hunting

Last night when I took off my shirt I was horrified to find a small black speck on my stomach. It was a tick, a souvenir from Virginia, feasting upon my blood. I had showered many times since returning to the city, but perhaps it had hid in my thick dark head of hair.

I had been feasting on blood myself. The blood of a fallow deer, killed for my hunting class with a perfect shot to the head that preserved her still grace in heavy lidded glassy eyes. 

Many people who have never really dealt with dead animals much assume it is a bloody affair, but the reality is that unless you bungle some blood vessel, it's possible to wear your nicest suede shoes while you butcher. Each cavity is wrapped with convenient lovely translucent membranes that make the job much easier than you would expect.

Hide preservation expert Fergus was there to teach us how to get the hide off in a way that allows you to keep it for tanning without much work scraping. Later he showed us finished hides, which were warm and silky. Apparently you can tan hides quite easily with the animal's brain, which is rich is nourishing fats that led to a soft, if slightly fishy smelling buckskin. We didn't want to eat the brain anyway because of some concerns with chronic wasting disease, a relative of mad cow disease that has never been found in humans, but I suppose it's a risk not worth taking, especially considering that ghee and butter are a tastier replacement for the nutritional qualities of brain.

The next concern is the digestive system, the potential source of meat contamination. If you do it right, you should avoid being assaulted by the fermenting contents of the stomach and intestines. You "unzip" the stomach with a good sharp knife, preferably featuring a rather useful gut hook that prevents puncturing quite well. Then comes the taste of disconnecting this long path that the deer's food had been taking, so different from mine. The deer's magic stomachs have the ability to take what looks like useless leaves and other woody forage and ferment them into food. A deer is a great way to eat your salad, as they can do more with it than you ever can.

The rest is taking out the cuts of meat, neatly skinning to make a blanket for the deer to rest while you cut. From the back we ate small slivers of the ruby red meat raw. It tasted fresh and slightly chewy, like the woods that were now full of small honeysuckle flowers tempting me as a walked past them with the hot musky summers of Georgia where I grew up. At night I could hear mockingbirds sing. It had been many years since I last heard that strangely haunting sound. I could imagine myself back in the South, despite not missing the rude insects that devoured my food or the Southern Baptist churches that devoured my soul. I liked hearing" y'all" from the mouths of smiling people, I liked the humid languishing mornings cooled by lemonade from the surprisingly bustling farmer's market. I liked the idea that the hunting license allows one to take a bear, something a Virginian in my blood named William Gibson once did back in the 1700s according to some old records I once found.

But Virginia is not the South I remember, the Florida panhandle, Louisiana, Mississippi places my family now lives that are ancient swamps. Virginia is more manicured- in between the primeval of the deep South and the dark Northern cities. Perhaps like I am having been so far from the South for nearly a decade now.

We carved the body cavity through and through, leaving bare ribs skinless so the light could shin through. The digestive system we left for the vultures, as it belongs to them. I read recently about one of the earliest religious sites, Göbekli Tepe, a marvel considering that hunter-gatherers had no cities, but they bothered to build this temple carved with vultures, lions, and other predators of humans dead...and alive. Some theorize that the hunter-gatherers left their dead here to be eaten by these fierce flesh eating creatures. The word for this is "excarnate," which is very beautiful to me, the idea of sharing your body with other carnivores. I think of then as a time when none owned another, except in death when it was an honor to be consumed and melded with others. Some place has called it the "garden of Eden," since it was theorized that this was where the transition to agriculture might have happened as people gathered together in more density. It's funny how the true garden of Eden is a place of lions and vultures rather than lions lying down with the lambs. Et in Arcadia...

With John Durant, Zev

But that is just myself extrapolating based on my own experience. I would be quite happy to only consume hunted meat only though, perhaps with some cream and butter from my own cattle. Mary Strange's book Woman The Hunter has much about the philosophy of hunter-gatherers towards animals. The lines are more blurred for them- they are animals and each animal perhaps becomes other animals, and each is intelligent and cunning in its own way.

A common criticism of hunting (and, as in Carol Adam's vegetarian feminism, of meat-eating in general) is that the hunter objectifies the prey, enforcing the split between human and nonhuman nature. According to this logic, one can only kill and eat something one perceives as an inferior "other," an entity worthy of use rather than of love or mutual regard. Yet from all we know about hunter-gatherer worldviews, precisely the opposite is the case for people who rely upon hunting for a significant portion (literal or symbolic) of their sustenance. For them, they animals they hunt and the predator species that are hunters like themselves, are kindred souls, powerful and intelligent. All animals, nonhuman and human, participate together in a web of pulsating life: birthing and nurturing, pursuing and fleeing, capturing, and dying.

By contrast ...the conventional view of nature that has developed in American civilization and, arguably, has reached its quintessential expression in such movements as animal liberation and radical ecofeminism, insists upon two assumptions: that humans are not really part of nature, and that our primary way of involving ourselves with the natural world is to destroy it.

Brings to mind C.S. Lewis when he said "Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness."

Speaking of woman the hunter, our teacher Jackson Landers mentioned that women are the fastest growing group of hunters. Our class had three, including myself. I enjoyed the company of everyone on the trip immensely, but was especially heartened to see my fellow females. As I will write in a later post, it's rather unfortunate that so many men see hunting as "reclaiming manliness." I see it as reclaiming our human-ness that has nothing to do with sex. Either way, Woman the Hunter is an excellent book no matter your gender.

The deer itself? The taste was magnificent. Each piece had a different flavor and only a few were gamey. For those who requested the recipe, the heart I prepared the way I prepare every heart- in coconut with red pepper, tamarind, ginger, cilantro, and garlic. Either simmer in coconut milk or fry in coconut oil. A more locavore approach can be found in Fergus Henderson's Nose to Tail, where he recommends marinating in vinegar.

I plan to improve my shooting skills and my family has invited me to hunt deer in Wisconsin this fall. Hopefully I can get all the licenses in order...one thing I learned is that it is very hard to have a real hunting rifle in NYC. Unless you are crazy and willing to hunt with a Civil War musket, it can take up to a year and $250 to acquire the right to have a hunting rifle in the city!

I never asked for to find my twin, but there you are
And I never asked for the spools to unspin, but there they roll.

I never asked for to carve your ribs, but here I go

and I've never pleaded for a new skin as i do now

Flowers and blood

Build up a new me of flowers and blood

I'll shoot me a gun made of leaf and branch in this here town
and eat me a bowl full of secret and mud, yes, I will
if you build up a new me of flowers and blood -- say you will.

 The sense of human alienation from nature, so prevalent in contemporary American culture, is in some ways the shadow-side of the Edenic wilderness myth. In light of the obvious damage we have done to the nonhuman environment, it is tempting to adopt a hands-off attitude and entertain the fantasy of nature's returning to a pristine state. The idea of "letting nature be nature" arises, however, from secondhand knowledge and nature-romanticism; it does no work in practice. Ultimately, we are all implicated, for better and for worse, in the fate of the natural world of which humanity is, in fact, very much a part. As native and traditional cultures help to show, hunter-awareness provides a crucial way of coming to terms with the extent to which each individual life is founded upon the deaths of vibrantly alive others. 

Consider the following excerpt from an obituary of a suicide, published not long ago in a radical environmental journal "Tony was a passionate man who felt the earth's distress acutely. In a letter he left to some of his friends he explained his reason for departing. He stated his life had never been better personally. He didn't want people to be sad for him. He checked out as a response to the overwhelming toll we humans are extracting from the planet. His strategy was to lighten the load....

It's hard to imagine more graphic, in some ways chilling, depictions of the alienation of humans from the rest of nature....some revolutionary activists see the eradication of humanity from the "earth-organism" as the only cure to the global environmental crisis....the popular fiction is of a "balance of nature" in which the non-human world, left to its own wisdom and devices, reverts to equilibrium and harmony. It is a fiction that more than once has masqueraded as science in the shaping of wildlife management. 

From Mary Zeiss Strange's Woman The Hunter, which does an awesome job of laying bare the true anti-humanistic nature of ecoveganism. Humans ARE nature and many animals we hunt have evolved with us as predators. It is very sad how some parts of the environmental movement see the need to denigrate us as a species and deny that we are worth much. 

Recently a vegan blog I read for the recipes did a post equating women's rights movement with the animal right's movement. It brought to mind this quote by Peter Staudenmaier:

The central analogy to the civil rights movement and the women’s movement is trivializing and ahistorical. Both of those social movements were initiated and driven by members of the dispossessed and excluded groups themselves, not by benevolent men or white people acting on their behalf. Both movements were built precisely around the idea of reclaiming and reasserting a shared humanity in the face of a society that had deprived it and denied it. No civil rights activist or feminist ever argued, “We’re sentient beings too!” They argued, “We’re fully human too!” Animal liberation doctrine, far from extending this humanist impulse, directly undermines it.

I was struck by the wonderful oddness of this -- a deer accepting human company, even going out of her way to be with me. After all, I am a hunter. On most days, I eat the flesh of her kind. Because of this I was somewhat embarrassed, as if I'd taken advantage of her naivete. I wondered if gaining such closeness with deer would make hunting difficult for me, but this didn't seem likely . I had always loved deer, not only as wild, beautiful creatures but also as a source of my own existence; as animals who elevate my senses, enrich my spirit, and nourish my body. My feeling towards deer were wholly unlike the attitude that cows are simply beef on the hoof or that wheat is nothing more than unprocessed flour.

From Heart and Blood by Richard K. Nelson. I'm a quarter through this book and LOVING it.

The gate of knowledge is closed!

Oh how ungrateful I was back then when I was enrolled in a big university. I didn't realize how annoying it would be to not have access to a large academic library. Sciencedirect now asks me to pay five gazillion dollars for the studies I want to read. It almost makes me want to enroll in school again. 

I live in freaking NYC, but the library here doesn't have the richness of that library in the middle of Illinois. 

When I did have access to the wonderful online research databases, I remember seeing that some misguided nutritionists and anthropologists cited papers by S. Boyd Eaton when they tried to say the paleolithic diet was plant-based and low-fat. So it's nice to see Eaton himself in this recent article about the paleolithic diet in Macleans eat his hat:

He says he had failed to consider the contribution of non-muscle meat like brain and fat depots, and thus underestimated the amount of fat we need. “It makes me feel stupid!”

Oops. Also on display is tehstupid 

Konnor still thinks that was the right call, and believes his original concerns about fat were prudent. “You can’t just go to the supermarket and buy meat loaded with fat and say you’re doing the Paleolithic diet. You’re not.” 

Ugh, such an annoying misconception perpetuated by restaurants that serve miserable cuts of miserable game for miserable prices. Yeah, that wild boar tenderloin roast at terrible overpriced restaurant is lean because the company that sold it is feeding the public's desire for "lean" healthy game. Any real hunter can tell that that game varies in fat content by species and season. Some game is very very fatty! And the cuts served at Green Meadows Fancy Golf Course Grill, typically lean cuts, are not representative of the real richness of game. This Hazda article speaks more to traditional consumption

Bones are smashed with rocks and the marrow sucked out. Grease is rubbed on the skin as a sort of moisturizer. No one speaks a word, but the smacking of lips and gnashing of teeth is almost comically loud.

Speaking of bones, I just finished reading the excellent cookbook Bones, by Jennifer McLagan. A full post on this excellent book is due, as bones are absolutely essential for a successful paleo diet, providing ample amounts of fat, calcium, and other important nutrients. 

Also, what's the deal with lacto paleo? I must say I'm not a fan of this trend or term. A paleo diet with dairy is not a paleo diet, it's a nomadic pastoralist diet. Such pastoralists are pretty healthy, but they are not representative of stone agers. There is absolutely no convincing evidence that dairy is paleo. That doesn't mean it's bad, but it does lead to some dilution of the paleo terminology. 

Also annoying is this NY Times article about some who argue that depression is somehow an evolutionary adaptation. In my opinion it's like arguing that heart disease is an evolutionary adaptation. I think it's fairly clear that depression is a disease of civilization caused by living inappropriately to our evolutionary heritage whether it's working inside all day staring at a glowing rectangle or not getting enough omega-3 fatty acids. Unfortunately this viewpoint is not in the article. The opposing view is that it's a hopeless disorder that can only be treated with modern drugs. 

I thought about that when reading the graphic novel bio of logician Bertrand Russell. He is devastated by the schizophrenia that seems to be an inevitable part of his bloodline. But there is increasing evidence that omega-3 fatty acids play a role. That this type of research is being done in the age of drug fixes is very hopeful and I would bet that scientists will eventually find even more nutritional factors that govern mental illness.