her essay “Being Prey,” about the crocodile attack she survived in 1985, ecofeminist philosopher Val Plumwood wrote of Western culture’s “strong effort to deny that we humans are also animals positioned in the food chain,” a denial she sees reflected in our revulsion at images of human bodies being consumed by predators, or by worms, for that matter. Hence our penchant for tightly sealed coffins. We imagine ourselves as “outside and above,” she wrote, “not as part of the feast in a chain but as external manipulators and masters of it.”
At the time of the crocodile attack, Plumwood was a vegetarian, not because she considered predation “demonic and impure,” but because she objected to “the reduction of animal lives in factory farming systems that treat them as living meat.” Being attacked gave her another level of insight. It was, she wrote, “a shocking reduction, from a complex human being to a mere piece of meat.” Reflecting on the experience, she came to the conclusion that “not just humans but any creature can make the same claim to be more than just food. We are edible, but we are also much more than edible. Respectful, ecological eating must recognize both of these things.”
Again I thought of hunting. And I thought of Uncle Mark.
We had never seen each other more than occasionally, usually for a couple of hours at Thanksgiving dinner, roasted bird on the table between us. Those visits to Cape Cod, where Mark still lived, fished, and hunted, had dwindled in frequency to once every few years. When I abandoned vegetarianism, though, I had written to him—curious about his relationships with forest, ocean, and food—and we struck up an e-mail correspondence. At family gatherings, he had always seemed contained, his full, expressive lips pressed firmly together. In writing, though, he was downright chatty.
Back and forth we went, mostly sharing experiences we’d had outdoors. I would tell him of the fox I had seen, or of the pileated woodpecker that had hopped among the trees near where Paul and I were working in the woods. Mark would tell me of his unusual daytime sighting of a pair of flying squirrels—they are typically nocturnal—or of the deer he had encountered over the past week.
Now, reflecting on my conversation with the turkey hunter who had parked alongside our driveway, I wrote to Mark again. I expressed my hope that we could visit in person one of these days, despite the busyness of our lives. Perhaps we could walk in the woods together. Perhaps we could fish. Perhaps we could talk about hunting.
I recalled the Wendell Berry poem I had pinned to the wall of my Brooklyn apartment, “The Peace of Wild Things.” A vegan at the time, I had recited the poem like a mantra. I imagined reconnecting with nature, lying down, as the author does, “where the wood drake / rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.” I imagined the stillness of the heron, standing in the shallows, peaceful, tall, and majestic. I did not imagine the heron actually “feeding”: the sudden, violent stab of its beak. It didn’t occur to me that the heron’s stillness was the stillness of a hunter.
For years, I had been glossing over the killing that surrounded me: birds, bugs, fish, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals, one feasting upon the other. The incessant eating—which I could now more comfortably acknowledge without boomeranging to some bleak Tennyson-like vision of “Nature, red in tooth and claw”—had been easy to forget, for I rarely witnessed such nutritional transactions.
When Cath and I lived at Bird Cottage, we had watched the songbirds that came to the feeders we hung, and thought little of the other visitors that were, in turn, attracted to the clearing. One afternoon I saw a cardinal dart for the trees. The sharp, taut shape of a small hawk streaked after it. The cardinal zipped back and forth, the raptor in fierce pursuit, carving tight, full-speed turns
At the time of the crocodile attack, Plumwood was a vegetarian, not because she considered predation “demonic and impure,” but because she objected to “the reduction of animal lives in factory farming systems that treat them as living meat.” Being attacked gave her another level of insight. It was, she wrote, “a shocking reduction, from a complex human being to a mere piece of meat.” Reflecting on the experience, she came to the conclusion that “not just humans but any creature can make the same claim to be more than just food. We are edible, but we are also much more than edible. Respectful, ecological eating must recognize both of these things.”
Again I thought of hunting. And I thought of Uncle Mark.
We had never seen each other more than occasionally, usually for a couple of hours at Thanksgiving dinner, roasted bird on the table between us. Those visits to Cape Cod, where Mark still lived, fished, and hunted, had dwindled in frequency to once every few years. When I abandoned vegetarianism, though, I had written to him—curious about his relationships with forest, ocean, and food—and we struck up an e-mail correspondence. At family gatherings, he had always seemed contained, his full, expressive lips pressed firmly together. In writing, though, he was downright chatty.
Back and forth we went, mostly sharing experiences we’d had outdoors. I would tell him of the fox I had seen, or of the pileated woodpecker that had hopped among the trees near where Paul and I were working in the woods. Mark would tell me of his unusual daytime sighting of a pair of flying squirrels—they are typically nocturnal—or of the deer he had encountered over the past week.
Now, reflecting on my conversation with the turkey hunter who had parked alongside our driveway, I wrote to Mark again. I expressed my hope that we could visit in person one of these days, despite the busyness of our lives. Perhaps we could walk in the woods together. Perhaps we could fish. Perhaps we could talk about hunting.
I recalled the Wendell Berry poem I had pinned to the wall of my Brooklyn apartment, “The Peace of Wild Things.” A vegan at the time, I had recited the poem like a mantra. I imagined reconnecting with nature, lying down, as the author does, “where the wood drake / rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.” I imagined the stillness of the heron, standing in the shallows, peaceful, tall, and majestic. I did not imagine the heron actually “feeding”: the sudden, violent stab of its beak. It didn’t occur to me that the heron’s stillness was the stillness of a hunter.
For years, I had been glossing over the killing that surrounded me: birds, bugs, fish, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals, one feasting upon the other. The incessant eating—which I could now more comfortably acknowledge without boomeranging to some bleak Tennyson-like vision of “Nature, red in tooth and claw”—had been easy to forget, for I rarely witnessed such nutritional transactions.
When Cath and I lived at Bird Cottage, we had watched the songbirds that came to the feeders we hung, and thought little of the other visitors that were, in turn, attracted to the clearing. One afternoon I saw a cardinal dart for the trees. The sharp, taut shape of a small hawk streaked after it. The cardinal zipped back and forth, the raptor in fierce pursuit, carving tight, full-speed turns
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