Hold the Meat – I’m cool with hunting

…people. For sport.

Sorry, I really just can’t help myself sometimes. As a general rule, I’m against violence. Not that many people are for it, but violent acts and blood make me squeamish, which is why I was always against hunting. To me, hunting equaled murder, plain and simple.

I remember being a kid and going to visit my aunt and uncle up in Ohio. My uncle was a big hunter, and the walls of their house were adorned with deer heads and other animal parts. It not only terrified me (I could feel their eyes boring into me), but it made me sad (they were totally saying, “why didn’t you help me?” in their little Bambi voices).

I couldn’t understand why these little guys had to die. For food? Clearly the accusing eyes staring at me weren’t being eaten. For sport? I’ve always heard golf is a relaxing past time. To prove that your dick is big? It was my uncle’s house and I very much did not want to think about that.

It always seemed so senseless to me: the taking of a life just because you could. It never occurred to me that hunting could be more than that, and that sometimes, even to a vegetarian, it could be justified. That is, until I dated a hunter.

Before I dated this guy, I thought the only justifiable reason for shooting an animal was if a goose broke into your house, or you found a deer in bed with your wife. From what I understood, neither of these scenarios happened very often, so to me, there was no reason to hunt. Then this guy explained it to me so simply, that it completely changed my views.

He hunted, not for sport, or to adorn his walls with tacky mementos of the time he was a Big Man — he hunted to eat. He hunted to the point that he no longer bought meat at a grocery store. If he didn’t kill it himself, he didn’t eat it. This, on its face, horrified me. It seemed so barbaric.

“Think about what the animals who end up in the grocery store go through,” he said to me. “The animals I hunt have a normal life up until the end.” As I thought about this, I realized it was true. I was in college at the time, and the central Virginia town where we were was a huge chicken producer. Seeing the trucks on the highway with chickens stacked like cord wood, feathers missing, feet welded to the cages, was a common sight. They didn’t have a life. They had torture and death; nothing more — until their flesh was processed beyond recognition, turned into chicken fingers and sold in the local Kroger.

This exchange happened before I read Fast Food Nation, and before movies like Food, Inc. were really becoming mainstream. Only hippies ate organic and nobody thought about where there food came from. Things have changed a lot in the intervening years. People, including me, are slowly becoming more conscious about the food they eat and the process in which it gets to them.

I’ve started eating organic food as much as possible, and I make the local farmer’s market a regular Saturday stop. I’m not obsessive about it, but if I can eat something grown locally, I will. Plus, you can totally buy booze there and support people in your own community.

If you’ve read this column before, you know that I’m not trying to convert people to vegetarianism. In a perfect world, we’d let the deer hang out and eat some grass, we’d let the geese swim around in the lake, and we’d let the turkeys just face up to the sky and drown themselves in the rain, the way God intended those stupid-ass birds to die. But it’s not a perfect world, and from what I understand, steak is delicious.

If you’re going to eat meat though, why not try to be a little more conscientious about it? If you can’t hunt it yourself, buy organic. At least let the cow you’re about to eat has a life before it becomes your steak. Oh, and hunting for food or no, if you keep deer heads on your wall, you’re an asshole. Read any true crime book and you’ll know that keeping trophies of your kills is some serious serial killer behavior — and that shit is crazy.

Clacked by Kona Gallagher
on Apr 15, 2009 @ 12:00 EST5EDT