My son Daniel hunted deer this January and came home delighted and proud of his time away. His experience and the common bond with nature that it created reminded me of my early experience hunting. I first hunted with my father, and I remember the experiences vividly. We explored PA Game Lands 56 and Haycock Mountain in Buck county Pa like explorers in a forgotten land. Rarely were we successful at actually shooting game in the rocky, infertile early growth forest but what I remember has little to do with the killing of wildlife. Ironically, my time spent as a hunter, from about 12 to 35 years old, molded my passion for keeping animals alive and giving honor to God in the church of nature. Its the paradox of hunting and fishing.
Now I satisfy the same need that urged me to hunt by restoring wildlife. It comes with difficulty and failure in what may become humanity’s final assault on nature. It also brings an intimacy with wildlife and nature in general, just as it did when as a boy I sat cold and still as a stone in winter, waiting for a hapless squirrel or deer to wander into my sights.
My experience now, however, also comes with the inspiration that killing an animal cannot provide. The reader can look at these pages and see the range of work it represents and how my occupation borders the line with avocation. Most of my career was spent working for agencies, but 15 years ago I turned conservation entrepreneur. Now I chose my work to give voice to the wildlife that I have loved all my life.
Killing wildlife for a sport turns off many people. Some adamantly resist or prevent it, as though stopping people from hunting creates protection for wildlife. It’s true that some hunters only like to kill. You can see this clearly in this Reply All podcast describing the slaughter of wild pigs for fun. Feral pigs need control; they wreck natural habitats and breed like rabbits. But these killers calling themselves hunters deserve nothing but disgust. Their justification of controlling an invasive pest is only a thin veneer over the desire to wreck a life, to feel superior at the expense of compassion.
Perhaps they deserve their life without compassion. Most hunters, however, go to the field just as I did as a boy, and my son did as a millennial young man seeking intimacy with nature. We go to enjoy nature and add a voice to the chorus demanding protection for wildlife. Those who disparage these hunters only deepen the divide between factions of people who want to protect wildlife. And it hurts. Just like every other issue in our lives, the people who destroy nature for easy money take advantage of this divided constituency, so it has no political power to make a change.
We are losing the fight to save our world’s biodiversity and the productivity of ecosystems. We not only lose species at an alarming rate, but we have lost whole ecosystems from overuse and destruction. Delaware Bay is one, but countless others exist. We have only one way to stop it –unite all people who love wildlife and create a new vision for the future. The current one belongs not to hunters or nonhunters but the exploiters and killers.
