Euell Gibbons: Author of Stalking the Wild Asparagus

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PLOWBOY: What about shooting wild animals for food? Many of today's people—especially young people—look upon hunting as another futile "conquest" of nature. Obviously you don't because you sometimes eat wild game. You're a pacifist but not a vegetarian. Does that square?

GIBBONS: Yes, it squares. Very much so. I don't think that eating animals is a conquest of nature at all. To hunt and eat wild animals is to assume your role within nature.

Now I can see a vegetarian saying, "I won't eat commercially produced meats because this is a wasteful means of feeding people." The pig, for instance, is raised for no other purpose than so that we may eat its flesh . . . yet pigs are way up in the food chain. It takes at least 10 pounds of vegetable protein to make one pound of animal protein and it takes 10 pounds of pig to make one pound of growing child. It would be ten times more efficient, you see, for us to interrupt this food chain a step lower and eat the vegetable protein directly.

But that doesn't apply to eating sea creatures, shore creatures and other wild animals. They're already there naturally. If I'm going to relate to them, I must relate for what I am . . . and I'm part predator.

Take a mussel on the Maine coast. Every mussel produces about four million eggs a year for three years. That's twelve million eggs . . . and only two can be allowed to survive or else the population of mussels will change. If all those eggs survived, the world would be ten feet deep in mussels in one year. The surplus is not only available for eating, it must be eaten. Some of the excess eggs are even eaten by the mussels themselves.

The same thing in decreasing frequency holds true right on up the scale. At the present time—because we've done away and continue to do away with most other predators—the hunter is an absolutely necessary balance in nature. So I'm not anti-hunter in general, though I have nothing but contempt for the person who shoots animals and won't eat them. I would also say that—from my moral point of view—the vegetarian downgrades the life of plants by stating that it's OK to eat them but not animals. Plants are alive too.

PLOWBOY: How do you account for the fact that people—even non-vegetarians—are generally more squeamish about trying strange wild meats—such as 'possum—than about tasting exotic wild plants?

GIBBONS: I don't know exactly how to explain it. I imagine it's partly because we have fewer animals from which we get meat. It also seems to tie into religious beliefs . . . whether as cause or effect is hard to say. The Hindu religion absolutely forbids beef and frowns on meat of any kind. Buddhists eat meat under certain circumstances if they can find a Moslem to butcher it for them. The Jew and Adventist won't eat pork. Ideas about "clean" and "unclean" meats are very extensive while the Bible says that "every green herb" is food for man. Well, that's quite an exaggeration because some green herbs will kill you deader than hell (laughter).

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