Thankfully, other men (and women) are already out there singing a similar tune.

Your words—and the vulnerability and gift/curse of highly sensitive empathy you describe—challenge us to consider all forms of harm more deeply.

As I mentioned in a comment on another post some weeks ago, my transitions from vegetarianism back to flesh-eating and on to hunting have come, in part, from painful confrontations with the inevitability of some degree of harm. With the fact that death sustains life. With the dilemma Barry Lopez raised in Arctic Dreams: “how to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in all life.”

How can we eat, feel compassion, and celebrate life? How can we fully inhabit both our bodies and our hearts?

That we can make hunting more respectful and conscientious “someday, someway”—that is one of my prayers.

The empathy that I and many others experience goes beyond what you describe as the physical sensations of a dying animal. The only way I can characterize what I feel is as an embodiment of the experience as a whole. It’s that visceral empathy you feel, combined with the intellectual revulsion for cruelty, fused with a psychological and emotional connection to that state of vulnerability — where one is, essentially, at the mercy of another and then shown no mercy. And I think it’s that latter part of the experience — the vulnerability — that makes witnessing harm to others nearly unbearable. Where you, yourself, having been vulnerable, cannot conceive of exercising anything but mercy in those moments where the gavel comes down on another. I think that might be why hunting, particularly in the hands of the less ethical or even outrightly cruel, is such a tough issue for many vegans or vegetarians. It’s perceived — sometimes rightly so, sometimes unfairly — as an act where there is, indeed, a choice between mercy and no mercy. But, obviously, this whole issue is far more complex than that, on both sides. That was a thoughtful and insightful question on your part, thank you for that.

Even though I can’t fully embrace the state of mind you describe in terms of pragmatism, I do at least appreciate that you and Tovar and others see those wasteful, callous hunters in the same way I do (in reference to Tovar’s latest post, which I just read). Unfortunately, our collective perspectives as non-hunters tend to fall on deaf ears when it comes to discourse with these very people. I continue to hope that upstanding hunters and the more conscientious hunters’ groups to can try to change this model (to paraphrase Marshall Crenshaw), someday, someway.

Hunting, for me, has partly been about confronting the harm I inevitably do just by being alive. Here I mean localized, immediate harm to individual creatures, not global, long-term harm to ecologies. Even the small-scale organic farmer down the road is killing woodchucks and deer to keep greens and berries in local food co-op. I needed to come face to face with that. (Other things drew me to hunting, too, but that’s more complex than I can tackle in this comment!)

And I’m with you: on the likely inaccuracy of the boundaries our culture insists on, and on the limitations of our language, both on what we can express and on what we can conceptualize in the first place.

Like Gabe, I resonate with your last paragraph. I, too, hope folks will entertain the ideas and questions being raised here, by me and by other people’s comments. Yes, I do think that both we and the animals around us stand to gain or lose a great deal, depending on how we understand our relationships with them: as food and as fellow beings who, by their presence, make this planet feel like home.

Some people grow up around animal-killing and, like Ingrid, end up abhorring it. Some, like you, end up thinking of animals like deer and cows purely as food-on-the-hoof.

What intrigues me is that other people kill animals (sometimes throughout their entire lives) but retain a sense of animals as complex beings and a conviction that animal suffering must be minimized. Some small-scale livestock farmers are like that. Some modern American hunters—Holly and me, for example—are like that, though we’re both fairly new hunters. My uncle has been hunting all his life and feels something similar. And there are entire hunting cultures where people kill animals constantly and depend on them for food, yet insist that animals are “other-than-human-persons” who must be respected and not harmed unnecessarily.

That’s crucial for me: the bringing-together of (1) being a hunter who’s part of the food web and (2) my ethical and emotional care for animals. For me, denying either one would make me feel dishonest and less-than-whole.

I’m curious: If you had enough money to buy all the beef your family could eat, would you lose all interest in hunting? Or is there something besides sheer necessity that draws you to the hunt?

And it’s interesting, because I have pretty strong empathy myself. When I watch an animal that I’ve shot in its last moments of life, I find myself in that animal, which is pretty overwhelming. But it doesn’t stop me from killing for meat.

I rationalize it intellectually with the obvious biological fact that life sustains life, and we’re omnivores, and all of us are meant to become food one way or another. But I don’t really believe it’s the intellect that allows us to take this serious step. There’s something in my constitution that allows me to be practical and accept the tradeoffs of my diet. Not callous, but still practical.

BTW, I love the line that animals benefit from your guilt. I love that whole species benefit from my hunting them. I know that the whole money-hunters-put-into-conservation thing never sways anyone, so I don’t make that argument in debates, and I’m not making it here. But it does make me smile knowing that habitat and conservation programs have benefited quantifiably since I joined the ranks of hunters three and a half years ago.

I do understand that we all vary in our physiological capacities. In spite of my strong convictions about animals, I too trample upon a land that’s undeniably damaged by our massive presence. I don’t mean to be a self-hating human (even though I kind of am) but I mean to suggest that the quantity of humans and our exponential expansion makes it nearly impossible to be a saint on this earth.

Personally, though, I couldn’t kill without feeling such conflict, I would be paralyzed by it. I know this because I’ve been in situations where the remorse I suffer — to this day — is so extreme, I still have nightmares after years and years. I’ve always been that way, and I’d have to say I was probably born with an over-active, dysfunctional conscience, or conditioned at such a young age, I have little recollection of the mechanism. I simply cannot remember ever feeling differently. And I’ve had more pressing things to work through in “group.” Besides, animals benefit from my guilt.

It’s personal, though, and I can relate somewhat to Envirocapitalist’s story of his childhood. I also wasn’t shielded from the realities of life and death as a child. Where I lived and traipsed, I was exposed to many forms of malaise. Awful, awful malaise. In as much as Envirocapitalist became inured to slaughter through exposure, I never could. I suffered greatly. I’ve stopped trying to explain that division in spirit. I have my own hypotheses, but most of those would require 8 hours, a bottle of Don Julio, and a defibrillator.

In response to the “correct” interpretation of your comment . . . “to what extent are there really divisions among physiology, mind, emotion, and soul, and to what extent are these simply separations that we’ve imposed, artificially divvying up whole beings and experiences into supposed parts? How would we understand and talk about ourselves and our experiences if our language and concepts were different?”

How utterly not surprising that I read this through my own self-imposed, self-limiting filter. Well, putting aside the rhetorical nature of that question for a moment, I will just say that me, myself and I buy into the wholistic approach to life, believing, as you may be suggesting in your comment, that we can’t really separate those things. Although I’m a writer and paid hack by profession, how does one verbally encapsulate that which transcends the tangible and the verbal? To this day, I have an archive of profound transformations and understandings that elude language. I’m sure we all do, which makes explaining or defending our beliefs an exercise in genuine exasperation.

Tying that in with my misinterpretation of your comment, my own belief system embraces a holism that includes animals in that hazy fusion of boundaries. I don’t believe I stop at the bounds of my hair or my fingertips — or at the delimiting line of my species. Quantum physics would suggest molecular collusion across all life, further breaking down those separations between us . . . and, say, a wood rot fungus. Frankly, I wish I had the sense of the ancients who could speak their truth across species. So far, I’ve been able clicker train a Japanese Quail. I other words, I have a ways to go.

Be that as it may, I always hope that even those who don’t share my sensitive disposition toward these things and toward our animal companions, will at least entertain the ideas you present here, which relate to respect, diligence, compassion and — I hope I’m not taking out of context — acknowledgement of what we all stand to lose and gain in ignoring those associations.