Author of The Mindful Carnivore Boy, Tovar Cerulli talks about his transition from vegetarian to hunter, and why he thinks hunting is the most ethical and most ethical way to eat meat and other animal protein in the modern world. He talks about how he went from a vegetarian diet to a carnivore diet, and what it was like being a hunter in a country where hunting is still a big part of the culture. He also talks about what it's like to grow up in a rural area where deer and other wildlife are the main source of protein, and how he came to the conclusion that hunting was the best way to get some animal protein. And, of course, he explains why he doesn t like eggs. This episode was produced by Alex Blumberg and edited by Annie-Rose Strasser. Music by Ian Dorsch and Bobby Lord. Additional music by Haley Shaw. Art: Mackenzie Moore Music: Hayden Coplen Editor: Will Witwer Additional editing by Matthew Boll Producer: Ben Koppel Mixing: Haley Shaw Background Music: Jeff Perla Audio Engineer: David Sidoroff Thanks to Rachel Ward and Alex Blanchard If you like what you hear, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and we'll get a shoutout on the next episode of the podcast. Subscribe to our new podcast, "Good Mythology" Subscribe to Good Mythology: Good Mythologist: Bad Mythology Podcast Subscribe on Podchaser, Badass Farm Podcasts Badass: Badass Farmer: Bad Ass Farmboy Badass Girl: Good Thing: Good Day: Good Girl, Bad Girl Bad Girl: Bad Girl, Good Boy, Bad Boy, Good Thing, Good Day, Good Life, Good Vibez, Good Things, Bad Thing, Bad Deal, Badie, Good Food, Good Deal, Good Morning, Bad Day, Bad Ass, Good Ol Olie, Farmboy, Goodness, Good Place, Good Lovin' by Sarah, Good Lady, Good News, Good Work, Good Will, Good Mouther, Good Vein' Day, Great Day, Farmlife, Good Gotta Have a Farm Day, I'll See You, Good Night, Good Coats, Good Luck, Good Week, Good Thoughts, Good Rest, Good Felt, Good Loved You, I'm Working, Good Enough, Good Thinkin' By Me?
00:01:46.000I mean, the switch to being vegetarian had a lot to do with ethics and animal welfare and compassion, and then it became other issues, environmental, you know, all kinds of things.
00:01:55.000The switch back, the first step really was starting to realize that my diet Whatever I was eating was connected to all kinds of things that I didn't realize.
00:02:08.000Control of deer in soybean fields to make tofu.
00:02:14.000Control is a nice way of saying murder.
00:02:52.000That just sort of softened these very black and white hard edges that I had drawn in my mind, these ethical lines, right?
00:03:01.000The shift to actually eating something different had more to do with nutritional needs in the long term.
00:03:08.000And once I started eating some yogurt, which is a big radical step, if you've been vegan for 10 years, you know, eating a bowl of yogurt is a big deal.
00:04:04.000And that seems to me to be the easiest and most ethical way...
00:04:10.000If you just want to get some animal protein in your body, that one really is, no one's getting hurt.
00:04:15.000Those things, I didn't, you know, this is so embarrassing, but I didn't even know, I think I was in my late 30s or early 40s, when I found out that chicken eggs couldn't become a chicken because they weren't fertilized by a rooster.
00:04:50.000I don't understand that part of it, but it's so easy to just get eggs from chickens.
00:04:56.000I mean, as long as you're feeding the chicken, and chickens exist off of so many different things.
00:05:01.000They clean your garden, they run around, they mostly eat bugs and grass and healthy chicken food, but...
00:05:09.000Once you decide you're going to pull the trigger on a deer, things get real.
00:05:14.000That's a totally different experience because there's this one guy who's this healthy, ethical vegan who's walking around looking at the deer like, hello, friend.
00:05:27.000And the next day, you know, your elbow's deep in that deer pulling out its guts, hanging it up in a barn and taking the skin off of it.
00:05:57.000Back in the 60s and 70s, we had all this young growth forest, all these farm fields that were coming back into forest, and there were a ton of deer.
00:06:07.000It was a really rich habitat for deer.
00:06:08.000Now it's a much more mature forest, and so the numbers have really dropped down.
00:07:57.000It's a real commitment, especially if you're doing it essentially by yourself, to decide to really get involved in quote-unquote gun culture and understand what kind of round you need, what kind of rifle you need, what's the best kind of rifle, what's the best way to pull the trigger,
00:08:13.000how do you keep yourself from jerking or punching the trigger?
00:08:17.000You know, there's a lot of practice involved.
00:10:16.000To get someone, especially someone with a full-time job, someone with a family, obligations, to get them and somehow or another set up some sort of a course that allows them to learn how to do that.
00:10:45.000And then they end up having these weekend sessions throughout the course of the year.
00:10:51.000And it culminates with a sort of a mentored hunt on public land in Wisconsin, Minnesota, or other states that have similar programs.
00:10:58.000But there's enough demand that there are private courses.
00:11:01.000I mean, there's weekend workshops being offered by folks I know Not associated with the state program at all, just teaching people because they didn't learn.
00:11:11.000And there's a huge demand, I think, not just for hunting, but people want these old skills, you know, hands-on, you know, whether it's how to physically build something out of wood or how to can your own food or how to, you know, hunt and butcher a deer.
00:11:27.000And there's an interest in that sort of do-it-yourself, quote-unquote primitive or just basic self-reliant skills.
00:11:35.000Yeah, I mean, even if you're not thinking about being a prepper, if you're not getting ready for the end of the world, it's still a fascinating thing to learn how to take care of yourself.
00:11:44.000Learn how to get your own food from the actual wilderness.
00:11:50.000I mean, just that hands-on experience, that direct experience, is really different from sitting in a cubicle, getting paid, and then going and buying food at the grocery store.
00:11:57.000You know, the author Richard Nelson, who's written great books about deer and all kinds of things, he lives up in Alaska, and he calls the...
00:12:08.000The supermarket, an agent of our forgetfulness.
00:12:11.000We forget where things come from if we don't live on a farm, if we didn't grow up doing that kind of thing.
00:12:16.000Yeah, I think that's an issue that a lot of people who have paid attention to All the different videos that have been released from these factory farms that are horrific and they try to figure out, well, what is a way to get around this?
00:12:30.000There's got to be a way to get around this.
00:12:32.000And the most ethical way, I think, and a lot of people think, is, if it's possible, to hunt it yourself.
00:12:39.000Because then you're getting an animal that was never caged up, it was a wild animal, and in one brief moment, its life ends.
00:12:46.000And realistically, that life was probably on its way out anyway.
00:12:49.000If you're shooting a mature deer, you're shooting something that's six years old, five years old, it's amazing that deer lived that long in the first place.
00:12:57.000Yeah, most wild animals are prey, you know, most prey animals, and even most predators, in fact, you know, die when they're pups, basically.
00:13:04.000I mean, the mortality rate is incredibly high.
00:13:07.000Yeah, I mean even the mortality rate for bears is insanely high, and the predator of bears is bears.
00:13:15.000Bears kill half of all the moose calves and deer fawns, like half of them that get born get killed by bears or coyotes or wolves or anything.
00:13:26.000So to get something that's five years old, you're essentially stepping in just before nature did.
00:13:34.000Yeah, I mean, I don't know enough about all the ecology and biology of all these species to speak authoritatively on that side of it.
00:13:43.000But the idea of it being an ethical alternative makes sense to a lot of people.
00:13:47.000I think it resonates with the people I've interviewed who are adult onset hunters, you know, and from my own experience, that's a pretty common theme.
00:14:46.000This book that you wrote, The Mindful Carnivore, I don't think I've ever even seen a book written by a guy who started off as a vegetarian and a vegan and was...
00:14:59.000You know, it seems when I first got into the idea of writing a book, which seemed crazy and still, in retrospect, seems kind of crazy.
00:15:09.000But when I started even writing a couple essays about that, about going from being a vegan and vegetarian to being a hunter, I thought, this is bizarre.
00:15:18.000I don't know what people are going to make of this.
00:15:21.000Over time, I've met more and more people who have actually had a pretty similar experience.
00:15:32.000Like, if you were that concerned about animals, that you decided to be vegetarian or vegan, and then you changed your diet.
00:15:43.000Animals are still a pretty serious issue for you, unless you just abandoned your entire philosophy and left out the door.
00:15:50.000If you still have those basic values and you still take animal welfare and environmental conservation and these sorts of issues seriously, then there's an interest in engaging directly,
00:16:14.000So for those of us who still have animal ethics and welfare in mind, when we make that transition out of being vegetarian, there's a way to confront it.
00:16:26.000You know, I know some folks who were vegetarian, young couple, and when their diet changed, they decided they're going to raise their own animals instead of hunt.
00:18:07.000What were you eating for your protein?
00:18:10.000Well, I mean, I was eating, you know, plenty of what they used to call sort of mixed, you know, rice and beans and veggies and fruit and...
00:18:20.000But even on very strict vegan websites they'll say, you know, you need to take B12. Right.
00:18:28.000There's things that are really hard to get if you're not eating any animal.
00:18:34.000That's a really fascinating conversation I've had with a friend of mine who's a vegan who says, you know, you really need very little B12 and you can get plenty of B12 from your diet.
00:18:45.000Like, for you to be real confident about that, I'm not sure that's necessarily correct because I've seen both really strong statements on both sides.
00:18:54.000Really strong statements that you definitely can't get it from your diet and really strong statements that you can.
00:19:06.000As I understand, I mean, flax seeds and...
00:19:09.000There are ways I think you can get it, but whether it's that easy to assimilate into your body and actually use, I think it depends on the source.
00:19:16.000And, you know, there's a huge difference nutritionally, as I understand it, between a vegan diet And a vegetarian diet.
00:19:23.000If you're eating some eggs, you're eating some dairy, that's a different ballgame.
00:19:28.000We have cultures and traditions of vegetarianism around the world that have sustained themselves.
00:19:35.000I don't I don't know of any communities and cultures or traditions around the world where they've been vegan for generation after generation.
00:19:46.000Isn't it possible, though, that it requires more education and more understanding about what the nutritional requirements are, as far as mixing your proteins and making sure...
00:19:54.000Because we had some guys on from the documentary Cowspiracy, and we talked about it, and I really wish I'd read a little bit more of the arguments against what they were saying before I had them on.
00:20:05.000Because one of the things we talked about is complete proteins and the complete amino acid profiles.
00:20:12.000Well, there's very few complete proteins in plant form.
00:20:16.000And if you're trying to get all your protein from broccoli, Jesus Christ you've got to eat like pounds of the stuff in order to like and so I don't It's one of the things it becomes with a lot of people it becomes almost like you're talking about their deity It's almost like a religious argument because they don't want to be objective about it one exception to that is Rich Roll Rich Roll is very objective and I don't know if you know who he is he's a vegan endurance athlete very
00:20:46.000good guy and He has a great podcast, and he's been a guest on the podcast a couple times here.
00:21:19.000But, like, vegan bodybuilding is fraught.
00:21:23.000It's fucking infested with people that are doing steroids that aren't being honest about it, that are getting gigantic, that are, you know, eating vegan food and, like, vegan power, and they're flexing.
00:21:50.000Scientists in a weight room, but that's neither here nor there, but I think For some people, it is very difficult if you're going to be vegan to get everything your body requires.
00:22:07.000You know who Travis Barker is, the drummer from Blink-182?
00:22:26.000Because how come some people can tell me that they're doing so well, they heal quicker, they recover quicker on a vegan diet, they feel better on a vegan diet, and then other people are telling me, you know, it's just their body just wasn't healing correctly, their immune system was floundering.
00:23:31.000For many people, I think there are depletions and consequences in the body of being strict vegan for that long period of time.
00:23:40.000Did you attempt to talk to a nutritionist and find out, like, are there any foods that I should, like quinoa or things on hemp protein, things that I need to mix in that are more complete proteins?
00:23:51.000I didn't really, you know, by that point, because my, those sort of black and white lines I had drawn, those really rigid ethical ideas, that sort of deity concept that I had in a way, and its attachment to my identity, you know,
00:24:07.000that had started to blur and loosen enough.
00:24:35.000And why do I... Why am I so fixated, have I been for this past decade, so fixated on separating myself from this world that I actually inhabit?
00:24:50.000I'm not saying this is true for all vegetarians or all vegans by any means, but for me there was, in a sense, a desire to live in this ideal world.
00:25:14.000I have a footprint here, you know, not just my carbon footprint because of the car I drive or whatever, but I have a physical footprint no matter what I eat.
00:25:33.000More of the kinds of foods that human beings have been eating forever, that we evolved on, you know?
00:25:40.000And so I just started to experiment with it and see both how it felt physically, but also sort of emotionally, ethically, spiritually, philosophically.
00:26:10.000I think it's connected to that in that we are so disconnected from our food that even people that are vegans that, you know, they think that they're causing no harm because they just eat plants.
00:26:22.000If you're eating commercial grain, You're a part of a massive, wide-scale death.
00:26:28.000In fact, there's probably more dead animals per acre if you're getting commercial grain than almost anything.
00:26:37.000When they grind up that grain to chew it up and to turn it into, like if you have corn or wheat and they chop all that stuff down, those combines are indiscriminate.
00:26:55.000And then there's also just the fact that when you create something like that, whatever natural wildlife would have been there has been completely removed and you turned it into this weird new thing where it's a monoculture, where you're just growing soybeans or you're just growing whatever, whatever the hell it is.
00:27:11.000I think that by not participating in it, by not participating in any aspect of the gathering of the food, you get this attachment from it and you say, you know, hey, I can remove myself from any cruelty, any ethical concerns by just establishing a cruelty-free vegan diet.
00:27:30.000Right, and it becomes a lot easier to think in those black and white terms.
00:27:37.000It's very easy to separate that because you don't experience it and realize, oh, plants eat animals, animals eat animals, then animals die and plants eat them.
00:27:46.000It's all this whole system that everything, including us, is part of.
00:27:50.000And we, as a culture, as a society, for...
00:27:55.000You know, decades, centuries have been various ways separating ourselves from that through industrialization, through, you know, just our ideas.
00:29:21.000I've only seen it a couple times, but I remember when it was my grandfather.
00:29:25.000And I was really close to my grandfather, so when I went to his funeral and I saw him sitting there in that box, I realized how bizarre it was.
00:30:09.000One of the things that I love to do with people that have too much of a Disney view of animals and like to get, you know, I can't believe that you would hunt.
00:31:15.000Where the deer live, especially white-tailed deer who live primarily around agriculture, they're around so much vegetation, so much food, that the last thing deer have to worry about most of the time is starving to death when they're around farmlands and stuff like that.
00:31:29.000I mean, up our way in the north and in some other parts of, you know, northern U.S. and up into Canada, where you get into mostly forested areas, and you get overpopulations of deer, they wipe out their winter habitat if they have too many deer, and...
00:31:47.000Because of the deep snow, they're compressed into tiny, tiny fractions of their usual range.
00:31:52.000And they can, in fact, starve to death in vast numbers.
00:31:56.000But around agriculture in more moderate climates, they've got no shortage of food.
00:32:01.000Yeah, and deer, it's really interesting how they're set up.
00:32:04.000It's almost like it's making sure that they don't last through when they're the older, strong, mature bucks, because a mature buck will go from the prime of its life to on death's door within a couple months during the rut.
00:32:57.000And they just run around rutting for so long that they sometimes forget to eat, they burn off all their fat, and they get skinny and scrawny.
00:33:09.000And when it's cold, that's when they die.
00:33:11.000So they'll go from being like a stud, prime of their life deer, to being a dead, starving to death, frozen to death deer within a couple of months.
00:33:32.000I know what happens with whitetails, but it may happen with mule deer as much or more.
00:33:35.000Well, it's just nature almost has these fail-safe systems set up to make sure that these mature bucks only have their time in the sun for so long.
00:33:43.000You get your party on, all the females love you, you're having a great time, you father a lot of offspring, and then that's a wrap.
00:33:54.000One of the things that I find fascinating is that different groups, vegetarians, hunters...
00:34:05.000And others who often seem diametrically opposed on an issue like hunting often are motivated by really similar values.
00:34:18.000I mean a concern for Environmental conservation, a concern for even animal welfare.
00:34:26.000I mean, in hunting, the ethic of the clean kill, the idea that you should only shoot once and it should be virtually instantaneous, you know, and even the concern that you expressed, you know, gee, I got this crash course so fast,
00:35:03.000There's such different languages being spoken often by, you know, folks who are on sort of an animal rights or animal welfare activist side and folks who are on sort of a hunting and hunting conservation activist side of things.
00:35:17.000And often they're speaking very different languages and don't realize that they have some things in common.
00:35:22.000You had, back at the beginning of January, you had, is it Phil Demers?
00:36:13.000They don't have a language that we can...
00:36:16.000Really accurately interpret, but when you pay attention to how insanely smart dolphins and orcas are, to me, locking them up is akin to slavery.
00:38:56.000I mean, that was the experience that actually made me decide to be a vegetarian.
00:38:59.000I'd fished all my childhood growing up, loved it.
00:39:01.000My fishing mentor was a guy from Boston who grew up in the Bronx, and he was a furniture builder in Boston, and he'd come up and visit us in southern New Hampshire, and we'd fish all the time.
00:39:12.000But when I was 20, I had been thinking a lot about what kind of life I wanted to lead, what were my values, and I went fishing, and I caught this trout, and I killed it, and I was like...
00:39:25.000I could have had, you know, rice and veggies or whatever, right?
00:39:28.000Well, that I didn't have to is one of the big arguments that people even say against hunting, even if they eat meat, you can go to the supermarket.
00:40:09.000Ecologically and ethically, it probably makes pretty good sense.
00:40:13.000And I don't have a big argument against it.
00:40:16.000I just never got back into that habit.
00:40:20.000So, the experience of Taking a deer is so profoundly different, obviously, from going to the grocery store or even going to a farmer, you know.
00:40:38.000And it's such a reminder, you know, to talk about the opposite of...
00:40:42.000The supermarket as an agent of forgetfulness.
00:40:46.000You know, when you take a package of venison out of the freezer and you remember that deer that you killed, I mean, there's no forgetting where that comes from.
00:41:01.000To someone who hasn't experienced it, it's very, very difficult to even imagine I hate to use the word spiritual because it just gets so beaten down and overused and watered down.
00:41:16.000But there is a weird spiritual connection between your meat or a tangible energy that's connected.
00:41:26.000The experience that you had, the meat that you're eating, the knowledge that you were the one who took the life, the knowledge that it was a life, that it was a living being, and now it's food on your plate and you're watching your family eat it, or you're having friends that come over and eat it.
00:41:47.000Are something really unusual and alien.
00:41:49.000And I think human beings have created them out of convenience and it's wonderful and it's allowed us to gather information and to create these incredible places where you can just group together millions and millions of people and you just ship all the food in.
00:42:03.000But in doing so, we've created this really convenient way of looking at things.
00:42:08.000And I think this is what I'm trying to get at with this whole series of interviews and series of conversations that I'm having with different hunters, different vegans, different people that are trying to ethically source their food.
00:42:21.000Get a sense of how the hell this happened and how it's so pervasive and how there's so much resistance to understanding and appreciating what the overall, what the really big picture of where our food comes from, what it actually is.
00:42:38.000Instead of this utopian view that I think, like we were talking about, you had this idea before of separating yourself from this world of animals.
00:43:35.000He's got a very bizarre accent because it's a combination of a bunch of different places where he lived for 10 years here and Argentina for 10 years.
00:44:42.000When you took your first year, what was that like as an experience?
00:44:47.000Shocking, strange, a definite tangible feeling of loss, you know, the loss of this life, but also an incredible feeling of exhilaration, this weird primal connection when you're actually eating the meat over a campfire,
00:45:05.000because we did it You know, hardcore...
00:45:17.000And, you know, you're around a campfire with a bunch of people that you really care about and you're all eating this meat from this animal that you just killed.
00:45:26.000And it is the male bonding experience, you know?
00:45:31.000I mean, there's like football games, oh yeah, this is fun, but hunting, going out and hunting parties together.
00:45:39.000I had a conversation with my friend Duncan Trussell yesterday about this, that I think that there's some things that we don't know that we have a requirement for in our minds, or in our bodies, or maybe perhaps in our DNA. That our bodies are set up with these certain reward systems.
00:45:57.000It's rewarding to gather up your own food.
00:45:59.000And anyone who's ever grown a garden, completely outside of hunting, gardening is super satisfying.
00:46:06.000When you eat some food that you've grown yourself, when you're chopping up some kale and tomatoes, and you're making a nice salad, and you made all this, you grew all this yourself, and you...
00:46:16.000You paid attention to it, you fertilized it, and you added water.
00:46:19.000There's this amazing feeling, like the exuberation, this weird exhilaration feeling when you're eating food that you grew yourself.
00:46:29.000These things, I think, are these reward systems that are in place because it was always good to do that because it ensured survival.
00:46:37.000Just like helping other people, that good feeling you get from helping others in your community.
00:46:48.000But there's a bunch of weird things that are in there, too.
00:46:51.000You know, being sexually attractive is in there, too.
00:46:54.000Having someone think you're attractive, like, that's a normal primal reward system that we all love.
00:47:00.000And even people that are in committed relationships, like women in committed relationships, like to go out with their girlfriends and dress up and look nice to get looked at.
00:47:10.000I mean, they might not have any desire to find a new man, but they want to get looked at because it fulfills these primal reward systems that are in our bodies.
00:47:50.000And they, you know, just like men, have a wide range of experiences and views and values and attitudes toward it.
00:47:58.000But, you know, they, of course, also have this experience of giving life.
00:48:04.000You know, whether they're actually mothers or not, they have this potential.
00:48:09.000And the combination of that plays out differently for different women, but to both be a giver of life and a hunter and a taker of life, you know.
00:48:18.000Talk about being sort of spiritually connected to the world and to life and death.
00:48:30.000I mean, I have this whole bit I'm doing about it in my act, because we'll never understand what it's like to even have a desire to have a baby in your body.
00:48:38.000I mean, that's so alien, so alien to us.
00:48:45.000The thought of the earth and that nature itself is a woman, that nature itself is a mother, a mother that provides, a mother that gives life and gives birth to life.
00:48:56.000Women hunters, it's a very interesting thing because Steve Rinello wrote this really interesting article about sexism in the way we perceive hunters because there was this cute girl Who was going on these African safaris and taking photos with these animals that she had shot.
00:49:17.000And all these people were so angry at her.
00:49:58.000Yeah, and she had death threats and got hundreds of thousands of Facebook likes.
00:50:04.000I think she's probably got more Facebook friends than I do.
00:50:07.000And it was all really quick and really fascinating how many people just turned out and attacked her.
00:50:15.000And the hunting community supported her in a lot of ways, but the hateful people, the things that I would read about it, a good portion of it was that she doesn't have to do this.
00:50:24.000If you want to eat meat, you can go to a store.
00:50:29.000And there's a lot of really good arguments for that.
00:50:32.000First of all, not that if you want to get meat, you can go to a store, but For real, if you're going to fly all the way to Africa to get meat, there's no eco-friendly in that.
00:50:41.000I mean, if you're going to get on a jet and you're going to fly 16 hours across the ocean to go get meat, let's be honest about what we're doing here.
00:50:52.000You know, like Steve Rinell, I remember that article by Steve, and I think that there are a whole bunch of different things going on in a situation like that.
00:51:06.000The perception of hunting, particularly so-called trophy hunting, or so-called sport hunting, and the language is really problematic, that it is about us, you know,
00:51:22.000and I say us, you know, the hunters who do that, who like, you know, fly to Africa.
00:51:27.000I've never done that and don't intend to, but a hunter who flies to Africa and is, whether they're hunting lions or kudu or whatever they're hunting, We're good to go.
00:51:48.000That's an ethic that actually not just in those who are criticizing trophy hunting, but in hunting traditions.
00:51:57.000There are many wanton waste laws in many states.
00:52:00.000You cannot kill a deer and just leave it there.
00:52:03.000Even if you have a hunting license, it's illegal.
00:52:50.000I guess, you know, I guess they're edible, but...
00:52:54.000No, I'm just saying that there are these values about respect for life and about animal welfare and suffering and so on that are seen as being violated by a situation like Cecil or by, you know, other hunters, Kendall Jones or others who go over.
00:53:11.000It's like, you didn't need to do that.
00:53:14.000You're not using it yourself, you know.
00:53:16.000Well, to put it, Africa is one of the problematic places, but just to, in all fairness, a lot of people go to New Zealand and they hunt over there and they do bring back the meat.
00:53:27.000It's still, ecologically, you're flying in a plane, you know, it's really kind of real, but it is an ethical way to acquire meat.
00:53:35.000In fact, a lot of the lamb and most of the elk that you buy commercially in America comes from New Zealand.
00:54:33.000But I think in addition to the sort of trophy and sports issues in terms of what is...
00:54:43.000Objectionable to a lot of people about certain kinds of hunting.
00:54:46.000I think there also is, in many cases, not in the Cecil case, obviously, but in the case of Kendall Jones and others, there's also a gender issue.
00:54:55.000There's also an issue about women as killers.
00:55:01.000And I think that is even more disturbing.
00:55:06.000I don't agree that that's the only reason people jumped on it, because people jumped on The dentist, too.
00:55:13.000But I think it is troubling in a different way.
00:55:16.000Well, the dentist killed a lion that had a name, and that's where things got really weird.
00:55:20.000Because the anthropomorphization of these animals that we've experienced in movies and in television shows and commercials and what have you, it gets real weird with people.
00:55:31.000Because you name something and all of a sudden they think that that thing is like someone's pet or something.
00:55:37.000Yeah, I think the naming has a, you know, certainly adds a dimension to it, the fact that, you know, it turned out to be, you know, a famous lion.
00:55:48.000But, you know, there have been other cases, you know, Donald Trump Jr. or, you know, one of the Trump sons was, you know, several years back.
00:55:55.000Yeah, it is Donald Trump Jr. And it wasn't a named animal.
00:56:56.000And I'm not knocking anybody that kills an elk and wants to put its quarter on their wall or whatever, or put its head on their wall, but...
00:57:02.000The bodies, when you see those things, it's a foam body and they tan the hide and they stretch the hide over it and it's so much, it's fake.
00:57:11.000These skulls are, this is the actual skull of the animal and to me, that is, it's a beautiful piece of art.
00:57:55.000And I think it's important for hunters to get better, and Steve Rinell has spoken about this too, to get better at- Expressing what's meaningful about the experience of hunting, what's meaningful about the meat,
00:58:11.000as you've spoken about a bit, what's meaningful about a skull or something.
00:58:19.000And I think people can actually understand that if we can move past just black and white, hunting is good or bad, trophy hunting is good or bad, and that kind of thing.
00:58:37.000I got in this conversation with someone really recently about it where I found a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich on their Instagram page after they were talking all kinds of crazy shit about hunters.
00:58:47.000And she told me that she's only been a vegan for seven months.
00:59:10.000When you get into something for the first time, you can't shut the fuck up about it.
00:59:13.000And I've been guilty of that many times in my life.
00:59:16.000If I got into race car driving or something like that, people on the podcast would probably be like, will you shut the fuck up about race car driving?
00:59:22.000And it got to the point, you know, with hunting, there's a lot of that.
00:59:26.000To this day, I'll put this podcast up and people go, oh great, another hunting podcast.
00:59:53.000I think these are important conversations because I think the disconnect and recognizing the disconnect that we have between where our food comes from and And these attitudes that we develop and have that we really don't have any problem with or we don't think there's anything wrong with the way we're alienating people or pointing out the flaws of other people's behaviors.
01:00:19.000And then I think this is a very important conversation because, like I said, I think we've created something really weird.
01:00:25.000With cities and with supermarkets, we've created this really weird thing where for our entire history, as long as people have been people, we knew where our food was kind of coming from.
01:00:39.000You knew you went to a butcher, you got the food, that butcher killed that animal.
01:00:42.000You knew you'd go to a farmer, he grew the vegetables, you knew they came out here.
01:00:45.000Or you did it yourself for thousands of years.
01:00:51.000You go to a drive-thru, and you give them paper, and within seconds, you get a ground animal sandwich, and you're eating it.
01:00:58.000The whole process takes a minute, and you're eating something that's already cooked, and you're drinking this vat of sugary liquid with ice cubes in it.
01:01:13.000There's this weird sort of Removal from nature that we have and the natural process of collecting and Gathering and then enjoying the food that you've gathered right and for me the interest in reconnecting those things and being aware of Where things come from and how they're how they're connected that is what led me to be a
01:01:43.000vegetarian and But it's also what let me be a hunter.
01:01:47.000You know, wanting to understand and recognize the connection and not turn away.
01:01:51.000And the turning away, when people willfully, like, I don't want to know, that willful ignorance, that's the thing that bothers me.
01:02:00.000I don't care if someone's vegetarian, vegan, if they hunt or not.
01:02:31.000Would consider it a compliment to know that it led her in that direction.
01:02:35.000And she was actually right, because I wasn't trying to convert her into being an omnivore or being a hunter.
01:02:41.000I was asking, look at these issues, think about these values, think about animals, think about nature, think about our relationship with these things, and you decide what you're going to do in your personal life, you know?
01:02:54.000And the fact that she could respect me enough and anticipate that I would respect her decision was great because she wasn't doing that willful ignorance thing.
01:03:08.000I think this is a fascinating time to be alive.
01:03:10.000And I think we're lucky that everything is so bizarre because it makes these conversations so...
01:03:16.000They crackle because there's something so weird about it.
01:03:19.000There's something so weird about a civilization, an animal, a life form, a species that has developed for whatever hundreds of thousands of years we've been people eating meat.
01:03:31.000I mean, it's essentially, when you look at scientists, when they discover the difference in the size of the lower hominids' brains and humans' brains, they're trying to figure out what the fuck went wrong, or right, rather, where we developed this gigantic brain.
01:04:13.000Pull this video up that I tweeted yesterday.
01:04:15.000Because if anybody wants to know how hard it is out there, there's a video of a marten, which is an animal that a lot of people associate with fur trading.
01:04:26.000And people go, oh, how could you kill a marten?
01:04:29.000Yeah, the weasel family, the big weasel.
01:04:57.000And it's a dead heat for a while, but the Martin is just slowly, relentlessly closing in on this rabbit.
01:05:07.000I don't know where these people are, but they were speaking a different language.
01:05:10.000And the rabbit's trying to zig and trying to zag, but the Martin is just one step after one step, just an inch closer, a little closer, a little closer, and they're fucking hustling!
01:06:33.000My friend lives in Alaska, and a brown bear killed a moose in his driveway.
01:06:38.000And they had to shoot the bear, the people that, you know, whoever the wildlife management people, they had to shoot the bear because it decided to bury this fucking moose in his garage.
01:06:48.000And they're going to keep coming back.
01:06:48.000In his driveway, yeah, or in his lawn.
01:07:17.000You know, there's a video of the same thing happening.
01:07:21.000There's a video of a bear killing a moose in this family's driveway while they're looking out the window.
01:07:26.000It happens all the time because these people that live in these parts of the world, especially Alaska, you've got Anchorage and then you've got wilderness.
01:07:37.000When I was up in Anchorage, we would just drive a little bit.
01:07:58.000But there's one where it's still alive, and it's killing it in the driveway.
01:08:03.000The thing's screaming and trying to get back up, and the bear drags it away and mauls it.
01:08:09.000Yeah, I mean, it's tough for us, you know, as humans, because we have this, you know, we have this moral conscience that presumably the bear doesn't have about the suffering of another animal, of its prey, you know?
01:08:21.000And we do, as hunters, as farmers, you know, as pet owners, you know, they have companion animals.
01:09:15.000Well, I think this is the real argument that vegans have, that we're trying to move away from any suffering.
01:09:21.000And this is what they're trying to do by trying to take a cruelty-free path, by trying to choose what they think is the most ethical lifestyle.
01:10:46.000The people that are on the outside, conveniently ignorant to all these facts that are incredibly complex, they're not aware of this big picture.
01:10:56.000I'm not saying you should go to Africa and go hunt lions.
01:12:01.000No, it's only people that can count the number, wildlife biologists that can figure out what's the right amount, and people that can study the results of having a disproportionate population of predators and realize that we've got to do something about that.
01:12:16.000Yeah, I mean, predators are really complicated all over the world.
01:12:21.000I mean, here they're complicated in Africa, they're complicated in many parts of the world.
01:12:26.000Ecologically in relationship to prey, you know, if we had a very large area and we just weren't part of the picture, It's not as though predators would just completely wipe out the prey.
01:12:40.000They will run out of food as prey gets harder to catch.
01:12:45.000Prey's not going to disappear entirely just because of a lion, you know, group of lions or wolves or any other kind of predator.
01:12:56.000They have different sort of states of equilibrium, high density of both, low density of both changes, and those sorts of things happen.
01:13:02.000In relationship to us and our different interests, agriculture, livestock, ungulates that the local human population values, then it gets really complicated.
01:13:14.000And the issue you're bringing up about, well, they're culling lions, and it could have brought in so many tens of thousands of dollars from hunters.
01:13:23.000And I've just been working on this essay about these sorts of issues.
01:13:27.000There's all these practical issues about Right.
01:14:14.000You're talking about a country like Zimbabwe, which is incredibly poor, which could have benefited from $1 million in money that would aid conservation if they allowed these hunts to continue.
01:14:27.000So each one of these 200 lions that were killed would be worth $50,000.
01:15:23.000There's this television show, this archery bow hunting show, where it was in the middle of the spring, and they brought in these archers to set up tree stands in these residential neighborhoods.
01:15:36.000The rebound in whitetails in the country as a whole, but particularly along the eastern seaboard, has created some bizarre, bizarre situations, particularly in suburbs.
01:16:12.000But it's some really bizarrely high number of ticks in certain areas of upstate New York where there's a giant prevalence of both deer and Lyme disease.
01:16:25.000They have a huge issue and they really don't know how to stop it.
01:16:34.000It can get into your nervous system and do all sorts of things to you.
01:16:37.000Yeah, and that's also a problem that happens when you have overpopulation of deer.
01:16:42.000There's chronic wasting disease, a bunch of different diseases that come through overpopulation.
01:16:49.000Well, and the chronic wasting disease, of course, that...
01:16:52.000The risks associated with that brings up the whole sort of captive deer hunting industry and issues when they start moving animals around that maybe carry CWD or other diseases and then they have contact with wild populations.
01:17:12.000This is part of the whole trophy hunting thing that's so bizarre.
01:17:15.000They're doing these fenced-in establishments where you go and hunt, and you're hunting these animals that have been grown just for their enormous antlers.
01:17:55.000Isn't that just how it's always going to be, though?
01:17:57.000I mean, if you have any sort of a discipline, any sort of a pursuit, you're going to have people that are unethical.
01:18:04.000You're going to have people that are race car drivers that are using just stronger engines than they're supposed to use, or they're cheating somehow or another on this or on that.
01:18:14.000It's just how it is across the board in life.
01:19:58.000But because, and this is true for vegetarians and vegans too, because we're a minority population, it's really easy for most people to have sort of a stereotype view and to lump them all together.
01:21:04.000You know, this identity gets attached to all hunters.
01:21:07.000I'm not saying it always happens, but there's a risk of that.
01:21:11.000And I think that part of the gift of this time, particularly in relation to the food movement, you know, Michael Pollan's work, is that people are asking questions.
01:21:21.000People are thinking about agriculture, people thinking about wild foods, people thinking about their relationships ecologically and ethically with what they eat.
01:22:10.000It's a strange, you know, it's this strange thing that we've decided because we're conveniently removed from the process of killing the animal, seeing the animal alive, killing it, butchering it, chopping it up, and then cooking it.
01:22:25.000We just get to the, give me a piece, or even more disconnected, we go to a restaurant.
01:22:58.000I mean, I think you're right about the movies from Bambi on having that kind of cultural impact and portrayal of hunters as a force of evil and being sort of anti-nature,
01:23:25.000I think that a lot of times, hunting industry and hunters today and the media around hunting forget how the rest of the world perceives the trophy photo.
01:23:41.000Even if it's an animal you're going to eat.
01:24:06.000Those sorts of images in TV shows and just photos posted online, I think it's hard for, and sometimes it's even hard for me, but I think it's hard for a lot of non-hunters like, what?
01:26:54.000There's an insane amount of pressure, and when it's over, when you've accomplished it...
01:26:59.000If I get ready for a rifle hunt, I sight my rifle in, I go to the range, I squeeze off a few rounds, I make sure my form is good, I make sure my trigger discipline is good, and I'm ready to rock.
01:28:49.000If that's just my photo and I keep it on my phone and I go, I want to look at it every now and then, this is the moment where I shot that elk and I was really happy that I was able to make a clean shot.
01:29:19.000It was important to thank my friend Cameron Haynes because without his help and without his teaching me, it would have taken a lot longer to learn how to get good with a bow.
01:29:29.000And to understand what a difficult pursuit it is.
01:29:34.000And just to keep your nerves together when this thousand-pound tree forest horse is coming up the hill screaming at you, and you have to shoot that thing with a bow and arrow.
01:30:40.000When I go, I'm going to go hunting again in September, and I'm going to bring my kids.
01:30:47.000And on one day, I'm hoping that I can be successful and have a day just to take them out and bugle for them and just make some cow calls, just so they can hear the screams.
01:31:01.000For someone who's never been in a canyon, while they're all around you screaming as the morning light is coming up, It's one of the weirdest things in all of nature.
01:31:14.000And the fact that this is going on in the American wilderness, and the vast majority of people that live in this country will never experience that.
01:31:22.000Outside of hunting, just take the hunting out of it.
01:31:25.000Just be there and hear this huge barrel-chested, thousand-pound animal screaming at the top of his lungs.
01:31:39.000And, you know, the fact that we have these populations of these animals, these amazing, amazing animals, and the places, you know, it's a big debate that I know Steve Brown has been involved in, you know, the politics of public lands.
01:31:54.000You know, there are a lot of people who want to turn, you know, federal lands over to the state and privatize a lot of that, sell a lot of that off.
01:32:01.000Well, that's a big issue with a lot of Republican politicians.
01:32:14.000This land that we have in this country was established, these wild lands, these public lands by Theodore Roosevelt.
01:32:21.000And he established it because he was a hunter and a conservationist.
01:32:24.000And he realized, like, you've got to lock this stuff down.
01:32:26.000And then you had, you know, John Weir, founding the Sierra Club, who...
01:32:31.000Who had a lot in common with Roosevelt, disagreed with him about hunting, but equally committed to preserve Yosemite, preserve these places.
01:32:42.000Not everything is going to be public, but we need public land.
01:33:04.000And people that want to be able to hunt Yellowstone are kind of angry about the whole thing.
01:33:09.000They're eventually going to have to call some of the grizzlies they're saying because the grizzlies are getting too crazy and they're getting too comfortable with people.
01:33:16.000Yeah, they have real issues even in Yosemite, I think, with bears.
01:35:10.000And, you know, it's amazing to think about Traditional subsistence hunting cultures that hunted bears of that scale went into their dens sometimes.
01:36:24.000And how does that get integrated in these traditions?
01:36:28.000It's pretty fascinating because we don't think, you know, as a sort of Western civilization, we've developed these, you know, the lower animals and the higher primates, right?
01:36:39.000We have this sort of hierarchy and we'll eat the lower ones or the ugly ones as we talk about.
01:36:45.000But the ones that are equal to us are higher or better.
01:36:49.000Maybe there's nothing higher or better than us in Western civilization in our imagination.
01:36:59.000So we've had this convenient way of creating this hierarchy and thinking of ourselves sort of being at the top of this pyramid in some way.
01:37:08.000But in cultures that see themselves still as very much part of more of a circle of peers, you know, in a community, and yet also are eating these animal people all the time.
01:37:49.000Well, I mean, before agriculture, before Christianity.
01:37:55.000You know, we have traditions in all of us that go back, you know, arguably all of us back to Africa or all parts of the world where, you know, we had, you know, the caves of Lascaux in France, you know, were painted by ancient European people who had...
01:38:14.000Probably a somewhat similar shamanistic, spiritual, and hunting relationship with these other animal people.
01:38:25.000Well, the first time I went deer hunting, I really do believe that locking eyes on that deer and being about to shoot it, I felt like it was some weird psychedelic experience in some sort of a strange way.
01:38:37.000It almost felt like I had taken a drug because I felt like There's some strange connection or some strange frequency that I had tuned into that I'd never been a part of before.
01:38:56.000I was still pretty detached, even while being interconnected.
01:39:01.000But those people that painted those paintings on the walls in the caves in France...
01:39:06.000They were desperately connected, intensely connected, and they were without the burden of these sort of strange moral ideas we have about what's okay to eat and what's not okay to eat and what's ethical and what's not ethical.
01:39:36.000Celebration, but also, you know, ceremonies for sending the hunters out and ceremonies for welcoming them back in.
01:39:46.000Because you are out there doing violence to another large mammal.
01:39:52.000And those ceremonies and those sort of Religious or spiritual practices are different from, but also kind of similar to how we've dealt, again, in big time history, in the large scale,
01:40:17.000To other humans in that case, which is different.
01:40:19.000And yet they're also, you know, if you're doing to other animal people, you know, the buffalo people, the deer people, there is still a similar, you know, moral ambiguity about this.
01:40:32.000You know, they were free in a sense from some of the baggage we carry now.
01:40:48.000I don't know if there was ambiguity, but there was certainly probably a deeper reverence And an understanding that these were inevitable decisions that people had to make, whether it's to defend your life against other humans that want to take your life and take their life instead, or whether it was to eat an animal that you hunted.
01:41:49.000The Vegan Society, 1944. Okay, a couple decades off.
01:41:53.000The first modern-day vegans in November of 1944, Donald Watson called a meeting with five other non-dairy vegetarians, including Elise Shrigley, to discuss non-dairy vegetarian diets and lifestyles.
01:42:08.000And he died of a common cold a week later.
01:42:17.000So that's what he was, a non-dairy eating vegetarian in 1944. That was back before they really totally understood how to get your vitamins and what the amino acid profiles of vegetables were too.
01:42:29.000So, taking some weird chances back then.
01:44:24.000Cats that live in the wild or indoor pets, allowed to roam outdoors, kill from 1.4 billion to as many as 3.7 billion birds in the continental US each year.
01:44:37.0003.7 billion birds in the continental United States.
01:46:09.000We do, you know, and that's, you know, when we have a cat that's part of our family or a dog that's part of our family, and obviously they're a very different species, but they become family.
01:46:38.000We, as a species, you know, we're very tribal.
01:46:42.000We identify with a group, whether that's all humans or whether we have, you know, wolves that become dogs that hunt with us or cats that we adopt for various reasons.
01:46:53.000And that, you know, that group becomes, you know...
01:47:01.000Well, have you ever watched that Penn& Teller show, Bullshit?
01:47:06.000They had an episode on animal activists and the people for the ethical treatment of animals, like what the roots of their argument and their ideas are.
01:47:23.000Everything's free to roam and do as it will.
01:47:26.000And no eating any animals, which is like, oh, what kind of world are we going to live in then?
01:47:32.000Well, there's a fascinating, I think it was Cleveland Amory, who was one of the founders of the Fund for Animals, I believe, I have this right, had a vision of the future world, and it was separate predators and prey.
01:48:16.000They do it to try to bring the female to estrus, and they also do it because they're hungry, and they're cannibals.
01:48:22.000When I was in Alberta, Some friends of mine run a hunting camp up there and they saw a male bear kill a female bear's cub and the female chased the male off the carcass and then the female finished it off.
01:48:57.000Because there's really good documentation and research also that animals, and not just animals, You know, orcas or dolphins, something that we assume is or have good evidence that they're really intelligent, that they have a wide Emotional range,
01:49:17.000you know, and including grief, you know, including mourning for the death of family members, including their, you know, the calf, you know.
01:49:28.000So there's, it's, and I think this is one of the unfortunate things that happens is that when we get into these black and white struggles, you know, hunters versus animal rights activists or anything like that, any similar kind of black and white, is that Each side has its argument,
01:49:46.000and each side doesn't really want to acknowledge too much that there might be some validity to either the argument on the other side, or just to the reality of the world.
01:50:18.000Well, there's pretty good research on a wide range of species that they have emotions, as well as the ability to physically feel pain and suffer.
01:50:28.000And I think it's really helpful when we get into these kinds of conversations across those lines to be able to at least acknowledge, you know?
01:50:41.000Or acknowledge where, you know, PETA, you know, or other animal rights groups, at least not acknowledge where they're coming from.
01:50:50.000You may not agree with their arguments or conclusions, you know, same as some people might not agree with you hunting, you know, but at least acknowledge there's a, for you hunting, there's a A valuable experience and an ethical impulse to, you know, confront what it means to eat meat,
01:51:07.000For vegetarians and animal rights activists of various kinds, there's an impulse to prevent suffering and respect life.
01:51:18.000You know, there are honorable and understandable impulses on both sides, even if we don't agree with, you know, what all the conclusions are.
01:51:26.000Yeah, I think it speaks to what we were talking about earlier about reward systems that are in place to ensure survival and ensure certain types of behavior and activities.
01:51:34.000I mean, it only makes sense that an animal would feel remorse if its child got killed.
01:51:39.000That's why you take care of it and protect it.
01:51:42.000I mean, if you've ever seen a mother cow around its calves, if you go near those calves, the mother will go crazy.
01:51:48.000And there's built-in systems that are established to make sure that these animals continue to procreate and continue to stay alive and make sure they have healthy populations.
01:51:59.000It's just the same reason why our emotions are in place.
01:52:02.000I mean, it's all really kind of a grand scheme to ensure breeding.
01:52:07.000Ensure community and ensure all these that mean we will call it emotions will call it Civilization will call it communication between sentient beings, but really What it is, is all these different systems that are established to make sure that we stay together,
01:52:23.000we keep together, we breed, we ensure that we stay alive and continue to have food and make sure we make more people.
01:52:31.000I don't want to break it down and say all romance songs and every book on...
01:52:41.000Every movie that shows an awesome relationship is just a ridiculous biological trick that's established to make sure that you continue to stay alive long enough to make more people.
01:53:42.000I mean, life and death and our own lives and deaths, you know, the creation of life, the taking of life, watching it happen around us, doing it.
01:57:08.000I mean, they could dry things and do certain things, but clearly not a Frigidaire around the corner.
01:57:15.000But, you know, what you're talking about...
01:57:18.000Whether it's cities or just modern society, that high-tech, high-speed world that most of us live in, where many of us don't feel like we have much free time and we're running around and doing all these things, in cities usually.
01:57:33.000When I talk to people who become hunters as adults, By and large, that's part of why they did it.
01:57:47.000It's part of why they do all sorts of other things that you understand and value, too.
01:57:53.000They want to get back in touch with not only the hands-on skills, but just the world they inhabit beyond the domesticated Concretized city.
01:58:09.000You know, the pavement, beyond the pavement, into nature.
01:58:13.000And whether it's a little garden patch in your backyard or, you know, hunting around the Missouri Breaks, you know, there's a sense of wanting to reconnect so that all these practices, hunting, gardening, raising chickens,
02:00:07.000Not just in some romantic sort of throwback fantasy, but we deeply need it because we are wild.
02:00:15.000And what does he use to establish that argument that we need it?
02:00:20.000I mean, he's got all kinds of, you know, research and, you know, umpteen citations of different sorts of studies and cultures and different things that happened to kids at first in his first book and then to adults if we're deprived of that, if we're always in front of a screen,
02:00:36.000for example, if we're just never out in the dirt, you know, never out in the woods.
02:00:43.000We certainly evolved In the real world, in nature, not in cities, right?
02:00:49.000And our, you know, we're hardwired for that three-dimensional textured, I mean, I guess there's textures in the city too, but that kind of natural surrounding in whatever climate,
02:02:34.000During the time that we're not hunting and we're not gathering and we're not farming...
02:02:40.000There's time for philosophical pursuits, creation of literature, all sorts of writing and different communication and wonderful conversations over meals you had no part in creating and the building of community and the bonding of friendships and the evolving of ideas.
02:02:57.000That a lot of these things can be thought of by some people as being more valuable than the collection of food.
02:03:28.000To be healthy human beings, whether it's just a walk in a park or being part of a community garden in a city, you don't have to leave the city.
02:03:35.000You can have some experiences of connection with the earth right in LA. Yeah.
02:03:45.000Well, I always wonder, and this is like a reoccurring theme with me, like what are we doing as a race, as a species?
02:03:53.000Like if you could step outside of ourselves, if you could hover a mile above Earth and you're objective, free from any influence of our culture, you're some calculating being that sort of is gathering up all the data and information and all the behavior patterns that you're seeing exhibited by this bizarre species,
02:04:55.000Yeah, we longed towards a simple past.
02:04:58.000We longed towards people that would hold hands in front of the dinner table and say our prayers and everybody was a good person except for the few bad people who wore black hats you could spot them a mile away.
02:05:10.000I think in this ever more and more complex life, we longed towards this time where things were simple.
02:05:18.000And it's one of the things that I believe It's very appealing about the idea of hunting and gathering your own meat, and it's very primally enriching because we do reward our system.
02:05:33.000We give ourselves the opportunity to participate in those reward systems that are set up and have been established for thousands and thousands of generations.
02:05:45.000That experience that you talked about, like locking eyes with that deer and having that intense experience of seeing that deer alive, the intense experience of taking a life.
02:05:59.000My sense, as you were describing it, is that the primalness of that, in part, is a sense that This is really familiar.
02:07:34.000I was doing the knife and the skinning and then in the kitchen with a leg and taking apart this amazing animal, all these layers of muscle and bone and That is what gave me the sense of this is really old and familiar and I'll probably do this again.
02:07:59.000You know, in another year, maybe not next week, but next time deer season rolls around, I'll probably hunt again.
02:08:06.000And that sense of deep sort of primal familiarity is common.
02:08:14.000I mean, I've heard, I've read accounts of this, people who are not hunters, but who have had a sort of hunting-like experience.
02:08:29.000Advocated for veganism and against veganism at various times.
02:08:36.000But very much an ecology, environmental advocate.
02:08:41.000He has this passage that he wrote about having this experience of, I think it was being with a spear going after fish, like flounder in shallow water.
02:08:56.000This felt like it was thousands of years old, like this primal connection with ancient human existence.
02:09:02.000And I think it's valuable for people, even if we live in a high-tech world, to have some connection to that.
02:09:08.000Well, I think these are genetic imprints.
02:09:10.000These are things that are written into our code that it was really important that you kill an animal in order to survive X amount of thousands of years ago.
02:09:20.000Those people that did that and bred I believe they gave that genetic information to their offspring, and they carried on and on and on.
02:09:28.000And then when you tap into it, it lights up.
02:09:31.000Like when I locked eyes at that deer, and that deer was bouncing around on the side of this hill, and it saw me, and I saw it, and I locked eyes at it, and then I'm looking at it through the riflescope, there was like this light bulb that went off.
02:09:45.000Area of my mind that was illuminated for the first time.
02:11:29.000And I'm still in an altered state for like hours or days afterward.
02:11:33.000And a state of thankfulness, too, which is also like there's a warm happiness to it, a thankfulness that you are successful and now you have this meat and you're going to provide this meat to your family.
02:11:48.000You know, like my friend Duncan sent me a photo of some elk meatballs that his girlfriend had cooked for them and their friend from some elk that I gave him.
02:12:00.000And it made me feel so good that my friend was eating some meat that I had given him from an animal that I had killed.
02:12:16.000It's an established community feeling, bond feeling with your friend where you give him meat and they're cooking this meat and he takes a photo of it.
02:12:24.000But it's all bizarre, you know, like this digital representation of this thing and it's sent to you through the air.
02:14:28.000Unless they get taken out by predators or disease or something, you raise these chickens and then you have meat, or you raise chickens and have eggs, and so on.
02:14:39.000So, the prime motive for me to hunt As the prime motive for humans to hunt when it started, you know, way back, is food.
02:14:57.000There's often been this split that's been drawn between, this distinction drawn between hunting for utility, utilitarian food, and hunting because you enjoy hunting.
02:15:12.000You know, whether you call that sport hunting or recreational hunting or whatever you call it.
02:15:19.000The problem with that is that, one, for most of us, they're not separate.
02:15:24.000I mean, you hunt because you enjoy something about hunting, and it's meaningful to you, and the food is meaningful, and you get food from it.
02:16:37.000But it's the experience of it, and as I got into it more, as I started to have more relationships with other people that I really respected and who also hunted, Then it's also part of that, if I'm hunting with someone,
02:16:53.000you know, that I really enjoy their company.
02:16:56.000So there's social and, you know, natural experience motives that are very much just about the process and the experience.
02:17:40.000Which is one of the reasons why that's the number one accusation that anti-hunters will label on hunters that you're a sadistic person, you enjoy doing this, is the only reason why you possibly do this.
02:17:50.000But when you say you enjoy hunting, if the understanding is what you enjoy is simply that moment of taking life, there's nothing else about it that you enjoy, and the way you enjoy that moment is sadistic.
02:18:30.000But there's something that is magnetic and powerful about it.
02:18:33.000Yeah, there's something insanely primal about it, but one of the weirder things that people lobby at you, insults that they send your way, one of the big ones is you can't get an erection, so you go kill animals,
02:18:50.000or you have a little penis, so you kill animals.
02:18:53.000It gets brought to this weird sexual lust thing.
02:18:58.000I'm really confused about, I always get confused, like, what is the root of that?
02:19:01.000Because so many people go to that one.
02:19:03.000Like, they go to that one whenever I watched...
02:19:07.000No matter who the hunter is that people are attacking, like whether it was the Walter or the dentist guy who killed Cecil or whatever, it's...
02:20:07.000And that women, like Mother Earth, there's an association between women and Earth and nature, and men are these dominating, domineering, violent, macho.
02:20:20.000You can sort of see the logic and the cultural roots of all of that.
02:20:26.000Part of the problem, and Mary Stange wrote this fascinating book called Woman the Hunter back 25 years ago, and part of her argument, she's very much a feminist and a hunter,
02:20:43.000and part of her rebuttal to that Parallel around sexuality is that the same story is told both by the sort of Mainstream culture that portrays men as domineering and women as nurturing and men as
02:21:13.000violators and women as victims, which has happened certainly historically.
02:21:25.000As man the hunter, as a cultural myth, which is very strong in our culture, that the critics, sort of ecological feminists and so on, the critics of that are retelling the same story.
02:21:41.000It's men play this role and women are inherently nurturing, inherently nurturing.
02:21:50.000Not the sort of sexual, violent, you know, lust-driven sort of male.
02:21:59.000And her argument is, let's break this down.
02:22:04.000Let's also have women as hunters being honored and respected and accept that strong women and hunting...
02:22:54.000I don't think if you gave them a quiet room and said, okay, why do you think people hunt?
02:23:03.000If you're correct, you're going to win a million dollars.
02:23:05.000I want you to really do your best to try to calculate and formulate the actual process that's going on in a person's brain when they're hunting an animal.
02:23:15.000I guarantee you they're not going to go with get it up.
02:23:17.000They're not, because then they want to get that million bucks.
02:23:20.000They would try to figure it out, and they would try to be objective about it.
02:23:37.000When a hunter talk about the experience of hunting, the way you're talking about it, and what that food means, and what that moment is like, when they hear that, they respect that, in general.
02:24:05.000They can really respect that in general.
02:24:08.000It's when there's no experience of someone speaking about it that way and it's just some picture of some guy with some zebra or, you know, it's so incomprehensible.
02:25:01.000You know, without, again, like if I wanted to win a million dollars, then left me alone in a room and I'd never hunted before, and if I wanted to come up with a motive, that wouldn't be on the list.
02:25:11.000Because I don't really believe it, and I don't think anybody else does either.
02:25:15.000But before I first hunted, I was thinking to myself, I'm either going to become a vegan, or I'm going to become a hunter.
02:25:21.000That was what this experience, when I first went hunting, I was saying, well, one of the things that's going to happen, either I'm going to shoot this animal, I'm going to be horrified with myself, I'm going to be like, I'm going to eat this animal, and then I'm done.
02:26:19.000I just think that This is sort of a stage that human civilization is going through that's going to take a few hundred years, and in that few hundred years or so,
02:26:35.000we're going to evolve to be something that's almost unrecognizable in comparison to what we are now.
02:26:42.000We're going through this process, and in this process we're longing.
02:26:46.000We're longing towards the idea of wearing a flannel shirt and going into the woods with a bow and arrow.
02:28:02.000I went very similar to the sort of experience you're talking about with what it felt like to hunt and actually take an animal.
02:28:09.000I went out to Colorado two, three years ago and did some I did seminars for hunter education instructors and I was a little uncomfortable because one of the topics they asked me to speak on was ethics.
02:28:27.000I mean, I just started a few years ago and here are all these lifelong hunters pretty much in this room, 75 guys, mostly guys, and I'm going to tell them about hunting ethics.
02:29:48.000And, you know, all these hunting jokes and redneck jokes.
02:29:53.000I was in Boulder because I was being interviewed by this ex-vegetarian who ran this show for Gaim TV, this online TV station.
02:30:02.000It's all Eastern spirituality and, you know, all that kind of thing.
02:30:08.000Exactly the people who would make fun of each other, right?
02:30:11.000Hunter Education instructors and Gaim TV. As soon as we got into the conversation, We're talking about, you know, the emotional and ethical dimensions of taking life.
02:30:23.000She's now eating meat, but she's not a hunter.
02:30:25.000She's thinking about these issues about confronting life and death.
02:30:28.000And when I got done the trip, I looked back.
02:30:30.000I was like, wow, those two conversations were really similar, completely different communities who normally would think they had nothing in common, especially around hunting.
02:30:40.000And yet, the very basic human questions, the basic moral, ethical, emotional issues around taking another creature's life, especially a big mammal, It was a similar conversation.
02:30:55.000And so that's been, I guess, in a way, one of the most rewarding and surprising things about the whole process and the journey since is that you get to see and talk with people in these places where there's common ground in different cultures,
02:31:16.000And one of the things that I'm hoping is going to bring common ground or bring some common ground or at least bring an understanding is the emerging science behind understanding the intelligence of plants and that plants are in fact a life form that we take for granted because they're not in motion.
02:31:34.000Because they're stationary and they slowly grow and we don't really associate them with being a life form.
02:31:58.000Grow to understand that life deeper and deeper and have more respect for it and really understand what exactly they're doing when they're making calculations, what exactly they're doing, they're communicating with each other, how this network of...
02:32:14.000Intertwined lifeforms, similar plant lifeforms that exist in this topsoil which is also some sort of a very bizarre ecosystem of life that these electrical impulses that they're sharing with each other are some sort of form of communication.
02:32:30.000And this whole tradition of the spiritual dimensions, not only of animals, but plants, too.
02:32:53.000You know, I don't know if there's any way ever to get away from what we've established in this country with the giant numbers of human beings in these population centers and the factory farms that support these population centers.
02:33:06.000I don't know what the way of getting around that is.
02:33:08.000But I do think that people like yourself and other people that are proponents of At least removing your own existence from it in as clear a way as possible by doing some growing and gardening,
02:33:25.000by doing some hunting, by experiencing the wild of this world and going out there and getting into it and understanding it.
02:33:32.000This is a real environment that coexists with the city during the same time frame on Earth.
02:33:43.000I don't think there's a person that looks at those factory farm videos and goes, oh yeah, awesome, fuck those cows.
02:33:49.000I'm glad those chickens get stuffed in those boxes.
02:33:52.000I don't think there's a single person that does that.
02:33:55.000And I think that's also why those ag-gag laws are in effect, to protect those businesses, because if that stuff gets out, people get horrified and then they vote with their dollar.
02:34:04.000And they make choices that reflect the horror that they experience when they're watching those videos.
02:34:10.000I don't know if we can all collectively as a group get out of this, but I think as individuals we can start moving away from it.
02:34:19.000I think what you're doing or what your friends are doing when you're talking about these people that used to be vegetarians and now they grew their own chickens and now they provide food to these other people, that's ideal.
02:34:30.000Finding the people that are involved in growing and butchering this meat and getting it from them.
02:34:37.000It's a cleaner, easier way of existing.
02:34:43.000I don't know if we're ever, though, with the amount of people that we have stuffed in these cities, how else...