Why I Eat Wild Meat

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Self-described "campfire philosopher" David Petersen is a former editor for MOTHER EARTH NEWS. He is the author of nine books, including the 20th anniversary edition of "Racks: A Natural History of Antlersand the Animals That Wear Them." David and his wife, Caroline, live in a self-built cabin in the Rocky Mountains, where they grow and hunt their food. PHOTO: DAVID PETERSEN

David Petersen has a long history with MOTHER EARTH NEWS magazine. He is the former Western Editor, and built his Colorado cabin from an early set of our building plans for a pole barn. He first met Edward Abbey when he interviewed him for the magazine. Check out his 9 wonderful books at David Petersen Books. 

The out-of-doors is our true ancestral estate. For a mere five thousand years we have grubbed in the soil and laid brick upon brick to build the cities; but for a million years before that we lived the leisurely, free and adventurous life of hunters and gatherers. How can we pluck that deep root of feeling from the racial consciousness? Impossible!
— Edward Abbey 

As one who makes no secret of his life preferences, I am often asked why I prefer to eat wild meat almost to the exclusion of domestic. It’s a fair question, to which I hope I have fair answers — beginning with health and nutrition.

By any comparison with the factory-produced, chemical-drenched, fat-laden pseudo-meat that too many Americans grow obese and sick from eating today, wild meat — fish, fowl or red — is brilliantly natural, inimitably healthy and morally superior. Wild game is the meat that made us human. Best of all, we must hunt in order to have it. The alleged “wild game” sold in some restaurants is in fact the comparatively flaccid flesh of captive wild animals and has the same culinary relationship to true wild meat as farmed salmon does to the genuine free-swimming creature.

And — this is my apologia — if we hunt with gratitude and reverence, we gradually acquire a personally meaningful love not only for the act of traditional hunting and the meat it procures, but for the animals we hunt as well.

Baloney, say hunting’s harshest critics. How can one who kills for “fun” feel compassion for his prey, the victims of the hunt?

To this emotionally charged yet seemingly reasonable criticism, I respond with a question of my own. Which would you rather be: a factory pig in a wire-floored cage whose neighbor in the next-door cage chews off your tail in frustration (for these are sentient beings), and you his; a castrated steer standing knee-deep in feedlot manure, being artificially fattened for undignified and panicked mass slaughter; a production-line chicken whose beak has been burned off to keep you from pecking your mates to death ... or a deer, elk, turkey, or anything truly wild: born free, living and eventually dying where and as you lived, taken down by tooth and claw or winter’s cold white fangs or, yes, given a swift wild death by a well-placed arrow or bullet sent by a true hunter, one who cares about wildlife and its dwindling wild world and who isn’t merely killing for ego and antlers and who gratefully and humbly consumes your flesh? Forced to the choice — domestic or wild — which would you rather be, in death as well as life? Speaking to my fellow carnivores, I ask which is the greater “cruelty”: production-line domestication and mass slaughter, or wildness and fair-chase hunting?