Hunting critics have consistently attacked the rhetoric that contemporary hunters employ to justify the slaying of wild animals. Peter Singer, for instance, sees appeals to habitat management as thinly veiled attempts to mask the human interests served by culling populations, a fact betrayed by the use of such anthropocentric terms as “harvest” in conservationist discourses (Singer 2009, 234). Singer does not specify what interests might be thusly served; he may have in mind the curation of landscapes according to human desire. Ecofeminist critics, such as Marti Kheel, however, perceive in hunting something more odious: the violent, masculinist attempt by alienated moderns to reunite with nature, one that misfires and compounds alienation (Kheel 1995, 2008). Kheel enumerates strategies deployed to mask this vera causa, from appeals to the invigorating pleasure of the hunt to claims about spiritual communion (1995, 87-104). Differences asides, then, both Singer and Kheel perceive in hunters’ discourses a kind of masquerade in which putative moral justifications function to conceal the intolerability of hunting.
I wish to examine two techniques some contemporary hunters use to rationalize the hunt found in a collection of Evangelical hunting devotionals. The first is the projection of certain desires in the case of wounded animals, specifically the desire for release from misery. The second strategy is to construe slain animals as having sacrificed themselves, tacitly ascribing autonomy to one’s quarry that culminates in a gesture of self-destruction. While hunting critics have noted such moves, in the context of the devotionals these techniques take distinctly theological shapes. Moreover, although these examples reiterate the troubling patterns of thought anti-hunters critique, and should be subject to criticism, say, for how they conveniently obfuscate nonhuman animal perspectives, I argue that these cases also deflate the caricature of contemporary hunters as mere moral charlatans. Additionally, when viewed within the frame of the Anthropocene, I claim, these texts should incite reflection, even among anti-hunters, on what it means to live well in a world where undue nonhuman animal death and suffering seems unavoidable for the foreseeable future.
The first sort of the rationalization is exemplified in Into the High Country (2006), a devotional co-authored by Evangelical ministers Jason Cruise and Jimmy Sites. In a chapter titled “Wounded,” Cruise recounts a wintry bow hunt during which he spots from afar a maimed whitetail buck. Hobbled and dormant beyond the range of his bow, he undertakes a strenuous journey, eventually crawling over frozen ground in socks to get close enough to slay the animal. Along the way he moralizes against the hunter who wounded the deer and expresses both regret and satisfaction at fulfilling his task, which we learn throughout is underwritten by Cruise’s sense that merciful death is what he owes this creature. Killing here is perceived as doing right by one’s quarry, and doing right by them is an obligation not easily shirked. Indeed, it is a thoroughly theological duty for Cruise; hunting for him is a practice constitutively organized by such norms and ordered to communion with God through nature. The question never arises whether destruction comports with the will of this particular deer. Indeed, the assumption of such comportment lends this duty its sense.
A second kind of rationalization recurs across a number of hunting devotionals, namely, the representation of slain animals as having sacrificed themselves in the hunt. This sometimes occurs explicitly, such as when devotionalist Aaron Futrell shifts from relishing the taste of venison to discussing “the cost of meat” and writes, “We should never take a killed animal for granted and always be thankful for its sacrifice” (2020, 131). Other cases, however, suggest self-sacrifice more symbolically. For instance, in the chapter “Bloodshed,” from his 2014 devotional In Pursuit, Evangelical minister Zeke Pipher recalls the first time he field-dressed a deer, and how his mind at the time meandered from contemplating the “loss of life” at hand to the sacrifice of lambs by the ancient Israelites and eventually to the image of the sacrificed Lamb of God. This set of semiotic shifts not only masks the fact that the deer in question was slain by Pipher; in addition Pipher’s discourse blends together the image of a deer corpse and the crucified Christ.
The rationalizations at play in these devotionals can be criticized from numerous angles; I have suggested one: that the projection of animals’ desires for self-destruction in situations of suffering and the construal of hunter-slain animals as having sacrificed themselves are convenient impositions that conceal the actual perspectives of the animals in question. I do not wish to diminish the veracity of such criticisms. However, I want to emphasize two features of the isolated rhetorics that might go missing in narrow readings. First, even if we disagree with these authors as to what the animals in question are owed, it is harder to deny that they adamantly think those animals are owed something—mercy in the first case, not to be killed without regret in the second. This feature chafes against the idea that here we have mere brutes playing at ethics, raising questions about what counts as genuine moral reasoning about killing animals.
Secondly, these writings consistently render the killing of animals ambiguous and severe, even as they condone it.Pipher thus injects the image of the slain buck with the significance of the crucifixion; Cruise, in turn, represents the demandingness of the norms guiding the assassination of deer. While we may reject the particular devices these authors use to conceptualize and ground the extirpation of animals, and perhaps the forms of annihilation they enact, we cannot afford to dismiss the potential value of such arts, which render killing grave and dubious while nevertheless conducting it. For our epoch is partially characterized by the recalcitrant carnage of nonhuman animals. That is a difficulty that will not disappear soon, and one to which many of us are or may become insensitive. Living well in the face of it requires, among other things, practices that render the undue mutilation and decimation of animals viscerally unnatural.
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.