Hunting for Connections
By Naomi Heindel, Executive Director and Chelsea Clarke Sawyer, Communications Coordinator
Our Executive Director Naomi Heindel sat down with three staff who are also hunters to talk about how hunting fits into their connection with the natural world and their identity as Vermonters. They covered more ground in this hour-long conversation than we can include here, so this has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Naomi: To start, what do you hunt and why do you hunt?
Ken Benton, Director of Education: I hunt deer, grouse, woodcock, ducks, geese, rabbits, and squirrels. And I fish. The primary reason I hunt is for food. It’s a diet and set of flavors that we’ve largely lost as we’ve moved towards buying food in packages. Tapping back into nature as a hunter also deeply connects me to the circle of life in a way that I have a hard time getting any other way. You can go out on a hike and experience and observe things, but when you’re entering that same landscape as a hunter, your senses are more highly attuned in a way that is hard to achieve otherwise. It’s a really powerful experience.
Ash Kerby-Miller, Teacher-Naturalist: I hunt ducks, geese, and mushrooms, and the most significant portion of my hunting is deer. I grew up in a family of hunters, and I learned so much through it. I hunt for a lot of the same reasons Ken said, including for food. I haven’t regularly bought meat for almost a decade, and I eat a lot of meat — including roadkill. Even more than that though, there’s such a sense of connection and being involved in every part. I process the hide. I do all the butchery. Friends help, but I’m present at all points.
In both mushroom hunting and deer hunting, I find deep, almost spiritual, connections to place, to understanding how other beings are moving through the world. I really appreciate how in seeing where chanterelles pop up, you’re sketching geology and biology underground. And when you’re trying to figure out where deer are, you’re sketching habitat connectivity and landscape history. It’s a good way to see a lot of sunrises and sunsets too.
And there are too many deer! I came to hunting for all the reasons I said, and now I want to keep hunting because our forests aren’t regenerating. Native trees and shrubs aren’t growing back when they’re cut because deer overbrowse the saplings, while ignoring introduced species. Our current deer population in Vermont is vastly higher than pre-colonial levels. We extirpated all their major predators, and deer thrive along forest edges created by agriculture and development. Now, more deer are hit by cars or starve in lean winters. That’s not good for anyone, including the deer.
Sean Beckett, Program Director: I hunt deer and turkeys. Unlike Ken and Ash, I’m a relatively new hunter. I came to it in Wyoming, where I had a great mentor with a nature connection that I really admired. At the time, I didn’t understand how hunting could square with a love of nature and wildlife, but then he took me hunting and I realized there’s something different and special about this. It feels like unlocking a sixth sense that used to be part of our humanity and how we survived as a species. It’s still there, and it comes out when you go out with the intention of hunting.
For me, it’s entirely about food. It’s true that my connection with nature is deepened and enriched in profound ways when hunting, but at the end of the day, you’re killing something, and that’s never to be taken lightly. Hunting helps me think about where my food comes from and recognize all the places in my life where I make decisions that cause the death of animals on a farm or in a forest, or the disappearance of habitat. If you are eating a salad from the grocery store, it likely came from a place that was once a wild tallgrass prairie where bison and elk roamed. Every time I’m hunting I’m asking myself “Why am I doing this?” because if I don’t have a good enough answer, then I shouldn’t be pointing a weapon at an animal.
Naomi: I think that what you all said about the footprint of our food feels really important to me. I don’t hunt, but my husband does, and for the past seven years our meat has come from less than four miles from our house. I support hunting in our family, or any family, for the same reason that I support gardening or growing an orchard. I think what you eat has a huge impact on our landscapes, our communities, our economies, our climate, and how we feel physically.
Which leads into my next question: does hunting fit into your environmental ethic, and if so, how?
Ken: So much of our global culture since the beginning of agriculture has been about separating ourselves from the natural order of things as much as possible. I think there would be a lot more vegetarians if everybody had to go out and hunt their own food. Now it’s so conveniently packaged for us on styrofoam trays, we have no connection with it at all. So for me, getting out there and putting myself back into that system reconnects me with nature in a way that’s so deep and powerful. Not everybody has to go out and hunt, and I’m not advocating for that, but I think everybody needs to get back in touch with where their food is coming from. Hunting is what works for me.
Sean: Our Indigenous mentors teach that everything has a spirit — a deer’s life is no more or less sacred than your life, or that squirrel’s life, or that tree’s life. We create in our minds this false hierarchy of who deserves more or less respect, with humans at the top of the pedestal. Hunting has made me just sit with this question: why am I more comfortable shooting a deer than a bear? Why am I more willing to kill a turkey than cut down an old tree? And I recognize that if I’m taking a life, I have an ethical responsibility to take care of that life, both in the moment and afterwards. I’m building a relationship with this animal by being in its space, and that makes me think about my relationship with this entire ecosystem and everything within it — its right to exist, and the recognition that my survival depends on taking life elsewhere.
Ash: I see my environmental ethic in hunting in two parts. The first part is the microcosm of that whole process of doing an ethical hunt, and making an ethical shot. Killing the animal in a way that is as free of pain as possible, doing the best service to the meat as possible, and then carrying that all the way to the plate. I boil the bones for stock, and then they become bone meal for compost, and all the scrap and sinew is food for my dog. I challenge myself to eat a new part of every deer I harvest.
In the moments after a successful harvest, I’m almost always shaky and deeply sad. It was a successful hunt, and I’m very glad for that success, and deeply sad. The emotional weight is a lot, but I believe in doing the things that you believe in, even if they’re hard. That experience is something I try to apply to other parts of my life.
The second part is the larger-scale aspect of empowering other people to connect with nature or to feed themselves through hunting and scavenging. It’s been so inspiring to me to see new hunters become more deeply connected with and invested in the space where they are.
Ken: My hands shake for hours after a harvest. I have to do some breathing to still my hands enough to actually process the deer. And there’s that deep-seated sadness for the loss of life. But alongside that there’s also a profound sense of pride and happiness, and I’m so thankful to that deer that I can now feed my family with its meat. Every time we pull that venison out of the freezer, we thank the deer. Every single time.
Naomi: Things like hunting, gardening, and burning wood reconnect us to the reality of being human, which is that we need all those things to survive. We depend on the environment and each other.
My final question is: are there ways that hunting is linked to your sense of place in Vermont specifically, or to your identity as a Vermonter?
Sean: I think hunting helps me connect with people that I wouldn’t necessarily meet otherwise. I like that when you wear camouflage, you’re camouflaged in two different ways. You’re camouflaged from animals, but you’re also camouflaging parts of your identity, your politics, and other assumptions that people make about you. I like walking into R&L Archery and shooting the breeze with people who aren’t in my usual bubble. We have so much in common, and all of us care so deeply about land conservation, about protecting Vermont as an ecologically functional place we can harvest food from and hunt and fish.
Ash: When I am asking permission to hunt on someone’s land, I almost always wear a North Branch hat. There are people who might not be into hunting, but might recognize the Nature Center and ask me a question. I understand before I knock on a door that there’s a lot of cultural baggage around hunting, and I want to present, not necessarily a different view of who a hunter is, but an opportunity for someone to ask more questions.
Going into really hunting-centric spaces, like a hunting store or a game supper, I recognize that these are spaces with people from a lot of different cultural and political backgrounds. So there’s an ease and unease in what it means to be seen as a hunter. I’m not talking about ecology at the archery show. I am talking about ecology when I’m asking to be on someone’s land.
Naomi: Thank you all for these thoughtful answers and great discussion! I feel like there’s a community out there that’s just waiting to form around these kinds of conversations.
We are grateful to these staffers for putting themselves out there and sharing a different take on environmental stewardship. If this type of conversation is interesting to you, we welcome your thoughtful responses. Please reach out to [email protected] to continue the conversation.
