AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WRITING: Hunting by JM

HUNTING by JM
I am against hunting even if it is for food. After all, it is not as if we couldn’t go to the supermarket and buy our meat there (but I’m a big hypocrite, as you’ll see below). Today, and for most of my life now, the thought of pointing a rifle at a deer, a hare, a pheasant, a duck, or whatever and pulling the trigger makes me cringe even though, believe it or not, I had been trained (as my father called it) to do so by the time I was twelve. At age twelve I was a sharpshooter with a light rifle, a 22. I could pick off pigeons and ducks in the air, shoot a running hare without any problem, and effortlessly kill a partridge flying erratically above. It’s not that I’m proud of it, it’s just a fact.
My father was an avid hunter. The shooting I was “trained” to do took place in northern Europe mostly in the winter time, which is hunting season. Before my brother and I were taught to shoot, we were taught to be “beaters”. That meant that we walked, or trotted, ahead of the hunters beating the brush with sticks to make the potential game take flight or start running. It was cold, wet, dirty, exhausting, and sometimes painful work. Much of the brush was thorny and sharp and I usually felt I was no better than the six or eight hunting dogs - German Pointers – that went and fetched the killed game. Even though my brother, cousins, and sons of my father’s friends seemed to enjoy being beaters, I hated it but never questioned it nor refused to do it; that just wasn’t an option. Once we were old enough to handle a light rifle, my father taught us the rules of gun safety and how to shoot. To my own great surprise, and that of my brother, my father, and the other hunters, I learned faster and better than any of the other kids – almost all boys - and was soon allowed to shoot small animals such as pigeons, ducks, rabbits, and hare. However, little by little I began to realize that I did not like hunting and that shooting an animal for fun was no fun for me. I told my father that I did not want to hunt anymore and that I could not understand why he and his friends considered hunting a sport. I’ll never forget the lecture this produced and even though I disagree with the actual shooting of the animals, the lecture had its merits and is a reminder of my father and his love of hunting. It goes something like this: “True hunters love to eat the game that they kill. When hunting season comes along, there is nothing better than shooting a hare, a duck, or a pheasant, cleaning it perfectly, having it prepared by your mother in the traditional way, going down to the cellar to select a fine bottle of wine, and enjoying the taste of fresh game with family and friends. Marvelous! Game contains the flavor of the fields and the woods; it is a gift from Mother Earth and we have the right to enjoy it. But hunting must be done correctly; it’s just like the berries you kids pick in the woods; you take the berries but you leave the bush. And what is more; meat has always been good for humans. Humans are carnivores too, why else would we have teeth that are incisors?”
In spite of the merits of the lecture, I refused to eat game for many, many years. As a teenager, I joined demonstrations against the use of furs, against bullfighting, and other such noble causes both in Europe and in Latin America. Today, I am still against hunting for “sport” but am hypocritically eating game again. I go to Europe twice a year to visit my 95 year old mother and my brother and his family and we often eat game, in very good restaurants or masterfully prepared by my brother at his home. Last Christmas we had duck, rabbit, deer, and boar and we all thoroughly enjoyed it, including my husband who is incapable of killing as much as a roach preferring to catch it and let it loose in the garden.
Eating game means there has to be hunting, without hunting there will be no game on the table. This is a truth that not everyone can understand. Of course, they do understand and they do eat game, but sometimes it is not politically correct to understand something. In Europe, the demand for game and free range animals is growing rapidly; more and more consumers prefer a piece of organic meat direct from the field to a piece of meat from a production line. The different meat crises that have occurred over the last few years have only increased this trend. Eating game also fits perfectly into today’s demand for organic food which is easily digested. We may not think about food safety all the time but we are concerned about it and the main supermarkets in northern Europe understand that: they carry a wide range of organic products which include game; that’s just good business.
Game is a top free range, organic product. It has had plenty of movement and has found and eaten its own food; whatever was not good was not eaten, and all food was selected by the animal itself. Because the animal has run around free in nature, the meat has received the proper blood supply which gives it its unique taste. This taste also depends on the food the particular animal has eaten. A rabbit that lives in the dunes of Holland and Germany tastes different from a rabbit that lives in the woods, a pheasant that has fed on berries tastes different (and is darker in color) from one that has found its food in the beet fields. Game produces its own taste by means of the particular diet which comes from nature and which makes it both authentic and unique. These particular flavors are in high demand, both at restaurants and at home.
I have no idea if hunters in Europe were a big deal before, but they certainly are now. They come home with freshly killed game. What more could you want? They prepare it themselves or ask the neighborhood butcher to do it for them. Of course, my father would have cut off his arm before asking a butcher to prepare his game. In our family, game was prepared with love and dedication and savored with the appropriate side dishes, the perfect wine, extended family, and lots of friends. To my father, game deserved not only respect but also required a number of precise steps in its preparation before any plates appeared. As I said before, I now eat game again but can’t help feeling an ever so slight twinge of guilt every time I do.