Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

Interesting topic. Personally I'm not a vegetarian on principle, and get very 
little meat or dairy, but it's for a couple reasons. One is a health concern 
and the other is a larger issue - the waste of land and freshwater for 
excessive, CAFO meat consumption in this country. And I'd rather see 
predators allowed to multiply and regain a natural balance in the wild 
instead of hunting. YMMV

paul tradingpost@lobo.net

Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.
--Henry David Thoreau
*********** REPLY SEPARATOR  ***********

On 4/13/2010 at 7:26 AM Doug Willhite wrote:

>Whether you hunt, raise & butcher your own livestock, or buy factory
>farmed meat from a grocery store, knowing where the meat on your
>table came from and how the animal lived & died, is a more ethical,
>responsible, & empowering stance for you and your family than the
>alternative -- which is NOT wanting to remember & appreciate the life
>of the animal you're eating.
>
>(With apologies to our friends who are vegetarians...)
>
>doug
>
>PS  Once again, this message is meant only as "food for thought."
>It's not a blanket endorsement of the author's views. This message is
>intended for the seed, garden, & animal husbandry e-group. Please let
>us know if you'd like your name removed.
>
>_________________________________________________________________
>
>The Good Hunter -- David Petersen On The Ethics Of Killing Animals
>For Food
>by Jeremy Lloyd
>The complete text of this selection is available in the print edition
>of The Sun Magazine.
>
>JEREMY LLOYD lives in Townsend, Tennessee, in the Great Smoky
>Mountains. Due west, south, and east of his home are forests
>containing some of the richest biodiversity on the continent. Due
>north is good beer. He is at work on a novel.
>
>Why is it that so many of my favorite subjects are conversation
>killers? Politics. Religion. Hunting. In my social circle the
>statement “I’m going hunting next week” tends to bring any discourse
>to a halt.
>
>Though I grew up in Pennsylvania, the deer-hunting capital of North
>America, I never went hunting as a boy. Today I live in rural
>Tennessee — inside a national park, in fact — and I work at an
>environmental learning center. “In wildness is the preservation of
>the world,” Henry David Thoreau said. But in the twenty-first century
>we relate to wild nature mostly as mere visitors to it. Several years
>ago, wanting a relationship with wilderness that was closer to the
>one Native Americans and early European settlers had, I went deer
>hunting for the first time. Two years ago I killed my first deer. I
>spent the next year eating the meat I’d hunted myself. In the process
>I deepened my connection with the land — land that hadn’t been
>cleared for crops but instead had remained wild.
>
>The U.S. Census Bureau reports that the number of hunters in this
>country has been in gradual decline for the last two decades. In 2006
>only 5 percent of the population identified themselves as hunters.
>This worries state fish-and-wildlife agencies, which depend on
>revenue from license fees to buy land and improve habitat. (Wildlife
>watchers and nature enthusiasts usually pay nothing for their
>enjoyment of these lands.) Fewer hunters means fewer memberships in
>organizations like Ducks Unlimited, which since 1937 has conserved
>more than 11 million acres of wetlands. But hunting entails picking
>up a weapon, aiming it at a living being, and sending a bullet or
>arrow through its heart. And many view this as cruel and barbaric.
>
>David Petersen would like to change their perspective. His book
>Heartsblood: Hunting, Spirituality, and Wildness in America (Johnson
>Books) explained to me both the sadness and the powerful feeling of
>connectedness that I experienced when I killed a deer. “Nothing could
>be more in tune with nature,” he writes, “and thus more moral, than
>to follow our omnivorous instincts, needs, and ‘God-given’ talents as
>hunters, openly and gratefully acknowledging the deaths that go to
>nourish our lives.” He wades fearlessly into ethical debates with
>vegetarians and animal-rights advocates, and he lives what he believes.
>
>Before giving up a conventional life in order to live closer to the
>wild, Petersen was a helicopter pilot in the U.S. Marines, the
>managing editor of a national motorcycle magazine, a mail carrier, a
>beach bum, and the western editor of Mother Earth News. He has
>written nine books (www.davidpetersenbooks.com), including Elkheart:
>A Personal Tribute to Wapiti and Their World (Johnson Books) and On
>the Wild Edge: In Search of a Natural Life (Holt). Petersen was a
>close friend of nature writer Edward Abbey, who died in 1989, and he
>has edited Abbey’s journals, poetry, and letters. He is currently the
>Colorado field director for Trout Unlimited’s Sportsmen’s
>Conservation Project and co-chair of Colorado Backcountry Hunters and
>Anglers (www.coloradobackcountryhunters.org). Though Petersen has
>little use for what he calls “man-made” religion, he holds to a
>strong personal spirituality that he describes as a respect for all
>life on earth, rooted in ancient practices and informed by modern
>science.
>
>I sat down with Petersen for several hours in the Strater Hotel in
>Durango, Colorado. Afterward he took me to the cabin he’d built in
>the San Juan Mountains. There he and his wife, Caroline, treated me
>to a delicious steak supper of elk and pronghorn antelope, both of
>which Petersen had shot with a simple longbow.
>
>
>Lloyd: Other than food, what type of rewards does hunting bring:
>Physical? Spiritual? A sense of place?
>
>Petersen: All of the above and more. But as with all “good work,” to
>use poet Gary Snyder’s term, hunting can open these doors only if we
>think about what we are doing and why; only if we work at it
>honestly, with no loutish shortcuts; and only if we intend it to be
>physically, spiritually, and even aesthetically rewarding. We take
>from hunting what we put into it, just as with the rest of life.
>
>Not all hunting is the same, and not all hunters are the same. One
>hunter may walk up the mountain to hunt like a real human animal and
>carry the meat back down; another may ride up the mountain on an all-
>terrain vehicle [atv] and haul the meat back effortlessly.
>Spiritually, hunters can study and internalize the natural histories
>not only of their prey but also of our own omnivorous species, at
>once empowering and restraining themselves with empathy. Or hunters
>can think of their prey merely as potential scores in the record
>book, stuffed heads on the den wall, which is the antithesis of
>spirituality and even basic human decency.
>
>Growing up on the Great Plains, I hunted and ate cottontails,
>squirrels, and bobwhite quail, because that’s what was available
>there. For the twenty-nine years that I’ve lived in the Rockies, I’ve
>hunted elk, because it’s the most abundant and delicious wild game
>around. I do almost all of my hunting near my home. I walk up the
>mountain and kill an elk and have meat all winter. This is the norm
>for me, as it is for a majority of American hunters, if you replace
>the elk with white-tailed deer.
>
>Lloyd: You’ve called hunting “our genetic dictum.” How so?
>
>Petersen: Humans evolved as wild animals among other wild animals in
>a wholly wild world. Sociobiologist Paul Shepard is the father of the
>field of human ecology, and in his book Coming Home to the
>Pleistocene he says humans reached ecological perfection during the
>Pleistocene, from 1.6 million to about fourteen thousand years ago.
>Then the climate changed, and their megafaunal prey died out.
>(Subsistence hunting was certainly a factor in the extinctions, but
>not the primary cause.) After that humans went from seminomadic
>foragers to sedentary farmers. But until that point, every human
>alive had been a hunter-gatherer.
>
>Natural inclinations and aversions evolve over a very long time.
>Since we began farming, there’s been just enough genetic change in
>our gut to allow us to better digest grains, but behaviorally,
>physically, and nutritionally we haven’t changed one iota from our
>Pleistocene forebears. Ten thousand years of agriculture cannot
>supplant 6 million years of evolution. We are still the same human
>animals. So, though this inclination to hunt may be a disturbing
>mystery to some of us, and though it doesn’t make logical sense as a
>means of feeding all of us, it remains an urgent biological
>imperative in many humans today, though often sublimated because of
>the culture and lack of wild surroundings.
>
>Lloyd: Some people believe we have evolved enough by now that killing
>meat for food is obsolete.
>
>Petersen: It depends what type of “evolution” you’re speaking of.
>Certainly, from a cultural-evolution point of view, modern, well-
>nourished First World citizens have no need to hunt or raise our own
>meat. But the majority of us still eat meat. Is it a moral gain or
>loss to relegate the bloody task of making meat to slaughterhouse
>professionals doing their unpleasant work behind closed doors and off
>camera? As an alternative we can become vegetarians, but even vegans
>must accept responsibility for the deaths of the plants that nourish
>them. Life is eat-and-be-eaten. Unless you can acquire all your
>nutrients from the air, killing for food can never be avoided.
>
>We human animals split from a common ancestor with chimps and reached
>our present form of mind and body millions of years later, only after
>having perfected hunting and meat eating. None of the several
>prehuman Homo branches that were strict vegetarians lasted. Our large
>brain developed thanks to the specific combination of fatty acids
>found only in meat. Without hunting and meat eating, we’d still be
>fruit-and-berry-eating apes. The world, in many ways, would be better
>off.
>
>Lloyd: Why, in a culture that glorifies violence, do some recoil at
>the notion of killing an animal to feed oneself?
>
>Petersen: I don’t know that I can answer that to anyone’s
>satisfaction, especially my own. As a culture, we glorify fictional
>violence to escape from and harden our hearts against the reality of
>a truly violent world. And some hunters hunt from a comic-book
>mentality, trying to enact violent fantasy in a legalized and
>somewhat culturally acceptable fashion. The end result is the
>objectification of all nonhuman life. Modern humans are strange,
>deracinated animals living in an increasingly unreal “reality.” But
>hunting is as real as the red blood on my hands after hauling home an
>elk.
>
>Lloyd: What’s your opinion of veganism as a philosophy and way of life?
>
>Petersen: Veganism is a morally valid, albeit nutritionally extreme,
>attempt to live ethically in an overcrowded world of finite material
>resources and seemingly infinite cruelty. But is it worth the bother
>in the big picture of life and death on earth? Biologically speaking,
>the human animal, like our brother the bear, is an opportunistic
>omnivore. We have a predator’s front-set eyes and an omnivore’s gut,
>teeth, and nutritional needs. But at least vegans are thinking about
>life’s problems and experimenting with theoretical solutions, which
>is more than I can say for most people, including most hunters.
>
>There are many hidden ecological and economic costs of veganism and
>vegetarianism. Ted Kerasote, in his well-researched book Bloodties,
>coined the term “fossil-fuel vegetarianism” to describe what’s going
>on today. If someone wishes to forgo meat — either for moral reasons
>or because they believe eating meat is unhealthy — I say more power
>to them. But how many vegetarians grow or gather all their own food?
>Practically no one falls into that category, which means you’re
>buying farmed products. Somebody has cleared land, costing many birds
>and animals their homes. Maybe that land was cleared a hundred years
>before you were born, but you’re a direct beneficiary of that
>destruction of the wild. Then there are all the chemical fertilizers.
>Even if you’re using organic fertilizer, it has to be shipped using
>fossil fuels. Every spring a big diesel tractor will be used to till
>the soil and will smash burrows and kill countless moles and mice and
>burrowing owls and even deer fawns. This considerable carnage is all
>conveniently invisible.
>
>Lloyd: Is predation ethical?
>
>Petersen: Absolutely! But civilization has a broad bias against
>hunters and predators of every stripe: The Big, Bad Wolf. Jaws. Elmer
>Fudd. The list goes on. Remember, we didn’t evolve only as hunters
>but as prey too. Before we learned to pick up a stick or rock and
>throw it at something good to eat, we were being chased, killed, and
>eaten by an impressive assortment of megapredators. It’s no surprise
>that many of us tend to think of the predator as the bad guy, and to
>side with the underdog, the weak, the “helpless” and preyed-upon.
>What a wonderful world this would be if only the lamb could lie down
>with the lion. But what are the lion’s choices at dinnertime?
>
>One of my favorite cult movies, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Predator,
>plays on this theme of the hunter as pure evil. It’s dismissed by
>most as a stupid, macho divertissement, but this testosterone-
>drenched flick is also a surprisingly subtle sendup of trophy hunting.
>
>My point is that, in our culture, in order to even entertain the idea
>of an ethical predator, the observer must approach the subject with
>an open mind. Ethical hunting is predicated on dignity and respect:
>Dignity in our private thoughts and public words as well as in our
>actions afield when, as hunter Aldo Leopold pointed out, nobody is
>watching us. And respect, not only for the animals we hunt, their
>habitats, and the greater natural world, but also for ourselves as
>hunters and human animals. Carry those two blessed burdens in your
>heart, and you will do no moral wrong as a predator.
>
>Lloyd: What are the cultural origins of this bias against hunters in
>America?
>
>Petersen: It depends on which America you are speaking of: Madison
>Avenue or Madison River, Montana; or, for that matter, New York City
>or upstate New York. Hunting is not looked upon as a cruel activity
>in most rural regions of the U.S. Whereas people in the city discuss
>the size of their financial investments, people in the country ask
>about the size of your winter woodpile and whether you’ve got your
>elk or deer in yet.
>
>Where a bias against hunting does exist in this country today —
>essentially in the large population centers — it’s a perfectly
>understandable phenomenon. Put people in an environment where hunting
>has not been a part of their families or culture for generations;
>where almost every visible aspect of wild nature has been erased and
>paved over; where hunting is no longer necessary to satisfy our
>natural cravings for meat; where guns are used only to commit crimes
>and enforce laws; where nothing about hunting’s essential role in
>human evolution is to be found in any schoolbook below the university-
>graduate level — and naturally those people won’t know or care about
>hunting. And what we don’t understand or care about, we tend to
>distrust and dislike. It’s a form of xenophobia.
>
>On top of this, within the last generation or so, out-of-touch
>hunters and the burgeoning hunting industry have begun to supply the
>nonhunting public with a bounty of justifiable reasons to distrust
>and dislike them.
>
>________________________________________
>
>The complete text of this selection is available in the print edition
>of The Sun Magazine.
>
>Original article available here: http://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/
>408/the_good_hunter?
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