become acres of vegetables and soybeans, wheat and corn. Habitat, more than anything, determines the health of a species. The passenger pigeon may have been snuffed out by wanton, unregulated hunting, but it was the massive destruction of virgin forest — forest cleared to grow crops — that brought the pigeon to the brink. I have nothing against vegetarians, and the vast majority I’ve met understand what I do and respect it. But to those few who do not, I say this: We all have blood on our hands, only I can see mine.

It all boils down to intimacy. Hunting has created an uncommon closeness between the animals I pursue, the meat I eat, and my own sense of self. There is a terrible seriousness to it all the underlies the thrill of the chase, the camaraderie of being with my fellow hunters and deep sense of calm I feel when alone in the wild. I welcome this weight: It fuels my desire to make something magical with the mortal remains of the game I manage to bring home. It is a feeling every hunter who’s ever stared into the freezer at that special strip of backstrap, or hard-won bird or beast understands.

Meat should be special. It has been for most of human existence. And no modern human understands this more than a hunter. I am at peace with killing my own meat because for me, every duck breast, every hog tongue, every deer heart is a story, not of conquest, but of communion.

What's left of a roast grouse, picked clean.
Photo by Holly A. Heyser

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About Hank Shaw

Hey there. Welcome to Hunter Angler Gardener Cook, the internet’s largest source of recipes and know-how for wild foods. I am a chef, author, and yes, hunter, angler, gardener, forager and cook. Follow me on Instagram and on Facebook.

99 Comments

  1. I love this: “It all boils down to intimacy.” It is very true. I grew up with my mom slaughtering chickens for dinner and I have always found it fascinating and not at all appalling. It is the intimate connection with the bird that I love. It makes me more appreciative of the food on my dinner plate. Someday I’d love to experience hunting.

  2. Excellent article! Thank you!

    I am a Hunter Education Instructor and one of the things I ask my students during their hunt planning session is to think about is WHY they want to hunt. I tell them it is a personal thing for each one in their group to consider and not necessary to make it part of their presentation, although I do encourage them to share their reasons.

    I am going to share this page on my FB page and ask my non-hunter and vegan friends to read this…and hope they will.

    Thank you again!

  3. What a wonderful essay. I think all meat-eaters should read this, whether they hunt or buy their meat in plastic packages. It’s worth thinking about how our meat gets into those packages after all.

    I gained a whole new appreciation for the process after my college-age son worked on a farm (WWOOF) this summer. It was more of a ranch–they raise grass-fed beef and chickens and vegetables and sell raw milk at market.. It was a small operation and they let my son participate in the slaughter. He killed a few chickens, too. He wrote a guest-post on my food blog about it (did a great job, if I do say so, but heck, I’m his mother.) It is rare that anyone, let alone young people (let alone young people from Cambridge MA, AKA United Republic of Cambridge) would have this experience, so I was fascinated and proud of how he handled it and the understanding and reverence he exhibited after the experience. By the way, nothing, NOTHING, on the ranch was wasted. A lesson the multitudes have forgotten.

  4. Hi Hank.

    I’ve been following your blog for a while – since my friend Amanda introduced me to it! This post really nailed it for me. We are relatively new to hunting. My husband and I did not grow up in hunting families. This time of year I am plucking and gutting lots of ducks and geese. Right now I am feeling a little frayed by it all. It’s emotional for me sometimes. As it should be. I butchered a lamb recently as well. I have never felt emotions over food before. I have an emotional attachment to the meat in my freezer. As I should. Thank you.

  5. Very well said. I can totally relate – many of the same thoughts and feelings went trough my head while hunting, butchering and then eating deer over Thanksgiving weekend.

  6. I remember when I killed my first chicken. My main worry was not in killing the bird. I was worried that when I was done, I would no longer see my precious cats as the darling little kids that I always thought of them as. Would I see them as just another piece of meat? It terrified me and I almost didn’t do it, not wanting to damage my relationship with them. They are precious to me, and really are my children. (Yup, I’m a crazy cat lady.) But I did it. As I did it, I said a silent prayer to whoever was listening to keep their deaths as painless and quick as possible. I openly thanked the bird for its sacrifice, for keeping me healthy and feeding me. Mine was a group situation with about 20 other people, everyone from people who had done this for years to people who were vegan, and wanted to do this to prove to themselves…well, various things. We all helped each other, held those that cried, and we all learned something. All of us, from the most skilled to the least inclined, walked away with more respect for humanity, our food, and how we get our food. All the vegans came away with the idea that eating meat may not be as bad as they thought, as long as they were willing to grow and kill the meat themselves.

    I got home that night with two of the best chickens I’ve ever had. I sat on the couch and nervously waited for one of my cats to jump up in my lap, not sure what my own reaction to these animals would be. Luckily, it was the same as it always had been, and I petted my kids and loved them. Nothing had changed. Except I was able to share my kill with them, which, in an odd way, made my bond with them stronger. I became even more of a parent to them than I had been before. I had never so intimately been able to provide for them. I had killed their food myself.

  7. Absolutely everything I have felt and wanted to say, said much better than I could. And I haven’t managed to *make* the transition to hunter (yet), but I do have chickens and we have killed some of the roosters to eat. Thank you thank you thank you for giving me something I can point to when I am flustered for how to explain myself to some of my peers who haven’t been exposed to this aspect of life (for what is death but a natural part of life?!).

  8. Hank, I think this is an eloquent and clear explanation of what is a very fundamental human reaction: how it feels to feed ourselves.

    I’ve come to believe that there’s a satisfaction in procuring food that hits us on a primordial level, and you’ve probably experienced it more — and in more varied circumstances — than anyone I know. Killing is part of that.

    Thanks for choosing to write about it. It’s important.

  9. This, all of this… YES. I grew up hunting, it’s a part of who I am and it no doubt shaped my values and views on food and respect. My views are not largely shared by those in my peer group and when asked to explain myself, I’ve never been able to express myself as eloquently as you have. This literally brought tears to my eyes. Thank you Hank.

  10. Hank,
    Absolutely fantastic viewpoint on the taking a life. All hunters should keep this in mind
    throughout the process. I am always emotional when I take game. I think that many
    people who are not hunters don’t realize these feelings exist in us. The more we educate hopefully the more people will understand us.

    Great stuff as usual. Happy Holidays and good hunting.

    Alan

  11. Thank you for this very thoughtful and articulate essay. I will share a link to this page with the director of the International Becoming An Outdoorswoman (BOW) Program; I think many members will appreciate your insight.

  12. Hank;

    While I understand and appreciate your level of empathy when it comes to killing animals, what I really like is the choice that you take – ‘if you’re gonna kill it, don’t waste anything.’

    I love to hunt and fish, but I do not enjoy the actual kill. But I really like everything that comes after, from field dressing to butchering to preservation. I like it when non-hunters are brave enough to try some well-prepared game and they really like what they eat.

    So, OK, I lie a little. There is one kill that I have enjoyed: I used to go to Alaska with an eighty year old; we had an agreement that for any halibut over 90 lbs, he could shoot it before we would load it into the boat. ( Long story short – they can do a lot of damage!)

    But every time he shot a halibut, I would break out laughing, and we would stand there in the boat, sopping wet from the spray, too tired to even pull the ‘but in the boat until we quit laughing.

    Thanks for another great post!

  13. I can totally understand and empathize with you. While I don’t hunt, I raise animals for meat and I always get the same reaction from people, except for me “How can you eat something you raised?” is tacked on with a look of horror. How can I eat something I didn’t raise (except for the game my husband brings home)? I want the control of truly knowing where my food came from. At least with my animals I know that they had a great life with only one bad day.

  14. Excellent write up! I am just now in the process of transforming from “just the cook” to huntress and the cook which has taken me more than ten years (fishing aside). I think you eloquently stated why I am making that transition and also why it has taken me so long. thank you.

  15. Hank, hi and many thanks for this post; it’s something than anyone who has even the faintest desire to ‘go back to nature’ has to think and feel through for themselves carefully and profoundly, rather than skirting around it. I have never hunted myself, and largely I try to avoid meat, both because of the sheer industrialised scale of the process and on account of health reasons but I take your point about vegetarians and the impact that their lifestyle can also have on other animals (as well as on other humans elsewhere in the world, who produce cash crops for export rather than feeding themselves).

    Also, I think your post helps to build a bridge between folks who are often separated on account of potentially glib political divisions – over here in the UK we have for example the “huntin’, shootin’, fishin” brigade whose countryside pursuits seem to be based more on socio-economic status than any affinity with the land or the creaturely world, and they would not be held in high regard by those on the Left.

    But we are all foragers, in the end, we all take from the earth, and in this sense of knowing it ever more consciously, and sharing that responsibility, rather than seeing the rape of the planet as a problem caused by someone else, we can go beyond categories of thought that truly belong to the 19th Century, and work out more distinctly ideas for all of us that belong to the 21st.

    Anyway, I enjoyed the thoughtfulness of the post and your insight into a world I know little about.

    All best!