The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [184]
Perhaps there is a more generous light in which to regard the hunter’s joy. Perhaps it is the joy of a creature succeeding at something he has discovered his nature has superbly equipped him to do, an action that is less a perversion of that nature, his “creaturely character,” than a fulfillment of it. But what of the animal in the picture? Well, the animal too has had the chance to fulfill its wild nature, has lived, and arguably even died, in a manner consistent with its creaturely character. Hers is, by the standards of animal death, a good one. But could I really say that yet? What if it turned out I couldn’t eat this meat? I realized that the drama of the hunt doesn’t end until the animal arrives at the table.
“For one creature to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun,” wrote Aldo Leopold, himself a deeply conflicted hunter. It is a very good thing indeed, he suggests, but we would do well to recognize just how new it is, what a departure from the usual order of nature this mourning represents. What shames at least some of us about hunting is the same thing that shames us about every other reminder of our origins: that is, the incompleteness of our transcendence of our animal nature.
So which view of me the hunter is the right one, the shame at the photograph or the joy of the man in it, the outside gaze or the inside one? The moralist is eager to decide this question once and for all, to join Cotton Mather in his noble quest for a more complete transcendence. The hunter—or at least the grown-up hunter, the uneasy hunter—recognizes the truths disclosed in both views, which is why his joy is tempered by shame, his appetite shadowed by disgust.
The fact that you cannot come out of hunting feeling unambiguously good about it is perhaps what should commend the practice to us. You certainly don’t come out of it eager to protest your innocence. If I’ve learned anything about hunting and eating meat it’s that it’s even messier than the moralist thinks. Having killed a pig and looked at myself in that picture and now looking forward (if that’s the word) to eating that pig, I have to say there is a part of me that envies the moral clarity of the vegetarian, the blamelessness of the tofu eater. Yet part of me pities him, too. Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris. Ortega suggests that there is an immorality in failing to look clearly at reality, or in believing that the sheer force of human will can somehow overcome it. “The preoccupation with what should be is estimable only when the respect for what is has been exhausted.”
“What is.” I suppose that this as much as anything else, as much as a pig or a meal, is what I was really hunting for, and what I returned from my hunt with a slightly clearer sense of. “What is” is not an answer to anything, exactly; it doesn’t tell you what to do or even what to think. Yet respect for what is does point us in a direction. That direction just happens to be the direction from which we came—to that place and time, I mean, where humans looked at the animals they killed, regarded them with reverence, and never ate them except with gratitude.
THERE WAS one other picture in Angelo’s e-mail that I didn’t look at very closely until some time later, no doubt because it hadn’t hit me over the head the way the trophy portrait had. This was the picture I took of Angelo cleaning my pig