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Barbera over at Tigers & Strawberries wrote an interesting piece on Hunters and Locavores. She says at the end of the article:

Hunters here are pretty much what I would classically call a locavore, in the most visceral and true sense possible. They go out, find their meat on the hoof, stalk it, kill it, field dress it (a very unpleasant process–you gut and bleed it right there in the woods–and it is a smelly, messy task–trust me on this), and either take it to a butcher to process it, or, if they have the equipment, they skin, behead and cut up the carcass themselves.

Personally, I think that anyone who has the stomach to do this deserves respect. Because they not only are confronting the ugly reality that meat must come from a living being head on–they are doing a good portion of the dirty work of making meat edible on their own.

As one of the few hunters I know who would apply the word locavore to themselves, I have a few additional thoughts on the matter. Not only are meat hunters (as opposed to ’sport hunters’, widely reviled by meat hunters everywhere as bourgeois dilettantes with inferiority complexes) usually also fishermen and gardeners (if not farmers), but also dedicated outdoorsmen, another label they would not necessarily rush to pin on themselves.

However, the pastoral archetype is not what I have been pondering, but the ethics of hunting, a topic of much interest it seems to non-hunters who like to decry the cruel and barbaric practice of actually seeing your meat on the hoof before eating it.

You see, when I shoot a deer, or a hog, or what have you, I am killing a wild animal. By definition, I am killing it instantly and without interfering in its life prior to my killing of it. (A good hunter is one who is not spotted by its prey, and who kills with one shot. A bad hunter is not one who does not kill their prey, but one who causes any suffering in killing said prey.)

No amount of ‘free-range’ or ‘cage free’ animal farming comes close to being as ethically honest as hunting, something that seems lost on those I have debated hunting with. They tend to think that while it is perfectly reasonable to breed domestic fowl solely for egg production or breast size as long as they are kept in larger than average enclosures, but that putting a bullet through poor Bambi is a mortal sin.

I fail to see how engineering (stock selection is as much engineering as gene fiddling) an entire species for my consumption and confining an individual of that species to an entire life at the service of my gullet is more ethically sound than stealing quietly into the forest, firing one bullet into an otherwise unmolested animal, and then going about using every last bit of it that I can.

Good hunters, meat hunters, are not just the original locavores, they are the more ethical, and certainly the more honest, locavores. I am proud to count myself among them.