Tovar Cerulli and mindful carnivorousness

mindfulcarnivore

Charles Murray’s new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 is about the vast and growing difference between the top and bottom echelons of our society. The highly educated elite live in a kind of a bubble, sharing less and less in the way of values and experience with those on the lower [...]

Don’t hunt and think

Let’s talk about hunting philosophy. Let’s use, as a jumping-off point, a piece on yesterday’s New York Times op-ed page by a man named Seamus McGraw. You can read it for yourself, but if you’re not inclined, I can pass along the important bits. The piece is a justification both of deer hunting, and of [...]

Hunt and wool-gather

Lt. Frank Otis (d. 1937), pilot and surgeon, for whom the base is named

Hang out with hunters and you’ll hear it, probably sooner than later: If you need to kill in order to have a successful hunt, you’re not a hunter, you’re a killer. Being in the woods, the reasoning goes, is an end in itself. You learn the animal’s habits and habitat. You learn how to make [...]

A Hunter’s Do-Re-Mi

DO, a deer, a female deer. RE is what I have of hope. MI, at dawn, my rifle’s here. FA, I can shoot with my scope. SO I think I hear her, coming soon! Oh-La-LA what a gargantuan raccoon. TI, it stand for try: this afternoon I’ll be back again for DO, DO, DO, DO.

Gear hunting

The urge to acquire must be hard-coded in us. I’m not overly susceptible to the Siren Song of Stuff – sloth and gluttony are my vices of choice – but I’m not deaf, either. I heard the call this morning, when, for the first time in months, maybe years, I had to go stuff shopping. [...]

It’s gun season

Image borrowed from howstuffworks.com

We should all age as well as firearms. The basic operation of firearms hasn’t changed in the eight hundred years or so we’ve had them, and the principle is beautifully simple. The pressure created by burning propellant pushes a projectile through a tube. That’s it. Over those eight hundred years, the propellant has changed (although [...]

All’s fair

In search of pheasant

Ah, spring! The weather warms, the robins return, the crocuses poke their little heads up through the soil. The cycle of life begins anew and all thoughts turn to … hunting ethics. I blame Tovar. He started it, in a post at A Mindful Carnivore about wounding animals. Every hunter I know believes it is [...]

Hunting lessons

Man the hunter

Deer hunting season has been over for three hours now, and we have to chalk this year up to experience. No deer, but something of an education. We learned about how, where, and when to look for deer, and what we should smell like while we’re doing it. We learned about deer blinds and tree [...]

Deer Season, Day Ten

The section of Truro we're ... um ... hiking in

There are only twelve days of the year when you can take a shotgun into the woods and shoot a deer. Ten of them, as of sunset this evening, are over. We hunted six of those ten days, including a sojourn to the National Seashore yesterday, and saw nary a deer. We assume we’re making [...]

Deer, 4: Kevin and Tamar, 0

The impenetrable deer habitat of Standish forest

I ask forbearance from those of you who are tired of, put off by, or simply uninterested in deer hunting. The season ends this coming Saturday, and then I promise I’ll be back to chickens, shellfish, vegetables, and variety. In the meantime, though, it’s all deer all the time. When I signed up for my [...]

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