Discovery Channel Magazine: so why should I care about hunting?

Discovery Channel Magazine, June 2013 

Anti-hunting? If you’re a vegetarian, you’re excused. If not, you’re a hypocrite.  Because the minute you sink your teeth into a steak, you are joining a community within which the hunter is not only a natural participant but the most honest one.

It’s a cliché that, if people had to hunt their own food, most would become vegetarians. It’s a cliché because it’s true. The pre-packed meats we buy in Carrefour or Cold Storage insulate us from the cold reality that we are eating an animal. By the time we get meat, it no longer looks anything like an animal; pink and red meat, white fat. Just a slab. Hunters at least dare to look their food in the eye, to accept it for what it is, and to have the self-awareness to accept that killing is part of the process you have to accept whether you’re pulling the trigger or buying from the supermarket shelf.

We’re not talking about the morons who would shoot an animal just to put its head on the wall and waste the rest of the body. We’re not talking about the indefensible who would kill an endangered big game beast just to cut off a horn for dubious medicinal use. True hunters use as much as possible of what they kill: not just meat but fur. And you know what? You might think it inhumane, but a hunted animal has lived a life in the outdoors. It has not been force-fed in a barn or a battery cage, surrounded by its own excrement and stuffed with unnatural hormones before being murdered in an abattoir. If you want an enemy, go take on the livestock industry.

Hunting, after all, is where we started; it’s where meat entered the human diet. For millennia, this was how people survived. And there are communities in the developing world where it continues to be the case. Remove meat from the diet of these groups and they die out; what’s more, the meat they hunt is the very definition of organic. As healthy as it gets.

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