Greg Breining: Why I hunt

Deer are doe-eyed, of course, pretty in a bovid way. I always enjoyed seeing them. Unless they were eating the white pines at my cabin. Or poised by the side of the highway, ready to leap into the beam of my headlights.

But I never thought or cared much about deer -- until I started shooting and eating them.

As a teenager I hunted ruffed grouse, but not big game. Then my wife, Susan, began the pursuit with a girlfriend, a government ecologist who had declared war on the plentiful whitetails that mowed down her beloved native trees and wildflowers. After a couple of seasons, I joined them.

One day, as I sat on an oak-covered hillside, a young deer, browsing in the waning minutes of daylight, wandered within range of my slug-loaded bird gun. With the sound of thunder and a moment of violent thrashing, Susan and I had our venison.

The next morning, as a bitter wind pelted us with icy snow, we wrestled with pages of butchering instructions downloaded from the Internet. As the splayed carcass twirled from a tree by the cabin, I tore away the hide and carved away at major muscle groups. Susan filleted small bundles of muscles from the super-tough connective tissue known as silver skin and wrapped the meat in white butcher paper.

From that moment to this, with another firearm hunting season just ended (bow and muzzle loader hunting continues), the whitetail has been a different animal for me. My detached appreciation of their size and beauty, my annoyance at their predilection for roadsides, and my casual familiarity with their habits gave way to an abiding interest in details.

People are often surprised that I hunt. I don't seem the type, I guess. I drive a Honda. I vote for liberals. Because I write about the environment and wildlife, people assume I am a friend to animals.

I pretty clearly understand why I hunt -- I find it thrilling. I am never more focused in the woods than when I hunt. And Susan and I like the lean meat of known provenance -- so much so that we don't buy much beef until the venison disappears.

I think hunting can easily be justified on ecological grounds. Depending on how much you drive to go hunting, it is one of the most environmentally benign ways to be a meat-eater. Except for the gas I burn, I'm doing little to expand my carbon footprint or to significantly change the environment.

I can even support hunting on the standard of cruelty. Food writer Michael Pollan notes that perhaps the best way to treat the animals we eat is to let them express their innate character, be they goats or turkeys, before their quick demise. Those who think they're too merciful to be hunters should consider that factory-farmed pigs, chickens and cows almost certainly get far less chance to express their animal nature than hunted game.

But it was after talking to Dave Garshelis that I began to realize more fully the benefit of hunting to the animals themselves.

Garshelis is the bear biologist for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. In addition to studying and helping to regulate the hunting of bears in the state, he also studies bears around the world as a researcher at the University of Minnesota. He spends a lot of time studying Asian black bears, a species in many ways similar to our own.

Garshelis has noticed this paradox: Where hunting is legal and regulated, bears do well. Where hunting is outlawed, they don't. You'd think that if a species is in trouble, as black bears are in China, for example, the prudent thing would be to ban all hunting. That's what the Chinese have done. But such an approach seems to backfire, says Garshelis.

"In China, it's OK to poach bears because no one likes them," he says. "It's totally illegal to poach bears, but nobody gives a rip."

In this country, the status of bears as game animals increases their value to hunters. Game status generates a "program" supported by hunting license sales. "Because there is an agency and because we try to be law-abiding citizens," Garshelis says, "the general public is actually a watchdog for poachers."

Indeed, a well-established tradition of hunting -- with restraint -- is good for game. But I would say the benefits are even broader than Garshelis lets on and extend to nongame wildlife as well. Where there is a culture of hunting -- whether the regulated hunting of developed countries or traditional hunting by indigenous people -- there's an understanding and give and take that strengthens wildlife conservation overall. That is, hunting is better for wildlife than not to hunt at all.

In his essay "Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?" Richard White makes the point that all of us, vegans included, make our mark on the earth. But most of us, especially those of the urban, white-collar tribe, don't know it. Writes White, "What is disguised is that I -- unlike loggers, farmers, fishers, or herders -- do not have to face what I alter, and so I learn nothing from it."

• • •

It may be thrilling to see a live animal at close range. It is doubly thought-provoking to head into the woods intending to kill it.

Like hiking or bird-watching, hunting brings into focus the beauty of the outdoors. But it also illuminates the struggle for life that exists in nature. We destroy to eat, whether it is to kill a deer to eat it or to drain a duck marsh to plant soybeans or to trap a rabbit to save the vegetable garden. Simply watching a moose, howling at wolves or signing a petition to save the whales is not the same as confronting the paradox that your life necessarily collides with theirs in a fundamental way.

We engage in this struggle because we are a part of nature. Hunting breaks down the fallacy that humans and nature are separate, that animals once lived in their own Garden of Eden, free of the original sin of human interference. What is "unnatural" is not hunting -- a deer munching serenely on suburban shrubbery with no fear whatsoever that a human with a stone-tipped arrow or a bolt-action rifle might try to make dinner of it.

Abstract relationships with the natural world lead to extreme positions -- whether it is the conservative ideologue who would argue for free-market solutions to environmental problems (or no solutions at all) without regard for practical effect, or the environmentalist who would wage war for a wilderness in which the number of wolves is never enough.

That is not to say we must all hunt to be good conservationists. Or that all hunters care about wildlife. I like hunting a lot more than I like some hunters. They use weaselly euphemisms like "harvesting" wildlife while reciting the passive malarkey that they hunt because deer (or bears or birds) "must be managed." In the woods, I see a casual disregard of etiquette, ethics and common sense, whether it is trash, destruction from ATVs, or gut piles from out-of-season poaching. Too many hunters seem to vote on the basis of reactionary "cultural" issues rather than for practical measures that would benefit wildlife or the environment.

Nonetheless, a tradition of hunting, fishing, gathering -- of long use and participation in the outdoors in a practical, consumptive give-and-take -- creates a culture of knowledge. And a feeling there is something at stake in our relationship with nature.

Greg Breining is a St. Paul writer who reports on matters of science, nature and travel for the New York Times and other publications. His latest book is "A Hard-Water World: Ice Fishing and Why We Do It."