Maybe You Should Go Hunting

Until a few weeks ago, I had never taken responsibility for eating meat.

Pre-civilization, you only ate meat in one situation: when you, or a member of your tribe, killed an animal.

Today meat is a commodity. You can have meat at every meal without having to think about where it came from. You could consume hundreds of animals over the course of your life (as I suspect many readers have, chickens are small) without ever having to take an animal’s life.

This never bugged me until a year ago. I was listening to a podcast interview and the guest got on the subject of hunting and made an argument something like this:

Every time you eat meat, an animal had to die for that meat to be harvested. So an animal dying is table stakes if you eat meat. Then the question is: is it better to get your meat from an animal that spent its entire life standing terrified pacing back and forth in its own shit? Or from an animal that had a great, free, life in the wild?

Again, you are killing an animal either way or at least supporting killing an animal, so is it better to finance the atrocious meat industry and its treatment of animals as it exists right now? Or is it better to try to get your meat from animals that had a better life?

If you care about buying free-range, ethically sourced meat, a hunted animal is as free range and ethically sourced as it gets.