On Not Hunting
By Patrick Mainelli
My dad never took me hunting. He never thought to because his dad never took him hunting. Whether my great-grandfathers carried guns or bows or slingshots I don’t know. It doesn’t actually matter. If they did, the tradition died in my family before I was born. The trail was cold before I even knew there was a trail.
I don’t think it would be bold to suggest that there is a traceable line running from that guy sitting in a tree-stand and the first ape that ever killed and ate flesh. Hunting as an art/necessity/tradition has survived these millions of years from the savannah to the cornfield because of the real, physical sharing of knowledge. Person to person. There is a lineage to this “sport” that has gone unbroken for a nearly impossible amount of time. The act of carrying a weapon quietly through the woods is a cultural relic, more passionately preserved than most treasures gathering dust in a museum.
Hunting is alive. It’s a tradition that never stays the same. Hunting is a link to memory, and to the past, and to every hunter that came before you. The technology of hunting changes every season (warmer clothes, lighter gear, more convincing camo) and the nature of hunting changes along with it. A hunter is not required recreate the hunt as if today were 1910, or 1870, or 250 BC. There is no obligation to the past. Hunting is not an artifact.
As I write this, I can hear something sizzling in a pan on the stove and the air is thick with the smell of baking bread. My wife is the first woman in her family to cook in three generations. Everything she knows she learned on the Internet. I think I can understand the allure and excitement of hunting; but absolutely nothing compels me to type – “how to kill a deer” into Google and walk out alone into the cold morning and try to recreate a memory I’ve never had.
Hunting is dead. Or at least, it’s dying. In 1982, 17 million hunting licenses were sold nationwide. In 2006, U.S. Fish and Wildlife reported that that number had dropped to 12.5 million. If the passion for hunting is allowed to disappear between the cracks of just one generation, it could be lost for good. Hunting is like an heirloom tomato. Unless the seeds are picked and dried and handed over – in person, generation after generation – fifty years from now, no one will remember the taste or the color of the fruit.
My dad never took me hunting. I might wake up tomorrow and decide to learn Portuguese. I might buy a book on mountain climbing. Maybe I’ll learn the names of all the birds in America and write them down whenever I see one. I will not wake up tomorrow and shoot a deer. I wouldn’t even know where to look.
Well how about you look to some of the folks sitting around you since you evidently intern with NGPC? There are plenty of folks all over willing to take new hunters out, I would imagine the NGPC office has a higher number of them than most other offices around. Sometimes you need to take a little initiative yourself, in the time it took to write this note you probably could have found someone willing to take you deer hunting tonight.
Certainly by this point in my life, whether or not I will ever become a hunter depends on my own curiosity and motivation. To me, it just seems interesting that hunting is among the rare class of hobbies whose enthusiasts are rarely self-selected. It seems more likely that someone would feel suddenly compelled to take up scuba diving or piano playing, than to become the first person they know to kill an animal for sport. The allure of hunting is a little more mysterious and elusive than say the thrill of playing basketball or riding a bike down-hill, and unless someone else informs that passion in you, there’s a good chance you just won’t get it. As an outsider, the coolest thing about hunting is that it seems to enliven some sense of rugged individualism, but at the same time is so completely rooted in a community and culture that links families and friends together for countless generations.
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