Blue Weimaraner Today

Attitudes About Hunting: A Personal View

Posted on 13. Feb, 2010 by Blue Weimaraner Today in Articles

I feel blessed to have grown up with a very diverse cultural background. My mother’s family are cowboys and truck drivers in rural New Mexico. I used to spend summers with my Aunt Rosie and Uncle Lee on their cattle ranch. I went to round-ups when I was a little girl. Yep, my uncle had a gun rack in his pick-up and spat tobacco. I guess you can say my family is pretty red-neck.

My mother was the black sheep of the family and ran off to be a Beatnik and then a Hippie. We went through a phase of “Back to Earth Hippies” where my mom moved us from Albuquerque to rural New Mexico. We had a horse, a pig, rabbits, chickens, a turkey and goats. The only meat we ate was what we raised or hunted. We were awfully thankful for the rabbits we hunted to put in our beans and rice. The rare deer or Elk in hunting season was an occasion for a feast with friends. The best “hamburger” I’ve ever had was a venison sausage on home-made biscuits. I’ve seen our pig butchered and I’ve wrung a chicken’s neck and plucked it. I didn’t like either of those, but I was very thankful for the meat. That pig was carefully preserved and only for special occasions. Ham on Christmas was truly a rare treat. I grew up seeing and understanding that for us to eat, an animal had to be killed.

When I was a teenager, we moved to Eugene, Oregon, a very liberal college town. I stayed there through university and embraced the punk movement of the times. After college, I moved to San Francisco and worked in photography and graphic design. I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for more than 20 years. Hmm. San Francisco, the arts…

Yes, I am a liberal Democrat. I usually don’t like mixing politics with dogs, but I thought it was worth mentioning as people often associate hunting with an image of stereotypical, republican red necks, throwing beer cans from the pick up truck. Speaking of stereotypes, you may find that those people you think of as red necks are more than often, really great people. Because of my family background, I feel comfortable around people who have different perspectives from my own. In fact that’s one of the things I really like about being involved with Weimaraners. I have a shared passion with people who have different politics and lifestyles from my own. I feel enriched by those connections.

OK, so back to my liberal days in San Francisco. While at that time, I had no idea or intentions of ever hunting, I noticed what I saw as a certain naivete of many urbanites in their attitudes about animals and food. While I personally feel that humans are omnivores and eat meat, I respect a person’s right to choose not to eat animals. I’m not talking about respecting a vegetarian’s choice. I’m talking about people who eat meat and wear leather, but recoil in horror at the idea of killing Thumper and Bambi for food. Later, when I had started training for field, I can remember being in the lunch room at my job. A co-worker asked me what I had done that weekend. I answered that I had been to a field training event with my dogs. She asked what that was and when I explained, she looked at me with shock and disdain, then lowered her eyes and muttered “THAT’S not very nice!” and slunk away. (Note: My advice is to think of hunting as one of those subjects like politics, religion, and sexual preferences. Probably best not to bring up at work. Ditto for tacking up photos in your cubicle of your dog proudly showing its bird retrieve. Yeah, I know, to us it’s a thing of pride and beauty, to others, not so much.)

There is a curious dichotomy in our modern attitudes about eating meat and killing animals. Modern, urban life is separated from seeing where food comes from. Our ideas of wild life and farm animals comes from cartoons like Bambi and Babe the pig.  Food comes packaged on the market shelf. Meat comes as Chicken McNuggets and Big Macs. It’s not meat that people object to, but the idea of killing an animal to get it. They don’t want to see that unavoidable step — that you must kill to eat meat. If you stop and think about it, why is it OK to have over-crowded stockyards of animals dosed up with antibiotics and hormones so they can survive the inhumane conditions – and are then killed and packaged, but it’s a horror to kill an animal in nature? Aside from vegetarians, most people don’t bat an eye at fishing or live crabs and lobsters at the grocery store. Why is it less politically correct to hunt for a pheasant than to fish for trout, boil a crab or steam mussels?

Another thing that people don’t see about hunting is the attention to conservation and appreciation of wild life. I’d bet that the majority of people I’ve met who pay lip-service to animal and land conservation aren’t actually involved. Hunters are involved. Every year, studies are done on the number of wild life and the land conditions such as rainfall and then hunting limits are set. Did you know that if wild life is too plentiful they will die from starvation because the land won’t support them? Why is that more palatable than controlling population through hunting?

Many hunters are involved in organizations such as Ducks Unlimited, Pheasants Forever and Quail Unlimited that actively raise money for conservation of lands to support wild life.

Since moving to France, I’ve had the opportunity to hunt with friends and dog clubs. It is a tradition. There is a notion in France called “Terroir” which refers to what the land gives you. Picking mushrooms and rooting for truffles are not far from fishing and hunting. All are gathering the richness of nature. There is also a wonderful comraderie from walking with friends all day long through valley and forest with your dogs working. Your Weimaraner will never be happier than when it’s jumping ditches and flying over a hill crest in search of a bird. Even if you walk all day and never get a bird, it’s a satisfying day.

I appreciate that there are people who don’t want to hunt. I just invite you to think again about your own reactions towards those that do. Are they well-thought out objections or only founded on popular political correctness? So, the next time your co-worker tells you they went hunting, how about offering to bring the wine if they’ll invite you to a pheasant dinner?

Photograph is Bellatrix des Perles d’Artemis. Photograph © Michel Daudin. All Rights Reserved. Please do not reproduce.

Further Reading: Th blog, NorCal Cazadora has really good posts on our attitudes about food and hunting. Especially this post.

I also highly recommend the following two books. Extremely interesting and illuminating reads about food, our modern food industry and our connection to food.

Tags: Field, hunting