Mercy Killing and Self-Sacrificing Deer: Projections of Animal Desire and Autonomy in Evangelical Hunting Devotionals

Hunting critics have consistently attacked the rhetoric that contemporary hunters use to justify the slaying of wild animals. This paper examines two such techniques as found in a collection of Evangelical hunting devotionals: the projection of the desire to be put out of one’s misery in the case of wounded animals and the construal of slain animals as having sacrificed themselves. Although these rationalizations merit criticism for conveniently eliding animals’ actual perspectives, confirming the suspicions of anti-hunters, these cases also deflate the idea that hunters' ethical discourses amount to a mere charade. Moreover, the particular articulations of these techniques in the devotionals achieve the complex effect of saturating the slaying of animals with gravity and ambiguity. Without diminishing the vices of these works, such an effect, I propose, merits contemplation in the Anthropocene, which is partially characterized by the mass annihilation and mutilation of nonhuman animals.