After I decided take up hunting again this year for birds the next thing that I had thought about was moving up to big mammals. I got quite a bit of venison and antelope from my friend Tom and it was excellent to say the least, made me want more. I also have to purchase a quarter beef and then some each year, a lamb and a whole pig to get me through the year in meat, it would be great to replace some of that with a deer, an antelope or even better an elk. Shooting birds, however, is much easier than shooting a large mammal and the prospect of taking a deer has forced me to do some reading and soul searching on the matter. The deadline is coming soon, if I want to try and hunt deer this fall I need to get my name in the draws next month in just a few weeks then I need to get myself geared up and ready to go.
I first got the idea of hunting again from reading The Paleo Manifesto by John Durant and he does go deer hunting for the first time in one chapter of the book. Durant references The Beginner’s Guide to Hunting Deer for Food by Jackson Landers which I read next. By the time I finished Landers’ book I was pretty convinced I was ready to go get myself a deer. I started making plans for a trip this October to Idaho to hunt with a friend there since Washington regs are so hard to understand I figured I’d need to hire a lawyer first.
Somehow reading these books and browsing web-sites I found The Mindful Carnivore by Tovar Cerulli and just finished it. This was the perfect book for me. Tovar is a Buddhist and was a vegan trying to live a very ethical life. He had to add animal protein into his diet and, like me, began killing fish. Then he moved into small occasional small game and finally took up deer hunting. It took Tovar several seasons to finally get that first deer and boy did he try, hunting archery, rifle and muzzleloader seasons each year. The feelings he goes through when he finally has killed a deer remind me of how I felt after breaking the necks of the rabbits a few weeks ago, it is hard to take the life of a mammal, especially with your bare hands.
The chapter Reckoning is all about this ambivalence. It starts with a great quote from Mary Zeiss Stange:
The paradoxes of life and death admit no ready solutions: they should not.
That pretty much sums up what Tovar feels that, that maybe the killing of a deer should not lead to any moral certainty but instead bring up this ambiguity each time. There were three paragraphs in this chapter that I totally could relate to:
In becoming a vegan, I had been mindful of my diet’s consequences for the planet and for the beings who inhabit it. I aimed to confront those consequences head-on, to see them clearly, to choose the path of least harm. I sought a respectful, holistic way of eating and living, a kind of right dietary citizenship, my food choices shaped by ecological and animal-welfare concerns in much the way that early American vegetarianism was shaped by fears of animality, issues of social reform and aspirations to masculinity and success. I was mindful, too, of my diet’s inner consequences. Since I believed that killing of animals was an unnecessary evil, integrity and alignment – a sense of values put into action – could only come from a meat free diet.
In becoming a hunter, my outward aim had been the same: to be mindful of the consequences of my diet, and to confront one of those consequences – the death of animals – with my eyes open. Taking a life carefully and swiftly seemed the most conscientious path. I still sought a respectful, holistic way of eating and living, my decision to hunt shaped by the same concerns that shaped my veganism. My inner aim had also been the same. Having concluded that I needed some animal protein in my diet and that some harm to animals was inevitable in even the gentlest forms of agriculture, integrity and alignment could only come from taking responsibility for at least a portion of the killing.
Hunting, however, would not put me on a new high road to moral certainty. If this first experience of killing a deer was any indication, it would bring me face-to-face with ambiguity every time. Perhaps this was how it ought to be.
This book has given me a lot to think about over the next week while I ponder putting in for a draw in Idaho this fall. I’ve done the research on the area thanks to my friend Kreg’s help and have been looking into an appropriate rifle. Knowing that I’d quite possibly need to be making a very long shot a few friends agreed that a 30-06 is the way to go. The problem with a 30-06 is that it kicks like a mule, and an angry mule at that. A 30-06 Springfield will put out about a 20 foot pounds of recoil energy moving at around 12 feet per second (From Chuck Hawks recoil tables). Compare this to my dad’s old .243 Winchester which was less that 10 foot pounds of recoil at about 9 feet per second. The solution appears to be the same as for my shotgun choice – go with a semi-auto that uses the recoil energy to eject the cartridge and absorb some of it. The Browning BAR and the Benelli R1 each fit the bill well, especially the Benelli with a ComforTech stock which effectively turns that 30-06 onto a .243. So, an expensive rifle with quality scope would be in order.
Add to that the fact I can’t go out and target practice too much with the 30-06 and a smaller rimfire rifle is going to be needed to so that I can get my shooting skills down pat without dealing with expensive ammunition and a sore shoulder. Luckily these are cheap and I could get a Savage .17 with scope for about $300 that would suffice. In the end it would be cheaper to just buy venison but it wouldn’t give me the chance to, as Tovar put it, confront one of those consequences – the death of an animal – with eyes wide open.