The Joe Rogan Experience - #765 - Tovar Cerulli

Episode Date: February 24, 2016

Tovar Cerulli is a "vegan-turned-hunter", environmentalist and author. His book "The Mindful Carnivore" is available via Amazon.

Eeeeee... really wanted to talk to you. I've read some of your stuff and I've seen some interviews with you online. Obviously a very intelligent, very thoughtful guy. You started out a vegan and became a hunter. Boy, that's, that's a tricky path. And it had to be, uh, fraught with peril, right? I mean, how much grief did you take for that? First of all? You know, not as much as I kind of anticipated. Really? Well, it's because you live in Vermont. It could be part of it, you know. They can't get you up there. Well, and it's a funny blend of cultures there. I mean, I didn't become vegetarian until I was like 20.

So I spent basically 20 to 30 as vegetarian, mostly vegan that whole time. And so then in my early 30s, I made this kind of bizarre transition into being a hunter. And I wondered how friends, not so much family, because I had one uncle who was a hunter and was well-respected. Welcome back, son. But, you know, but friends, you know, I wondered, you know, what was that going to be like? And there were some, you know, some occasionally odd moments with friends or neighbors, but not as much as you might expect. What was it that made you switch over? Like what was there a moment? Was it a realization? Was it an accumulation of information? Like, what was it? I mean, the switch to being vegetarian had a lot to do with ethics and animal welfare and compassion.

And then it became other issues, environmental, you know, all kinds of things. The switch back, the first step really was starting to realize that my diet, whatever I was eating, was connected to all kinds of things that I didn't realize. You know, control of deer in soybean fields to make tofu. I mean, you know, the... Control is a nice way of saying murder. It is. It's a gentle word, right? And just the impact of agriculture on the landscape as a whole. Talk about wildlife habitat disappearing in a hurry.

Yeah. You know. And even the local organic farmer down the road where we, you know, go get organic strawberries. You know, when there's enough crop damage, he calls a friend and they shoot a deer or there's smoke bomb in the woodchucks all the time. So there are all kinds of impacts that I realized my diet was having, even though I wasn't eating animals, you know, indirectly. That didn't change my diet. That just sort of softened these very black and white, hard edges that I had drawn in my mind, these ethical lines, right? The shift to actually eating something different had more to do with

nutritional needs in the long term. And once I started eating some yogurt, which is a big radical step. If you've been vegan for 10 years, you know, eating a bowl of yogurt is a big deal. Or a few, you know, eggs and fish and chicken. Once I did that, I said, I'm going to go back to fishing, which I did as a kid. And then I live in a rural area, you know, I'm in the woods practically. And I look around, I was like, hmm, if I'm going to get protein, animal protein, there's some of it running around here in the woods. And it's still part of the culture there, you know, where I live in Vermont, you know, hunting is still alive as part of the culture. So it started to sort of sneak up on me as this idea to get into hunting.

Wow. Well, eggs are an easy one because nobody has to get hurt. Like eating eggs is so easy, especially I have my own chicken. So it's just, hey, girls, what's going on? Take the eggs. No one gets hurt. Everything's fine. hey girls what's going on take the eggs no one gets hurt everything's fine and um that seems to me to be the easiest and most ethical way if you just want to get some animal protein in your body that one really is no one no one's getting hurt those things i didn't you know this is so embarrassing but i didn't even know i think i was in my late 30s or early 40s when i found out that chicken eggs couldn't become a chicken because they weren't fertilized

by a rooster. Like, this is how stupid I was. Or more really removed from any farming or any idea of farming. I just, in my stupid mind, I just had this idea that, and then I had to think, oh, yeah, of course, there's no rooster. Wait a minute, why are they laying eggs every day? Like, what the hell's going on? I don't understand that part of it, but it's so easy to just get eggs from chickens. I mean, as long as you're feeding the chickens, and chickens exist off of so many different things.

They clean your garden. They run around. They mostly eat bugs and grass and chicken and healthy chicken food. But once you decide you're going to pull the trigger on a deer, things get real. That's a totally different experience because there's this one guy who's this healthy, ethical, vegan who's walking around looking at the deer like, hello, friend. And the next day, you know, your elbows deep in that deer pulling out its guts, hanging it up in a barn and taking the skin off of it. That's exactly right. And it took me a few years from when I

started hunting to, and I was learning through email to my uncle and reading articles and poking around in the woods. And it was a slow learning process. Yeah. And there aren't tons of deer running around Vermont. There are some, but there aren't. There's not? Really? No.

Back in the 60s and 70s, we had all this young growth forest, you know, all these farm fields that were coming back into forest. And there were a ton of deer. It was really rich habitat for deer. Now it's a much more mature forest. And so the numbers have really dropped down. Do they have predators up there? What do they have? We have coyotes and bear, but, you know, nothing that is really a good predator on adult deer.

So I was trying to hunt, but unsuccessful for several years. And in retrospect, I'm really glad because I don't think I was ready for that experience. So you were saying, I'm going to go hunting, but you weren't getting anything. So you're trying to find the deer. So it was more like hiking with a backpack that has a gun in it. Yeah. I mean, I did a little bit of small game hunting. I took a snowshoe hare or two.

But a deer is a different experience. It's a mammal, but something that big, too. And something that beautiful. I mean, they're stunning animals. And so when it finally happened a few years in, it was a total shock, the actual experience. Even though I'd seen someone else with a deer they had just killed and I'd helped my uncle. But doing it yourself, different game. And how did you prepare for this?

Did you take courses? Did you train yourself how to shoot? Did you already know how to shoot? I had shot a bit as a kid. I'd been around firearms. Can you push that right up to your face? Sure. I'm a little closer. Sure. You know, I'd been around firearms a little bit as a kid. I'd never shot a deer rifle, you know, center fire rifle. So that was new. But yeah, it was learning from books, articles, my uncle, a lot of emails back and forth.

I was totally clueless about firearms, about deer, about everything. It was starting from ground zero. And so it was slow. It was slow. It's a real commitment, especially if you're doing it essentially by yourself, to decide to really get involved in quote-unquote gun culture and understand what kind of round you need, what kind of rifle you need, what's the best kind of rifle, what's the best way to pull the trigger, how do you keep yourself from jerking or punching the trigger,

and, you know, there's a lot of practice involved. Oh, yeah, there's a ton to learn, and I think that's one of the interesting things with, you know, what I call adult-onset hunters, those of us who come to it later in life. Sounds like diabetes. It does, exactly. Adult-onset hunters. That we don't know a million things that those people who grew up doing it take for granted. Yeah.

About the woods, about firearms, about all kinds of things. And they forgot they even learned them because it you know they learned it when they were 10 or 15 and we don't know any of that we've lived maybe we've spent some time in the woods maybe we know something about fishing or but we don't know that whole world. So it's a challenge without a mentor. So for me, my uncle was really helpful, but having a mentor is really key, I think, for folks who come to it later in life. Yeah. It's so much so that I was thinking that there's got to be some way to start a program that teaches people the ethics of it. And boy, it's so hard to do because you're talking about something that reasonably should take a long time before you actually i think the way you did it taking a

long time before you actually shoot a deer it's probably the way to go i got a crazy crash course from steve ranella right um where i did his television show i shot literally a couple times at a piece of paper and i'm not bullshitting we set up a target put it on like a patch of dirt and shot a couple of times where he's explaining how you have to squeeze you can't jerk it you have to squeeze and uh then next thing you know I'm shooting a deer like five days later or whatever it was it was uh very strange and it took me a while to sort of let all the information set in and then get my skills up to it. I pulled it off the first time, but I easily could have fucked up.

I easily could have wounded an animal. I really wasn't ready. To get someone, especially someone with a full-time job, someone with a family, obligations, to get them somehow or another set up some sort of a course that allows them to learn how to do that. Right. Well, there's a demand for it. Yes. There are a bunch of states that are doing it.

Wisconsin, Minnesota have really good programs, adult learn-to-hunt programs, and they do it over the course of six or nine months. Oh, okay. So they have an intro workshop, usually at the local food co-op or something. They recruit people there. And then they end up having these weekend sessions throughout the course of the year. And it culminates with sort of a mentored hunt on public land in Wisconsin, Minnesota, or other states that have similar programs. But there's enough demand that there are private courses.

I mean, there's weekend workshops being offered by folks I know not associated with the state program at all, just teaching people because they didn't learn. And there's a huge demand, I think, not just for hunting, but people want these old skills, you know, hands-on, you know, whether it's how to physically build something out of wood or how to can your own food or how to, you know, hunt and butcher a deer. And there's an interest in that sort of do-it-yourself, quote-unquote primitive, or just basic self-reliance skills.

Yeah. I mean, even if you're not thinking about being a prepper, if you're not, you know, if you're not getting ready for the end of the world, it's still, it's a fascinating thing to learn how to take care of yourself. Right. Learn how to get your own food from the actual wilderness. Right. Or even, or from the garden.

I mean, just that hands-on experience, that direct experience is really different from sitting in a cubicle, getting paid, and then going and buying food at the grocery store. Yeah. You know, the author Richard Nelson, who's written great books about deer and all kinds of things, he lives up in Alaska, and he calls the supermarket an agent of our forgetfulness. We forget where things come from if we don't live on a farm, if we didn't grow up doing that kind of thing. have paid attention to all the different videos that have been released from these factory farms that are horrific and they try to figure out, well, what is a way to get around this? What's, there's gotta be a way to get around this. And the most ethical way I think, and a lot of people think is if it's possible to hunt it yourself, because then you're getting an animal that was never caged up. It was a wild wild animal and in one brief moment its life

ends and realistically that life was probably on its way out anyway if you're shooting a mature deer you're shooting something that's six years old five years old it's amazing that deer lived that long in the first place and most yeah most wild animals are prey you know most prey animals and even most predators in fact you know die when they're pups, basically. I mean, the mortality rate is incredibly high. Yeah, I mean, even the mortality rate for bears is insanely high. And the predator of bears is bears. Bears kill half of all the moose, calves, and deer fawns. Like half of them that get born get killed by bears or coyotes or wolves or anything.

So to get something that's five years old, you're essentially stepping in just before nature did. Yeah. I mean, I don't know enough about all the ecology and biology of all these species to speak authoritatively on that side of it. But the idea of it being an ethical alternative makes sense to a lot of people. I think it resonates with the people I've interviewed who are adult onset hunters, you know, and from my own experience, that's a pretty common theme. There's an ethical drive involved, whether it's practical for a huge portion of the population to really do that is a different, you know, statistical question. It's just not. But it's also not practical for the United States

to feed every country in the world. It's not practical for everyone to exist off all the crops grown in England. There's a lot of things that aren't practical. Not that those things do exist, but what you can do as a human, you can still today in the United States still learn how to hunt, hunt and get all your food from that. It is still possible. It might not be possible for everybody in the united states still learn how to hunt hunt and get all your your food from that it is still possible it might not be possible for everybody in the country to do it but guess what everybody in the country is not going to do it in any way it's like no you

know like saying is it possible to write a book yes it is guess how few fucking people write books you wrote a book how many people write books i mean you could go all day without meeting anybody who's ever written a book sure you know um this book that you wrote the mindful carnivore um i don't think i've ever uh even seen a book written by a guy who started off as a vegetarian and a vegan and was compelled to to become a hunter you know it seems when i first got into the idea of writing a book, which seemed crazy and still in retrospect seems kind of crazy. But when I started even writing a couple essays about that, about going from being a vegan and vegetarian to being a hunter, I thought this is bizarre. I don't know what people are going to make of this. Over time, I've met more and more people who have actually had a pretty similar

experience other vegetarians who became hunters and there's a there's a logic to it like if you were that concerned about animals that you decided to be vegetarian or vegan and then you changed your diet animals are still a pretty serious issue for you unless you just abandoned your entire philosophy and left out the door. If you still have those basic values and you still take animal welfare and environmental conservation

and these sorts of issues seriously, then there's an interest in engaging directly, like confronting it. Right. Instead of just saying, oh, well, just go to the supermarket now and just buy some ground chuck. Right. So for those of us who still have animal ethics and welfare in mind, when we make that transition out of being vegetarian, there's a way to confront it. You know, I know some folks who were vegetarian, young couple.

And when their diet changed, they decided they're going to raise their own animals instead of hunt. Started raising chickens. And now they do it full time. They're chicken farmers. Chicken, cows, rabbits. They run a CSA, you know, Community Supported Agriculture. They supply meat to these two ex-vegetarians, supply meat to this, you know, whole area up where we live.

So they wanted to confront it directly. It's the same kind of thing. If we're going to do this, we're going to do it ourselves. Now, you say your diet changed like it used to be spring, and now it's summer. What does that mean, your diet changed? And why did your diet change? What was the compelling reason?

I mean, for me, it was that my health was iffy. You know, I wasn't in, you know, on death's door, but my immune system was kind of depressed and that sort of thing. And several people, including my wife and my doctor, said, you know, maybe this is part of the picture. You know, think about your diet and start adding some other things in.

And so when I started to add in some eggs, yogurt, some local chicken, that kind of thing, it did change. It really did. So for me, it was a nutrition issue. Is it possible that you just weren't doing veganism correctly? That's always the question. Yeah. You know, that's always the question. Could I have done some things differently?

Possibly. What were you eating for your protein? Well, I mean, I was eating, you know, plenty of what they used to call sort of mixed, you know, you know, rice and beans and veggies and fruit. But even on very strict vegan websites, they'll say, you know, you need to take B12 supplements. There's things that are really hard to get if you're not eating any animal. Well, some people deny that. That's a really fascinating conversation I've had with a friend of mine who's a vegan who says, you know, you really need very little B12 and you can get plenty of B12 from your diet.

I'm like, boy, that's controversial. Like for you to be real confident about that, I'm not sure that's necessarily correct because I've seen both really strong statements on both sides, really strong statements that you definitely can't get it from your diet and really strong statements that you can. And I don't know who to believe. Yeah. I mean, I'm no nutrition expert either, but- It's primarily from animals though, B12, correct? As I understand, I mean, flax seeds and there are ways I think you can get it, but whether it's that easy to assimilate into your body and actually use, I think it depends on the source.

And, you know, there's a huge difference nutritionally, as I understand it, between a vegan diet and a vegetarian diet. You know, if you're eating some eggs, you're eating some dairy, that's a different ballgame. I mean, we have cultures and traditions of vegetarianism around the world that have sustained themselves. I don't know of any communities and cultures or traditions around the world where they've been vegan for generation after generation. I don't think it exists. Isn't it possible, though, that it requires more education and more understanding about what the nutritional requirements are, like as far as mixing your proteins and making sure? Because we had some guys on from the documentary Cowspiracy, and we talked about it,

and I really wish I had read a little bit more of the arguments against what they were saying before I had them on. Because one of the things we talked about is like complete proteins and the complete amino acid profiles. Well, there's very few complete proteins in plant form. It's very few. And if you're getting like if you're trying to get all your protein from broccoli, Jesus Christ, you've got to eat like pounds of the stuff in order to like, and so I don't, it's one of the things that becomes with a lot of people, it becomes almost like you're talking about their deity. It's almost like a religious argument because they don't want to be objective about it.

One exception to that is Rich Roll. Rich Roll is very objective. And I don't know if you know who he is. He's a vegan endurance athlete, very good guy, and has a great podcast. He's been a guest on the podcast a couple times here. Really cool guy. He's very non-dogmatic and also not a judgmental guy. He's not preaching.

But for a lot of them, they just don't want to admit the difficulty in getting complete sources of protein. And then there's a few vegan bodybuilders. These people are hilarious. You find out they're doing steroids. Like, dickhead. Vegan steroids? Yeah. I don't think so.

But, like, vegan bodybuilding is fraught. It's fucking infested with people that are doing steroids that aren't being honest about it, that are getting gigantic, that are eating vegan food and like vegan power and they're flexing. Plant power. Meanwhile, they've got fucking synthetic testosterone, which by the way is made with yams. You can make synthetic testosterone with Mexican wild yams. Yeah, in a way. But it's just hilarious that they're attributing all this.

Fucking scientists have made your body, man. Right, right. Scientists in a weight room. But, you know, that's neither here nor there. But I think it's, for some people, it is very difficult, if you're going to be vegan vegan to get everything your body requires. You know who Travis Barker is, the drummer from Blink-182? Really cool guy.

Got in a plane crash and was burned really badly. Had a bunch of skin grafts and stuff. And it wasn't taking until he ditched his vegan diet. He was having a real hard time healing. And I hear things like that. I go, man, what is going on? Because how come some people can tell me that they're doing so well, they heal quicker, they recover quicker on a vegan diet, they feel better on a vegan diet. And then other people are telling me, you know, it's just their body just wasn't healing correctly.

Their immune system was floundering. Like, what's going on? I mean, I think part of it is probably that we have, you know, our bodies are different. We have somewhat, I mean, we're the same species. We have basic profile, but we have all kinds of, and as the more science progresses, looking at, you know, our microflora inside our bodies, I mean, we're all really different. So it may be that we process and need things in different ways. Right. So it may be that we process and need things in different ways. And there's, for many people, I think there's a real change in over time. So in a short period of time, if you've been eating a really crappy diet full of tons of fried food, and then you start eating a whole foods vegan diet, lo and behold, you're going to feel better.

Because you're suddenly eating, in general, healthier, cleaner food. Um, after 10, 20 years for many people, I think there are depletions and consequences in the body of being strict vegan for, you know, for that long period of time. Did you attempt to talk to a nutritionist and find out like, are there any foods that I should like quinoa or things on hemp protein, things that I need to mix in that are more complete proteins? I didn't really, you know, by that point, because my, those sort of black and white lines I had drawn, those really rigid ethical ideas, that sort of deity concept that I had in a way. And it's attachment to my identity. That had started to blur and loosen enough. I was like, you know, I live in this world, not in some fantasy world.

I live here. And even the local farmer who grows our strawberries is smoke-bombing woodchucks and shooting deer. And he's eating venison. is smoke-bombing woodchucks and shooting deer, and he's eating venison. And I'm part of this interconnected system, this natural community of all kinds of creatures, plants, animals.

I'm not separate from that. And why am I so fixated, have I been for this past decade, so fixated on separating myself from this world that I actually inhabit? You know, I think not, I'm not saying this is true for all vegetarians or all vegans by any means. But for me, there was, in a sense, a desire to live in this ideal philosophical world. Right. Not in this ideal philosophical world. Right. Not in this like physical, natural world that I actually inhabit. I'm actually an animal that inhabits this place.

Right. I have a footprint here, you know, not just my carbon footprint because of the car I drive, whatever, but I have a physical footprint no matter what I eat. Right. I'm impacting, it's a whole network of connections, you know, through agriculture and all kinds of ways. I'm not separate from this. Why don't I actually eat more of the kinds of foods that human beings have been eating forever that we evolved on, you know? And so I just started to experiment with it and see both how it felt physically, but also sort of emotionally, ethically, spiritually, philosophically. How does it feel to start to do that?

And it was strange. I mean, it was kind of a bizarre experience to start to eat, especially to start to eat meat again. It was weird. Even before I was hunting. I can only imagine. I think what's going on is all connected to what your friend calls the supermarket. What does he call it? Agent of forgetfulness?

Yeah. I think it's connected to that in that we are so disconnected from our food that even people that are vegans that, you know, they think that they're causing no harm because they just eat plants. If you're eating commercial grain, you're a part of a massive wide-scale death. In fact, there's probably more dead animals per acre if you're getting commercial grain than almost anything. When they grind up that grain to chew it up and to turn it into, like if you have corn or wheat and they chop all that stuff down, those combines are indiscriminate.

They kill everything. Right. I mean, they've made some improvements in that, you know, over the decades. But sure, small mammals, birds. And then there's also just the fact that when you create something like that, whatever natural wildlife would have been there has been completely removed and you've turned it into this weird new thing where it's a monoculture where you're just growing soybeans or you're just growing whatever, whatever the hell it is. I think that by not participating in it, by not participating in any aspect of the gathering of the food, you get this detachment from it.

And you say, you know, hey, I can remove myself from any cruelty, any ethical concerns by just establishing a cruelty-free vegan diet. Right. And it becomes a lot easier to think in those black and white terms. Right. Because you're not there. Either or, good, bad. You know, it's very easy to separate that because you don't experience it and realize,

oh, plants eat animals, animals eat animals, then animals die and plants eat them. It's all this whole system that everything, including us, is part of. And we, as a culture, as a society, for decades, centuries, have been various ways separating ourselves from that through industrialization, through just our ideas. Again, this is culturally specific. Not every culture in the world thinks this way, but we do. Think of ourselves as very separate.

And there's an environmental philosopher who's now passed on, but her name was Val Plumwood. She was in Australia, and she talked about this. And she talked about how even our practices around and our ideas around our own life and death as humans. And how we bury ourselves in these concrete boxes to sort of keep ourselves from decomposing, supposedly. So like protect ourselves from death. like protect ourselves from death and the idea of of us being part of that world in a physical way we actually you know ending up being food eventually yeah she thinks that we and i think i think she's right that we reject that as a culture we just we don't have room for that right well

that's one of the things what we do to our bodies when we embalm them. We sort of remove ourselves permanently from the cycle. Right. Which is really kind of fucked up. Have some formaldehyde, buddy. Like, why do we, do we really need to stare at our dead bodies, like sitting with perfect clothing on and, you know, Pretend you're not dead. It's just so fucked up that we, I've only seen it a couple of times, but i remember when it was my grandfather and i was really close to my grandfather so when i went to his funeral and i saw him sitting there in that box and i realized like how bizarre it was her first of all he's not there

i'm like this is a shell this is not my grandpa he's gone like this is some strange thing and like they've pumped him full of all this stuff so he doesn't stink Because the stinking is natural it's like that's what's supposed to happen to a person right you were supposed to put them in the ground And the bacteria eats them you fertilize a soil and make it better for everything around right and when we don't do that What do we do we burn ourselves to turn ourselves into powder right so fucking totally useless? We're real weird with how we treat our bodies and the concept of death yeah yeah it's totally true one of the things that i love to do with people that have uh too much of a disney view of animals and like to get you know i can't believe that you would hunt i can't believe you would kill deer do you know that deer eat birds and they'll go what

yeah deer eat birds yeah it's just probably a bizarre uh i've seen a couple of those videos i mean it's probably pretty darn rare but they chase them they've been known to very again very rare but they've been known to like in the shallows like whack fish and eat them i mean pretty unusual behavior most of the time they can't pull it off but when they can pull it's like deer are designed essentially to graze it's real simple the way they are but they'll take their food any way they can get it And that is really hard for people to believe like cows as well like cows eat ground nesting birds all the time There's videos of cows doing it and when you show that to people they're like what the fuck is going on Maybe what we're doing is we're ruining the earth so much that the animals themselves are killing each other and eating it.

No, they've always done this. They just don't do it a lot. Because they're just not designed for it. And there's plenty of vegetation. Where the deer live, especially like whitetail deer who live primarily around agriculture, they're around so much vegetation, so much food, that the last thing deer have to worry about most of the time is starving to death when they're around like farmlands and stuff like that sure i mean up our way in the north and in some other parts of of you know northern us and up into

canada where you get into mostly forested areas and you get overpopulations of deer they wipe out their winter habitat if they have too many deer. And their starvation time is winter. Right. Because of the deep snow, they're compressed into tiny, tiny fractions of their usual range. And they can, in fact, starve to death in vast numbers. But around agriculture in more moderate climates, yeah, they've got no shortage of food. Yeah, and deer, it's really interesting how they're set up. They've got no shortage of food.

Yeah, and deer, it's really interesting how they're set up. It's almost like it's making sure that they don't last through when they're the older, strong, mature bucks. Because a mature buck will go from the prime of its life to on death's door within a couple months during the rut. And it's really crazy. They drive them. They use all their fat reserves. They just burn it. And they're doing it right when the winter's coming. Right.

It's a bad design. Yeah, it's terrible. But it's almost like it's on purpose. Because for people who aren't aware of the process, what happens is the deer will eat all throughout the summer. They'll fatten up. They look great. Their antlers grow.

And as soon as the air starts getting crisp around the fall, they'll fatten up, they look great, their antlers grow, and as soon as the air starts getting crisp around the fall, they get ready to party. The velvet falls off their antlers, their antlers start to get hard, and then the females go into heat, and then the party starts. And they just run around rutting for so long that they sometimes forget to eat, they burn off all their fat, and they get skinny and scrawny. And then by the end of it, it's cold. And when it's cold, that's when they die.

So they'll go from being like a stud, prime of their life deer, to being a dead, starving to death, frozen to death deer within a couple of months. It's really weird. Yeah, and especially in those kinds of harsh climates where it is cold, deep snow, limited food. It can be really risky. Yeah, like mule deer in particular, right? I don't know. I know what happens to white tails, but it may happen with mule deer as much or more.

Well, it's just nature almost has these fail-safe systems set up to make sure that these mature bucks only have their time in the sun for so long. You get your party on. all the females love you, you're having a great time, you father a lot of offspring, and then that's a wrap. Yeah. One of the things that I find fascinating is that different groups, vegetarians, hunters, and others who often seem diametrically opposed on an issue like hunting, often are motivated by really similar values. I mean, a concern for environmental conservation, a concern for even animal welfare. I mean, in hunting,

the ethic of the clean kill, the idea that you should only shoot once and it should be virtually instantaneous, you know, and even the concern that you expressed, you know, gee, I got this crash course so fast, I could have wounded an animal. You know, the concern about wounding an animal is a concern about, you know, not causing suffering, you know, undue suffering, not violating essentially an animal welfare ethic. Right. And there's such different languages being spoken often by, you know, folks who are on sort of an animal rights or animal welfare activist side and folks who are on sort of a hunting and hunting conservation activist side of things. And often they're speaking very different languages and don't realize that they have some things in common. You had back at the beginning of January, you had, is it Phil Demers? The guy with... Marine Land.

Marine Land, exactly. So he's an animal rights activist doing really important work related to orcas and other captive animals. And he has a real respect for and gets where you're coming from in your interest in hunting. Yeah.

And so there are people who do get it across those, you know, those camps. He's different. First of all, I'm pretty sure he eats meat. Didn't he say he eats meat? I think he does. He may be, yeah. But also on top of that, he's, we're talking about marine mammals that are super intelligent. And I have, I have a deep appreciation and respect for

those things and i think they're basically like water people i really do i just think they don't have fingers they don't have a language that we can really accurately interpret but when you pay attention to how insanely smart dolphins and orcas are, to me, locking them up is akin to a slavery. It's almost like slavery. It's insanity. I just despise it. I think it's sick. It costs me money because there's the best comedy room in Vegas is in the Mirage, and

I won't work it. I've done it in the past, and then I was told that the Mirage has dolphins. I was like, oh, fuck, man. I can't work there. I've done it in the past. And then I was told that the Mirage has dolphins. And I was like, oh, fuck, man. I can't work there. I just can't. I can't. I can't do comedy. I can't have a fucking hee-hee and a ha-ha show above a slave ship.

And that's what it feels like. Sure. But that idea that they're water people yeah is interesting because in many traditional hunting societies they speak of animals as people you know and of them as and even deer you know they have they have a society it's not the same say as a dolphin pod or a wolf pack it's a different but they know those animals really intimately as a species and sometimes even as individuals. But the language, the idea of them as other people, as animal people. Right.

And yet they're hunting cultures. Mm-hmm. And so they're taking lives, but they also have a deep respect. It's not that, oh, well, we'll kill the ones we don't respect. Right. Or we'll kill the ones that are kind of ugly. But the ones that we respect are the ones that are beautiful we won't touch that's not it that's not how they're thinking about it yeah and we often do my agent i have an agent i love her to

death she's awesome but she loves animals she's vegetarian she loves animals but she doesn't mind if i hunt wild pigs because they're disgusting they're ugly and disgusting right there's this arbitrary aesthetic that, that some people say, well, you know, it's an ugly kind of fish or it's an ugly kind of mammal or any kind of fish. Really?

There's very few people give a fuck if you kill a fish. They just really don't care. Right. It's, and it's a different experience emotionally. It's totally different. And it is, but it is,

it is weird and moving. I mean, there's a tangible sense of a loss of life. Absolutely. I was big into fishing when I was a kid. When I was probably like, I guess I moved to Boston when I was 13. That's when I really got into fishing. And I used to fish every day. I used to live in this place called Jamaica Plain.

And they had this lake there called Jamaica Pond. they had bass and trout and I loved it. I'd go there every day and I'd catch fish there all the time. And whenever I killed one and ate it, it always felt weird. Like I just killed something. Right. I mean, that was the experience that actually made me decide to be a vegetarian. I fished all my childhood growing up, loved it. My fishing mentor was a guy from Boston who grew up in the Bronx. And he was a furniture builder in Boston. And he'd come up and visit us in southern New Hampshire. And we'd fish all the time.

But when I was 20, I had been thinking a lot about what kind of life I wanted to lead, what my values. And I went fishing and I caught this trout and I killed it. And I was like, I didn't have to do that. I didn't have to kill that. I didn't have to kill that. I could have had rice and veggies or whatever. Well, that I didn't have to is one of the big arguments that people even say against hunting. Even if they eat meat, you can go to the supermarket. You don't have to kill it.

Right. It's a voluntary participation that for some people is hard to fathom. Yeah. Yeah. Now, do you get all your meat from hunting? All my red meat, if we have red meat. I mean, we'll buy local chicken, you know, but if we happen to have red meat in the house, it's because I was lucky the previous November. And you won't go to these people that you know that raise chickens and cows and... I could, and there's just, there's no really good rational argument for it.

I just never got back into the habit of buying beef. Right, right, right. Ecologically and ethically, it probably makes pretty good sense. Yeah. And I don't have a big argument against it. I just never got back into that habit. So the experience of taking a deer is so profoundly different, obviously from going to the grocery store or even going to a farmer, you know, um, and having that is so valuable

to me. Um, and it's such a reminder, you know, to talk about the, the opposite of the supermarket as an agent of forgetfulness. When you take a package of venison out of the freezer and you remember that deer that you killed, I mean, there's no forgetting where that comes from. Oh, yeah. It's always present. Yeah, it's indescribable.

To someone who hasn't experienced it, it's very, very difficult to even imagine what it's like. I hate to use the word spiritual because it just gets so beaten down and overused and watered down. But there is a weird spiritual connection between your meat or a tangible energy that's connected to the experience that you had, the meat that you're eating, the knowledge that you were the one who took the life, the knowledge that it was a life, that it was a living being, and now it's food on your plate and you're watching your family eat it or you're having friends that come over and eat it. friends to come over and eat it. It's, I just think that cities are something really unusual and alien.

And I think human beings have created them out of convenience and it's wonderful and it's allowed us to gather information and to create these incredible places where you can just group together millions and millions of people and you just ship all the food in. But in doing so, we've created this really convenient way of looking at things. And I think this is what I'm trying to get at with this whole series of interviews and series of conversations that I'm having with different hunters, different vegans, different people that are trying to ethically source their food. I'm trying to get a sense of how the hell this happened and how it's so pervasive and how there's so much resistance to understanding and appreciating what the overall, what the really big picture of where our food comes from, what it actually is. Sure. Instead of this utopian view that I think, like we were talking about, you had this idea before, separating yourself from this world of animals.

And it's not just food, obviously. I mean, every material that a city uses, water, huge issue here in California, right? Sure. Huge issue in Atlanta, Georgia, huge issue in many places. That water is coming from somewhere else. Every material that that city uses,

very little is being produced, actually the raw materials coming from that location. So we're constantly drawing on rural areas, far flung around the globe sometimes, but certainly the immediate surroundings. And cities are utterly dependent on that. Yes. And plastic and then waste products. And then I have a friend who's a surfer. He's a yoga teacher and he loves surfing. He's a real interesting cat, kind of a free spirit. But he told me he's lived all over the world and he's got a very bizarre accent because it's like

a combination of like a bunch of different places where he lived for 10 years here in Argentina for 10 years. And, and he surfs surfs everywhere well he went surfing in Los Angeles he went surfing in Malibu after the rain and didn't know that you can't do that like you can't because there's so much waste that comes from our cities when it rains it pours into the ocean and it's like you're bathing in a toxic soup. So he was sick for days just from surfing in the water right off our shores. Just from all these chemicals and pathogens and sloughing off the land. Everything. All the oil, all the residue, break dust residue that's on the roads, all of that.

When you have a pouring rain and it comes down that L.A. river and it just goes right into the ocean. They say for like five or six days you're supposed to stay out of the ocean it takes a while to filter all that stuff out and get it back to the where the state that it normally is at but you know we live in this really dirty gross polluted city that's right next to this beautiful ocean and there's consequences yeah yeah when you took your first year was, what was that like as an experience? Shocking, strange, a definite tangible feeling of loss, you know, the loss of this life, but also an incredible feeling of exhilaration, this weird primal connection when you're actually eating the meat over a campfire. Because we did it, you know, hardcore. Backcountry.

Yeah, backcountry, public land in Montana, off the Missouri River, camping, like the whole deal. Right. We did it the right way. And, you know, you're around a campfire with a bunch of people that you really care about and you're all eating this meat from this animal that you just killed. It's intense and it's it is the male bonding experience you know i mean there's like there's there's like football games oh yeah this is fun but hunting going out and hunting parties together i i had a conversation with my friend duncan trussell yesterday about

this that i think that there's some things that that we don't know that we have a requirement for in our minds or in our bodies or maybe perhaps in our DNA. That our bodies are set up with these certain reward systems. It's rewarding to gather up your own food. And anyone who's ever grown a garden, completely outside of hunting, gardening is super satisfying. It's amazing. When you eat some food that you've grown yourself, when you're chopping up some kale and tomatoes, and you're making a nice salad, and you made all this, you grew all this yourself, and you paid attention to it, and you fertilized it, and you added water,

there's this amazing feeling, like the exuberation, this weird exhilaration feeling when you're eating food that you grew yourself. And these things, I think, are these reward systems that are in place because it was always good to do that because it ensured survival. Just like helping other people, that feeling, that good feeling you get from helping others in your community. Absolutely. Helping. And also hunting, I think, is in there. But there's a bunch of weird things that are in there, too. Being sexually attractive is in there, too.

Having someone think you're attractive, that's a normal primal reward system that we all love. And even people that are in committed relationships, like women in committed relationships, like to go out with their girlfriends and dress up and look nice to get looked at they do i mean they might not have any desire to find a new man but they want to get looked at because it fulfills these primal reward systems that are in our in our bodies and i think archery is in there too and i definitely think hunting and eating

your own meat from an animal or from a fish or something that you've gotten and pulled from the wild one of the things about you know you say it's a male bonding experience one thing that's fascinating is that in so many of the old mythologies the the deity of hunting is a goddess mmm well the earth itself you know I mean Artemis and Diana you know they're women right and I know many the deity of hunting is a goddess. Well, the earth itself, right? I mean, Artemis and Diana, you know, they're women. And I know many women who hunt. And they, you know, just like men,

have a wide range of experiences and views and values and attitudes toward it. But, you know, they, of course, also have this experience of giving life, of, you know, whether they're actually mothers or not, they have this potential. And the combination of that plays out differently for different women, but to both be a giver of life and a hunter and a taker of life, you know.

Talk about being sort of spiritually connected to the world and to life and death. Yeah, the giver of life thing is something that men will never really truly understand. There's no way around. I mean, I have this whole bit I'm doing about it in my act because we'll never understand what it's like to even have a desire to have a baby in your body. I mean,

that's so alien, so alien to us. And I think the earth itself, the thought that the earth and that nature itself is a woman that nature itself is a mother a mother that provides mother that gives life and gives birth to life it totally makes sense women hunters it's a very interesting thing because steve ranella wrote this really interesting article about sexism in the way we perceive hunters because there was this cute girl who was going on these African safaris and taking photos with these animals that she had shot and all these people were so angry at her.

And this was pre Cecil the lion. And so he had this take on it. He was like trying to figure out like, what is with all this hate? Like, where's all this hate coming from? And he believes that a certain percentage of it is just sexism is that someone looking at this girl, like, why is this girl going over there and shooting a kudu? Like, why does she do that? Why does she even want to do that? That beautiful animal? Why does she want to go over there and shoot that? And that if it was like some fat, old, ugly dude, nobody would care. But because it was this pretty, I think her name was Kendall Jenner.

Jones. Kendall Jones. Kendall Jones? Oh, Kendall Jenner is like one of the Kardashians, right? Probably. I don't know. So you know who I'm talking about. I do.

Yeah. And she, you know, she had death threats and got hundreds of thousands of Facebook likes. I think she's probably got more Facebook friends than I do. And it was all really quick and really fascinating how many people just turned out and attacked her. And the hunting community supported her in a lot of ways. But the hateful people, the things that I would read about it, a good portion of it was that she doesn't have to do this. If you want to eat meat, you can go to a store. I saw all that stuff.

Sure. The fly. And there's a lot of really good arguments for that. First of all, not that if you want to get meat, you can go to a store. But for real, if you're going to fly all the way to Africa to get meat, there's no eco-friendly in that. That's not what you're doing. Yeah. I mean, if you're going to get on a jet and you're going to fly 16 hours across the ocean to go get meat, let's be honest about what we're doing here.

We're having fun. Right. And, I mean, I think the, you know, like Steve Rinell, I remember that article by Steve. And I think that there are a whole bunch of different things going on in a situation like that. bunch of different things going on in a situation like that there's the perception um of hunting particularly so-called trophy hunting or so-called sport hunting and the language is really problematic right um that it is about us you know and i say us you know the hunters who do that who like you, you know, fly to Africa. I don't, I never done that and don't intend to, but, but a hunter who flies to Africa and is, whether they're hunting lions or kudu or whatever they're hunting, they're clearly not hunting that so they have food.

Right. Right. So that ethic of respecting life and therefore you take life for a serious purpose, including food. That's an ethic that actually not just in those who are criticizing trophy hunting, but in hunting traditions. You know, there are many wanton waste laws in many states. You cannot kill a deer and just leave it there. Right. Even if you have a hunting license, it's illegal.

Right. That's understood as wrong. And there are many traditional hunting prayers from hunting cultures where it's, you know, I took your life because I needed the food, the hide, et cetera, you know? So that basic respect for life. And also like in the Cecil case, you know, there was the fact that he was shot and then 40 hours later killed. The animal suffered. It was not a clean kill. Right. And there was outrage over that. That ethic also is part of hunting culture.

You don't do that. Well, you also don't leave, you know, you don't take the head and leave behind the rest of the body. That's one of the things that Rinella said about lion hunting. He's like, if I shot a lion, I would eat that lion. And you can eat a lion, I guess. Right. I guess, you know, I guess they're edible. Well, he has this, I'm sorry.

No, I'm just saying that there are these values about respect for life and about animal welfare and suffering and so on that are seen as being violated by a situation like Cecil or by other hunters, Kendall Jones or others who go over. It's like you didn't need to do that. Why are you doing that? You're not using it yourself. So there's that. To put it, Africa is one of the problematic places,

but just to, in all fairness, a lot of people go to New Zealand and they hunt over there and they do bring back the meat. It's still, ecologically, you're flying in a plane. It's really kind of real. But it is an ethical way to acquire meat. In fact, a lot of the lamb and most of the elk that you buy commercially in America comes from New Zealand.

So they import elk from there. Is that right? I didn't know that. Yeah. Interesting. Deer, elk, red deer, a lot of venison comes from New Zealand. So they import elk from there. Yeah. I didn't know that. Yeah. Interesting. Deer, elk, red deer, a lot of venison comes from New Zealand. Lamb comes from, a lot of lamb comes from New Zealand. They don't have any predators.

So if you've ever been over there or if you ever, I watched a video about it last night. I mean, they have fucking enormous herds of sheep. I mean, you've never seen anything like it. It's insane. And elk and, well, not elk, stags. Red deer or something. Yeah, red deer. And they have so many of them that it's really easy to go over there and shoot them because they don't have any predators.

There's no predators there. And all the animals have been imported there. New Zealand is a very strange place because it's almost like a paradise. It's unbelievably lush, green. I've never been there, but I've seen footage of it. I haven't either, man. I've only seen footage. I want to go.

I'm not even hunting. Just as a vacation, I want to take my family over there and just check it out because it just looks so cool. But I think in addition to the sort of trophy and sports issues in terms of what is objectionable to a lot of people about certain kinds of hunting. I think there also is, in many cases, not in the Cecil case, obviously, but in the case of Kendall Jones and others, there's also a gender issue. There's also an issue about women as killers. And I think that is even more disturbing. Right.

I don't, I don't agree that that's the only reason people jumped on it because people jumped on the dentist too. Right, I agree.

But, but I think it also, it is troubling in a different way. Well, the dentist killed a lion that had a name and that's where things

got really weird because the anthropomorphization of these animals that we've experienced in movies and in television shows and commercials and what have you, it gets real weird with people because you name something and all of a sudden they think that that thing is like someone's pet or something. Yeah, I think the naming certainly adds a dimension to it, the fact that it turned out to be a famous lion. But there have been other cases.

Donald Trump Jr. or one of the Trump sons was several years back. Yeah, it is Donald Trump Jr. And it wasn't a named animal. No. But still, the whole trophy, the image of trophies. And, you know, you've got these, you know, these skulls of deer and elk you've taken, and I have some too. And they're, for me anyway, it's not a trophy in the sense of, oh, look, here's what I did. You know, it's not some, you know, some kind of macho proving, you know, that I'm going to hang up in the living room and show off.

It has some sort of totemic or symbolic power. You know, it reminds me of that hunt. Right. And it, you know, I don't want to just throw it away. It's something that I value and respect. Well, it's art. It can be seen as art. I think it's nature's art.

I mean, that's why I don't have anything that's been taken care of. There's no stuffed things because they're not real. Like if you look at, and I'm not knocking anybody that kills an elk and wants to put its quarter on their wall or whatever or put its head on their wall. But the, the bodies, when you see those things, it's a foam body and they tan the hide and they stretch the hide over it. And it's, it's so much, it's fake. These skulls are, this is the actual skull of the animal. And to me, that is, it's a beautiful piece of art. It's fascinating to me. And when I look at, I mean, that's the mule deer, the first animal I killed over to your left right there. I look at that thing every day and I look at it and every day I find some new area on it. Just the design of the deer skull is fascinating. Sure. Yeah.

And I mean, I wouldn't ever shoot an animal just for its skull or just for its antlers, but I would never leave it behind either. You know, I would want to keep that too. Right. And so, you know, the idea of trophy and the language of trophy and the symbols like, you know. It's cruelty. Is, you know, that's troubling for people. Yes. And I think it's important for hunters to get better. And Steve Rinell has spoken about this too. To get better at expressing what's meaningful about the experience of hunting,

what's meaningful about the meat, as you've spoken about a bit, what's meaningful about a skull or something. What is it that is meaningful? And I think people can actually understand that if we can move past just black and white hunting is good or bad trophy hunting is good or bad and that kind of thing no i think they can too i mean we're always going to have problems with people that are really hardcore vegans that have they've and it's really interesting i i got in this conversation with someone really recently about it where i i found a bacon lettuce and tomato sandwich on their instagram page after they were talking all kinds of crazy shit about hunters and um she told me that she's only been a vegan for seven months she was like one of the most like outspoken angry

forceful like every everything about it was like like it must be done you must stop this is oh we're killing people you have a BLT on your fucking Instagram page. Like, what's happening here? What is this that causes that? Well, it's almost like when you get into something for the first time, you can't shut the fuck up about it. And I've been guilty of that many times in my life. If I got into race car driving or something like that, people in the podcast are probably like, will you shut the fuck up about race car driving? And it got to the point, you know, with hunting, there's a lot of that.

Like, to this day, like, I'll put this podcast up and people go, oh, great, another hunting podcast. Z, Z, Z, Z, Z. I get it. I don't care. I'm going to talk about what's interesting to me. And also, I think part of these podcasts is these things will last for as long as they get shared and spread around in a digital form. And I think these conversations are important right now.

I think this conversation, the conversation about where does your food come from, what made you make these choices, I think these are important conversations. Because I think the disconnect and recognizing the disconnect that we have between where our food comes from and these attitudes that we develop and have that we really don't have any problem with or we don't think there's anything wrong with the way we're alienating people or pointing out the flaws of other people's behaviors. We're not looking at ourself.

There's a blind spot there. And then I think this is a very important conversation because, like I said, I think we've created something really weird with cities and with supermarkets. We've created this really weird thing where for our entire history, as long as people have been people, we knew where our food was kind of coming from. You knew you went to a butcher. You got the food. That butcher killed that animal. You knew you go to a farmer.

He grew the vegetables. You knew that they came out here. Or you did it yourself for thousands of years. And those were, it was real clear. And now it's not anymore. Now it's real weird. Right. You go to a drive-thru and you give them paper and within seconds you get a ground animal

sandwich and you're eating it. The whole process takes a minute and you're eating something that's already cooked. And you're drinking this vat of sugary liquid with ice cubes in it like how the fuck the ice cubes it's 95 degrees outside where'd you get the ice there's this weird sort of removal from nature that we have and the natural process of collecting and gathering and then enjoying the food that you've gathered. Right. And for me, the interest in reconnecting those things

and being aware of where things come from and how they're connected, that is what led me to be a vegetarian. But it's also what led me to be a vegetarian. But it's also what led me to be a hunter, you know, wanting to understand and recognize the connection and not turn away, you know, and the turning away when people willfully, like, I don't want to know that willful ignorance. That's the thing that bothers me. I don't care if someone's vegetarian, vegan, if they hunt or not. That doesn't matter to me. As long as they're willing to at least look at how things are connected and look at what's going on.

One of the first reviews of my book that was written was by a vegetarian. And she said that the book actually made her think about going back to being vegan because she was disturbed, you know. And she also said that she thought that the author, who she didn't know me, would consider it a compliment to know that it led her in that direction. And she was actually right because I wasn't trying to convert her into being an omnivore or being a hunter. I was asking, look at these issues. Think about these values, think about animals, think about nature, think about our relationship with these things.

And you decide what you're going to do in your personal life, you know? And the fact that she could respect me enough and anticipate that I would respect her decision was great because she wasn't doing that willful ignorance thing. Right. I think we're lucky that there's so much confusion. I really do. I think this is a fascinating time to be alive. And I think we're lucky that everything is so bizarre because it makes these conversations so – they crackle because there's something so weird about it. There's something so weird about a civilization, an animal, a life form, a species that has developed for whatever hundreds of thousands of years we've been people eating meat. I mean, that's essentially when you look at scientists, when they discover the difference in the size of the lower hominids brains and humans brains, they're trying to figure out what the fuck went wrong or right. Rather, where we developed this gigantic brain or wrong or wrong. Yeah. I mean, it could be wrong, you know,

we got to get back to the garden, right? Um, if it, if it was what they think it is, it's because we started eating meat. We started hunting. We had to develop ways to be more clever and capture these animals. We're soft and spongy and we're very weak animals. Right. So we had to get smart. Compared to saber-toothed tigers, we're really, we're crunchy. Yeah, we're ridiculous. We can't outrun anything. I watched a video.

Pull this video up that I tweeted yesterday, because if anybody wants to know how hard it is out there, there's a video of a marten, which is an animal that a lot of people associate with fur trading. And people go, oh, how could you kill a martin? Yeah, the weasel family, the big weasel. And it's chasing a rabbit. And I don't know why I never thought of them as carnivores.

I probably should have thought of them as carnivores. There's a fucking martin chasing a rabbit, and it chases this thing for hundreds of yards. And this is a sprint. Look at this. Look up at the screen. You look right over here. You look to your right.

You don't have to look behind you. Look at this thing. So this martin is chasing after this rabbit. Unusual terrain. Yeah. Open road. Open road and ice. And it's a dead heat for a while, but the martin is just slowly, relentlessly closing in on this rabbit.

I don't know where these people are, but they were speaking a different language. And the rabbit's trying to zig and trying to zag, but the Martin is just one step after one step, just an inch closer, a little closer, a little closer. And they're fucking hustling. And this rabbit is like, shit, bam, and then he gets them. But look at this fucking evil little animal.

It is the size of the rabbit, which is what's really crazy. It might actually be smaller than the rabbit. Oh, smaller, probably lighter. And he just jacked that rabbit. We had essentially the same thing happen in front of our front porch a year or two ago. We were, I think we were on the porch or out in the yard, and suddenly we hear this squealing,

this horrible shriek, and there's a young snowshoe hare, you know, little rabbit, and a tiny weasel, like an ermine, I mean, things like as big around as a hot dog. I mean, it's a tiny little thing, much smaller than a rabbit. Killed that rabbit.

They're intense. They're amazing. Right there. Right there. I mean, and I'm a hunter, but it was still horrifying to see. And it's totally, I mean, it happens all the time. Yeah.

Plants getting eaten, animals eating animals. Yeah. Insects, birds. I mean, everything's eating everything all the time. Everything's eating everything. And we don't see it most of the time, most of us, unless we are out in the outdoors a lot or paying attention in the garden.

You don't see it. It's happening all the time. In Alaska, a brown bear killed a moose in his driveway. And they had to shoot the bear. The people that, you know, whoever the wildlife management people, they had to shoot the bear because it decided to bury this fucking moose in his garage keep coming in this driveway yeah or it is his lawn like like this is his

territory and be coming back for that and there's a 600 pound fucking bear who just killed a moose in his driveway and that's not even a big bear which is really terrifying but bears are for brown bears yeah yeah they're so big and to think that and he loves it there and I think that he's watching out his window like a little piece of glass well thin piece of glass the families look oh my god look oh you know there's a video of the same thing happening of one happened there's a video of a bear killing a moose in this family's driveway where they're looking out the window.

It happens all the time because these people that live in these parts of the world, especially Alaska, it's so like you've got like Anchorage and then you've got wilderness. When I was up in Anchorage, we would just drive a little bit.

Oh, here's one right here. Here's another one. It's like fucking common up there. There's a bear that's dragging this moose and this moose, I've one right here. Here's another one. It's like fucking common up there. This is a bear that's dragging this moose. And this moose, I've seen this one. This moose is dead, right? Or is it still alive? It looks dead.

This one's dead. There's some where there's another video. We don't need to see a lot of these videos. This is enough. But there's one where it's still alive and it's killing it in the driving. And things screaming and trying to get back up. And the bear drags it away and mauls it. Yeah, I mean, it's tough for us as humans because we have this moral conscience that presumably the bear doesn't have about the suffering of another animal, of its prey, you know, and we do as hunters, as farmers, you know, as pet owners, you know,

they have companion animals. We have this moral compass of some kind. Well, we're conscious entities, aware of ourselves. We have compassion and a moral code built around these sorts of impulses to protect animals from suffering, that kind of thing. And yet we see what happens in nature, on occasion at least. We get to witness something like that. And we have to integrate, you know, what's real in nature, the way animals do things. You know, our moral frameworks aren't terribly relevant in that world, but we still evaluate them. Like you say, it's evil. You know what I mean?

Even though you don't literally mean that Martin's evil, but we think in those moral terms about animals. Yeah, we do. Well, I think this is the real argument that vegans have, that we're trying to move away from any suffering. And this is what they're trying to do by trying to take a cruelty-free path, by trying to choose what they think is the most ethical lifestyle. What they're doing is they're sort of answering this call of evolving, this call that they have of the evolving species.

Right. Away from slavery. Cruelty. Away from certain kinds of practices that we historically have abandoned. You know, not saying slavery has been banished worldwide, but we as a society said we can no longer do this. We have to evolve socially beyond that. And the argument, which has some legitimacy to it in a sense, is that we have to evolve beyond eating meat and so on. Well, that's why I think this conversation is so fascinating is because the argument does have a little bit of merit to it. It is not a black and white issue. And neither is what you would call, quote unquote, trophy hunting. That's not a black and white issue either because Zimbabwe just announced they're going to cull 200 lions

because they've outlawed lion hunting. So now they have a surplus of lions. They have a problem with the undulates are getting decimated. So they're like, all right, we've got to fucking kill some lions. And each one of those 200 lions that they're going to cull would have brought them $50,000 of revenue towards conservation that would stop poaching, that would keep wildlife habitat. It's really complicated

and the people that are on the outside conveniently ignorant to all these facts that are incredibly complex they're not aware of this big picture I'm not saying you should go to Africa and go hunt lions I don't want to do it I'm not going to do it

I don't have any desire to kill anything like a lion but to that part of the world I can go hunt lions. I don't want to do it. I'm not going to do it. I don't have any desire to kill anything like a lion. But to that part of the world, that brought in a considerable amount of revenue. And there's a balance that they were attempting to achieve with the predators and with the prey. And that balance is kind of screwed up now that they've taken out hunting of lions, which is hard for people to imagine, you know, because you'll read about Africa that some areas the lions are threatened. You know, there's this really interesting page that I follow on Instagram called Save the Lion. They have all these really cool photos of lions, and I think lions are amazing. I'm glad they're around.

I like looking at videos of them. I would love to see them in real life other than a zoo, you know, but you get too many of them. You got a real problem. And the only animal that can figure that out is us. That's it. There's, you know, the, the, the goats aren't going to get together and go, Hey man, we've got to fucking do something about this mountain lion population. We're just, there's no more goats. We're going to, we're going to, we're going to help, you know? No, it's, it's only people that can count the number, wildlife biologists that can figure out what's the right amount, and people that can study the results of having a disproportionate population of predators and realize that we've got to do something about that.

Yeah, I mean, predators are really complicated all over the world. I mean, here they're complicated in Africa. They're complicated in many parts of the world. All over the world. I mean, here they're complicated in Africa. They're complicated in many parts of the world. Ecologically, in relationship to prey, you know, if we had a very large area and we just weren't part of the picture, it's not as though predators would just completely wipe out the prey. They will run out of food as prey gets harder to catch. Prey is not going to disappear entirely just because of a lion, you know, group of lions or wolves or any other kind of predator.

They will ebb and flow. They have different sort of states of equilibrium, high density of both, low density of both, changes, and those sorts of things happen in relationship to us and our different interests agriculture livestock you know ungulates that the local human population values then it gets really complicated and you know the issue you're bringing up about well they're culling lions and it could have brought in so many tens of thousands of dollars from hunters. And I've just been working on this essay about these sorts of issues. There's all these practical issues about money, conservation, and those sorts of things that are happening in Zimbabwe, for example, or other countries or here. And then there's the moral and ethical issues around animal welfare. And is it respectful of life to kill an animal just for the head?

Or do you have to eat it? So there's a language of practicality. What does the Zimbabwe need to fund given programs? How do you fund that? And then there's the whole discussion and language of the morals and ethics of it, which is, you know, those are active discussions among hunters, too. Yeah, they really are. And they should be because, again, this is not a black and white issue. It's very complicated.

You're talking about a country like Zimbabwe, which is incredibly poor, which could have benefited from $1 million in money that would aid conservation if they allowed these hunts to continue. So each one of these 200 lions that were killed would be worth $50,000. That's fascinating. It is. It is. Because it's not really that simple. And also, Africa is enormous. And this is something that a lot of people don't consider either.

When you think of Africa, you hear, well, lions are in danger. Well, they're in danger in some spots. But, you know, that's like saying, I looked out my yard today. There's no deer. Okay, well, go to upstate New York. There's a shitload of them. They're everywhere. To the point where they have to hire assassins, essentially, to go in and call the deer because

they've got so many of them. They've got to go in and shoot them. I mean, this is a big problem in a lot of places on the East Coast. There's areas in Pennsylvania that don't have a hunting season for deer. And in people's neighborhoods, you can just shoot them all the time. They bring in archers. There's this television show, this archery bow hunting show, where it was in the middle of the spring, and they brought in these archers to set up tree stands in these residential

neighborhoods. It's crazy. Yeah. The rebound in whitetails in the country as a whole, but particularly along the eastern seaboard, has created some bizarre situations, particularly in suburbs. The animals that used to be symbols of the wild and still are for many of us are hanging out in people's lawns.

Not only that, they're giving people Lyme disease. There is concern about that. That's a big concern. Ticks that carry Lyme disease, they say something like 60% of the ticks in New York State have Lyme disease. There's some insane number like that. I just made that up. Check, check.

Fact check, fact check. But it's some really bizarrely high number of ticks in certain areas of upstate New York where there's a giant prevalence of both deer and Lyme disease. They have a huge issue, and they really don't know how to stop it. Yeah. Because Lyme disease is devastating. If you get it, it's horrible on your immune system. It's rough. Yeah.

It can get into your nervous system, do all sorts of things to you. Yeah. And that's also a problem that happens when you have overpopulation of deer. There's all the chronic wasting disease, a bunch of different diseases that come through overpopulation. Well, and the chronic wasting disease, of course, the risks associated with that brings up the whole sort of captive deer hunting industry and issues when they start moving animals around that maybe carry CWD or other diseases, and then do they have contact with wild populations? Well, they're doing these, this is part of the whole trophy hunting thing that's so bizarre.

They're doing these fenced-in establishments where you go and hunt, and you're hunting these animals that have been grown just for their enormous antlers. We covered it a couple of days ago with my friend Doug Duren, and we showed some photos that animals that don't even look like deer. No, they're bizarre. They have these weird sculptures on their heads. Yeah, like bushes. Like a bush growing out of their head. It's just so much antler material. It just doesn't make any sense.

Yeah. It's a huge industry. The Indianapolis Star, I think, a few years ago did a really good long-form expose on that whole industry. And it is bizarre. Isn't that just how it's always going to be, though? I mean, if you have any sort of a discipline, any sort of a pursuit, you're going to have people that are unethical. of a discipline, any sort of a pursuit. You're going to have people that are unethical.

You're going to have people that are race car drivers that are using just stronger engines than they're supposed to use or they're cheating somehow or another on this or on that. It's just how it is across the board in life. Sure. You're going to have people who want to do that. Yeah. Whether it's legal or not and how much industry is allowed to be built up around it. Right. I don't know.

It's a different question. And so you have like the hunting industry or the hunting community, the hunting world. You're going to have people like yourself that are doing it to provide their family with sustainable meat. And then you're going to have a guy who wants a collection of different animals from all over the world stuffed in his room so he could show everybody. You know, like this is my zebra room. You know, like, this is my zebra room. You know, like, you ever seen those fucking guys? It's strange, man. I was watching this television show once, and this guy brought these people into this room that looked like a high school auditorium.

And he was just like this super wealthy guy who hunts all over the world. That's all he does. And it was just like a stuffed zoo it was the strangest thing birds and fucking baboons and all these stuffed things like this is the weirdest guy this guy's like a serial killer of animals right like some weird thing that he's attached himself to yeah one of the things that's tricky is because such a relatively small percentage of the population here in the States hunts. You know, it's...

How small is it? You know, it varies depending on how it's... It's millions of people, though. It's millions of people, it is. But, you know, it's on the order of 10%, give or take. What percentage are vegan? Fewer than that.

But again, it's a small number. Right. In LA, I bet it's higher. Vegans to hunters, I bet the hunters are way outnumbered in this fucking goofy city. Could be. I would imagine. But because, and this is true for vegetarians and vegans too, because we're a minority population, it's really easy for most people to have sort of a stereotype view and to lump them all together. Right. such a huge percentage of the population drives cars, we can distinguish between good drivers

and bad drivers, people who get into road rage and people who are polite. We can distinguish these things and we have understandings of it because we experience it and we see it. And we don't judge people for being drivers or lump them all together, you know, but any minority community runs the risk. This is true for vegetarians, true for hunters, true for any minority community. We run the risk of being identified as a sort of a monolithic singular group. So you get, you know, a hunter who portrays a certain image of hunting. And if that gets, oh, that's what hunting is. Right.

Boom. Yeah. You know, this identity gets attached to all hunters. I'm not saying it always happens, but there's a risk of that. And I think part of the gift of this time, particularly in relation to the food movement, you know, Michael Pollan's work, is that people are asking questions. People are thinking about agriculture. People are thinking about wild foods. People are thinking about their relationships ecologically and ethically with what they eat.

Yeah, and I think that's great. I think it's a good thing. I think these weird sort of stereotypes that we have about hunters, they're really easy to do in this day and age. They're attractive. From the time Bambi was released, it's attractive to lump hunters into this evil. If you see hunters in a movie, they're almost always these cruel assholes.

Did you ever see the movie Wolverine? No. Wolverine got mad because there was a bunch of hunters and they poisoned a bear and he beats them up in a bar and they're all mean people. Meanwhile, Wolverine, what are you eating, dude? Look at the size of you, you fuck. What are you eating, Hugh Jackman?

It ain't lentils. You're eating a lot of meat, I bet. It's strange. It's this strange thing that we've decided because we're conveniently removed from the process of killing the animal, seeing the animal alive, killing it, butchering it, chopping it up,

and then cooking it. We just get to the give me a piece. Or even more disconnected, we go to a restaurant. So disconnected. It's like we're 18 steps removed. Sure. And it's real convenient to look at hunters like some horrible, evil thing. Like I said, one of my favorite is the people that eat meat and say

you don't have to do that because you can just go to the supermarket why would you want to do it you only do it because you're cruel they can't imagine that you would do it because you want to kind of understand what are the consequences of what you're doing is this what you want to do you know i mean i think you're right about the the movies excuse me uh from bambi on having that kind of cultural impact and portrayal of hunters as a force of evil and being sort of anti-nature, right? You know, the sort of disruptors of this Eden-like natural world. Eden-like natural world. And I think that a lot of times hunting industry and hunters today and the media around hunting forget how the rest of the world perceives, like, the trophy photo.

Even if it's an animal you're going to eat, you know, you're smiling with the picture, you know, as like, what is seen in that from someone who's not experienced that and doesn't, you know, is that an image of respect for the animal? What is the, if a hunter is expressing joy in that picture, is it joy? Is it joy at the death? Well, going on? And those sorts of images in TV shows and just photos posted online, I think it's hard for, and sometimes it's even hard for me, but I think it's hard for a lot of non-hunters. What does that mean? It's kind of disturbing. What does that mean? It's kind of disturbing.

Well, yeah. Is it that you're happy that you accomplished this very difficult thing? Or is it that you're proud of yourself that you're a killer? Right. Are you posing with this thing because it's your trophy and you win? Are you cruel? Are you happy because you're happy that you killed something? Are you smiling because that's what you do for cameras? Yeah.

You know, and I've never been terribly comfortable. I've taken photos, like, when I've hunted and succeeded, and the first time I did it, I, you know, took a photo mainly because I wanted to be able to send it to my uncle. Right. But I wasn't smiling. I just, for me, it was like, I'd have to force a smile. I'm actually not, I don't experience the same sort of rush that some people do in it.

I find hunting meaningful. And I find that moment incredibly powerful. But it's never been, only until just this past fall, I finally took a photo that I actually i read that i really felt good about you know and i was what were you doing the photo it's actually on my facebook page i think um my book's facebook page it's the deer was down and i was just kneeling there and i had my hands on the deer and i was just you, just being in that moment with that animal. It wasn't about, you know, the camera. It wasn't about smiling. It wasn't about this is what I accomplished.

It was just this is an important. There it is right there. Yeah. That's the image. That's like the first time I've taken a photo after a hunt that really felt good to me. You know. That's a great picture. You know. That's a great picture because, boy really felt good to me. That's a great picture. That's a great picture because, boy, that is the wild.

I mean, you are in the woods. And that's less than a half a mile from home. That's awesome. You live in a great place. And you're there with a really wild deer, a nice, big, mature whitetail that was probably at the end of his voyage. And you took him out um i've posed with uh pictures of animals that i shot and i've done it smiling because i'm happy because it's

difficult to do it doesn't take away from the reverence that i have for the animal you know especially elk elk are in my opinion they're like almost like a mythical creature i'm very very happy when i when i've killed an elk especially the one that i killed with a bow because it's so hard to do it's insanely difficult there's the same amount of pressure and when it's over when you've accomplished it like if i if i get ready for a rifle hunt i sight my rifle in um i go to the range i i squeeze off a few rounds i make sure sure my form is good, I make sure my trigger discipline is good, and I'm ready to rock. I'm good to go. If I am thinking about hunting in September, I will start preparing in October for the following September.

With a bow. Year round, yeah. Yeah. Because once I started hunting with a bow, I realized like, this is insanely difficult. This is not something you can kind of dabble in. And I know some people do, and I don't know how the hell they do it. Maybe they just don't, maybe they're not worried about the consequences as much as I am, or maybe, I don't know, maybe they're just better at it than me about the consequences as much as I am, or maybe,

maybe, I don't know. Maybe they're just better at it than me. I don't think so though. I just think, I think archery is something that you have to do all the time. I don't think you could take 10 months off of archery practice for a couple of weeks and be as proficient as if you were practicing those entire 10

months. Most of the people that I know, there's me with a, an elk that I shot. I'm happy right there. People got mad at me for that picture. But it's hard, I think, for people who, you know, you've experienced that. You were there, you know what you felt.

Yeah. You know what your reverence was for that animal. You know what you were happy about. I'm happy it died quick, too. Right, you know what all the things that went on there yes as a snapshot to someone who's never experienced anything like that it doesn't they don't know any of that you look like a mean person who's happy that you've just killed exactly that's yeah exactly there's so much going on when when it comes to a photo with

that animal because it's not just about look if, if I took that photo just for me, that's perfect. If that's just my photo and I keep it on my phone and I go, I want to look at it every now and then, this is the moment where I shot that elk. And I was really happy that I was able to make a clean shot. The animal died in seconds. Everything went great. All my training paid off. All the hard work, all the thinking, all the preparation, all of it paid off. But that's not just for me.

That's for everybody else too. Right. But that's also why it has a really long paragraph attached to it where I went into it. And usually there's not that context. Yeah. Well, for me, I think it's very important. It was very important. It was important to thank my friend Cameron Haynes because without his help and without his teaching me, it would have taken a lot longer to learn how to get good with a bow and to understand

what a difficult pursuit it is. And just to keep your nerves together when this thousand pound tree forest horse is coming up the hill screaming at you and you have to shoot that thing with a bow and arrow. There's a lot going on there, man, and there's consequences. If that thing decides to kick your ass, there's not a whole lot you can do. Have you ever hunted elk before? I have never. I was out in New Mexico this fall. I had a writing residency down there for a month,

and I had a mule deer tag for a few days at the end of that. I did not end up shooting. I didn't shoot at all when I was down there at an animal. Saw a few deer, but saw a few elk up close. I wasn't hunting them, but they came through. We heard them coming. It was like, wow. They're awesome. That's almost like a moose up where I am.

That's a big animal. They're pretty close. They're pretty close to the size of a moose. Yeah. They're awesome, man. They're amazing. They're so cool. And I heard at least one bugle, which was wild.

I'd heard tape of it, but I never actually heard one bugle. What time of the year was it when you were there? I was there in October. When I go, I'm going to go hunting again in September and I'm going to bring my kids. And on one day, I'm hoping that I could be successful and have a day just to take them out and bugle for them and just make some cow calls just so they can hear the screams. Because it is amazing, man. For someone who's never been in a canyon while they're all around you screaming as the morning light is coming coming up it's it's one of the weirdest things in all of nature

and the fact that this is going on in the american wilderness and the vast majority of people that live in this country will never experience that outside Outside of hunting, just take the hunting out of it. Just be there and hear this huge barrel-chested, 1,000-pound animal screaming at the top of his lungs. There's really nothing like them. Yeah. And the fact that we have these populations of these animals, these amazing, amazing animals and the places, you know, it's a big debate that I know Steve Rinella has been involved in, you know, the politics of public lands. You know, there are a lot of people who want to turn, you know, federal lands over to the state and privatize a lot of that, sell a lot of that off.

Well, that's a big issue with a lot of Republican politicians. It's one of the reasons why Rinella considers himself a political eunuch. He's like, the Democrats want to take your guns away and the Republicans want to take your land. And it's real interesting. Right. This land that we have in this country was established, these wild lands, these public lands by Theodore Roosevelt. And he established it because he was a hunter and a conservationist. And he realized, like, you've got to lock this stuff

down. And then you had you know John Weir founding the Sierra Club who had a lot in common with Roosevelt, disagreed with him about hunting but you know equally important, equally committed to preserve you know Yosemite preserve these places. We need

you know not everything is going to be public but we need public land. And even Yosemite is an places. We need, you know, not everything is going to be public, but we need public land. And even Yosemite is an issue, man. They're calling buffalo now. They're shooting bison. Yosemite or Yellowstone? Yellowstone. I'm sorry.

I always fuck those two up. Those Ys, you know. It's just a Y, yeah, I guess. But Yellowstone with the bisons, they're having a real issue. You know, they have to call them now. And people that want to be able to hunt Yellowstone are kind of angry about the whole thing. They're eventually going to have to cull some of the grizzlies, they're saying, because the grizzlies are getting too crazy and they're getting too comfortable with people. Yeah, they have real issues even in Yosemite, I think, with bears, not grizzlies.

With black bears. But getting into people's cars. Yeah, yeah. Like, open your car like a can opener taking a can apart. Yeah. It's no food. Good night. I know.

Even a smaller black bear, you just can't believe how strong those things are. They're amazing. Because we live in the woods, I mean, we have them come investigate our house sometimes. You'll see their prints. Or I've seen them on the back porch, you know, through the screen. Right. It's like, hi. I mean, and they're pretty skittish.

I mean, where we are. They're, you know, they do not hang around people. And so all you have to do is make noise and they take off. You know, they're not really dangerous to people at all. But it's pretty neat to be that close to them. And you see even a small one, you're like's a pretty good size powerful animal ranella's friend um took this young guy uh like uh i don't know if it's one of his relatives or whatever took him on a black bear hunt uh while they were sleeping it took him on some kind of hunt i don't even know if it was a

black bear hunt but while they were sleeping was attacked by a 500 pound black bear in his tent um big melee ensues everybody's screaming one of his friends shoots the bear and hits this kid on his first hunt ever in the elbow shatters his elbow with the gun yeah the whole thing is chaos they wind up killing the bear seven foot tall 500 pound black bear that had come to kill this kid mauled him cut him up pretty bad but yeah bears are they're a crazy thing that if they weren't real i mean if a grizzly bear wasn't a real creature and you saw it in a movie, you'd be like, what? Like, it's a Star Wars animal in a lot of ways. They're very powerful.

Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, it's amazing to think about, you know, traditional subsistence hunting cultures that hunted bears of that scale. Went into their dens sometimes. And it was like, that's pretty hardcore. Oh, so crazy. You know, you have to do what you have to do to stay alive and that's again we can't appreciate that yeah we we're in some strange state now where our meat we associate meat with a thin plastic wrap over a styrofoam tray right

right that's meat you know going back to the idea of, you know, animal people and spirituality, I'm thinking about these sort of traditional hunting cultures too. There's this great film documentary called Diet of Souls that was done by this guy up in the north, up in like Alaska. the north up in Alaska. And one of the basic questions in the film is, how can an animal be your spiritual equal, which is how it's thought of in many traditional hunting cultures.

They're your equals. They aren't just animals. They're powerful. And yet they're also your daily bread. They're also what you eat every day. And how does that get, you know, integrated in these traditions? It's pretty fascinating because we don't think, you know,

as a sort of Western civilization, we've developed these, you know, the lower animals and the higher primates. Yeah. Right? We have this sort of hierarchy and we'll eat the lower ones or the ugly ones as we talk about.

But the ones that are equal to us or higher or better, maybe there's nothing higher or better than us in Western civilization in our imagination. Unicorns. Right, unicorns. Exactly. Rainbow unicorns. So we've had this convenient way of creating this hierarchy and thinking of ourselves sort of being at the top of this pyramid in some way. But in cultures that see themselves still as very much part of more of a circle of peers in a community and yet also are eating these animal people all the time, it's a different worldview. Well, vegans would say, well, why don't you start eating people then?

If you want to be all spiritually connected to your food. Right. How about, hey, friend, you're going to be my dinner. I respect you. I'm going to eat you now. You're going to feed my whole neighborhood. Right. Yeah.

Well, you know, there's something that we appreciate about these Native American cultures that had a deep reverence for the animals that they killed. Or ancient European cultures, for that matter. What ancient European cultures? Well, I mean, pre, you know, before agriculture, before Christianity. You know, we have traditions in all of us that go back, you know, arguably all of us back to Africa or all parts of the world where, you know, we had, you know, the caves of Lascaux in France, you know, were painted by ancient European people who had probably a somewhat similar sort of shamanistic, spiritual and hunting relationship with these other animal people you know well the first time i went deer hunting i really do believe that like locking eyes on that deer and about being about to shoot it i felt like it was some weird psychedelic experience in some sort of a strange way it almost

felt like i had taken a drug because i felt like there's some strange connection or some strange frequency that I had tuned into that I'd never been a part of before. I'd never experienced that before. Now, I had a protein bar in my pocket. I could go back to camp. We had a cooler full of food. I was still pretty detached, even while being interconnected. interconnected. But those people that painted those paintings on the walls in the caves in France, they were desperately connected, intensely connected. And they were without the burden of these sort of strange moral ideas we have about what's okay to eat and what's not okay to eat

and what's ethical and what's not ethical. They were free from those burdens. And yet in hunting cultures for thousands of years, hunting has been surrounded by ceremony, right? And ritual and, you know, been very much part of the religion. Celebration. But also, you know, ceremonies for sending the hunters out and ceremonies for welcoming them back in, because you are out there doing violence to another large mammal. And those ceremonies and those sort of religious or spiritual practices are different from, but also kind of similar to how we've dealt, again, in big time history,

in the large scale, how we've dealt with warfare. You know, how do you send a warrior out and then welcome a warrior back into the community after he's gone out and done violence? To other humans. To other humans in that case, which is different. And yet they're also, you know, if you're doing to other animal people, so, you know, the buffalo people, the deer people. Right.

There is still a similar, you know, moral ambiguity about this. You know, they were free in a sense from some of the baggage we carry now. Sure. I think you're right. Yeah. But was there still moral ambiguity about taking life and needing to respect that animal by using it fully and i think so i don't know if there's ambiguity but there was certainly probably a deeper reverence um and an understanding that these were inevitable decisions that people

had to make whether it's to defend your life against other humans that want to take your life and take their life instead or whether it was to eat an animal that you hunted, they were sort of unavoidable. I think so. I mean, what year do you think it was where the first vegan was invented? I don't know. Was it the 80s? Oh, probably earlier than that.

60s? Could be. I have no idea. But it had to be within 100 years, right? I mean, vegetarianism... It's been around for a long time. It's been around

for a long time, even here. I mean, since the 1800s. Yeah. Came over as part of this Christian group from England and has been around

in other parts of the world for much longer, you know, in India and other parts of the world. Veganism is, I think, a relatively new invention. Jamie's got an answer. The Vegan Society, 1944. 44, okay, a couple decades off.

The first modern-day vegans in November 1944, Donald Watson, called a meeting with five other non-dairy vegetarians, including Elise Schrigley, to discuss non-dairy vegetarian diets and lifestyles. All right. And he died of a common cold a week later. So that's what he was, a non-dairy eating vegetarian in 1944. That was back before they really totally understood how to get your vitamins and what the amino acid profiles of vegetables were, too. So taking some weird chances back then.

Yeah. No, I probably had very little idea what they were doing nutritionally. Yeah, well, that's the weird thing, too, when people show a picture of a gorilla and show the gorilla only eats vegetables. You can do it, too. Yeah, we're not gorillas. Try feeding a cat only vegetables. They go blind.

Yeah, they do not do well. Although people still do it. I know. I heard you talking about that on one of your shows. I was reading about it today. I was reading another article about it today, this morning, about vegan cat owners. Yeah. That's tricky.

They go blind. Yeah, it's not. They're obligate carnivores. They must eat owners. Yeah. That's tricky. They go blind. Yeah, it's not. They're obligate carnivores. They must eat meat. Yeah. Well, so much so that they actually have to add taurine to cat food because a lot of cat food just in the process of- Loses that. Yeah, loses taurine.

Like, they're brutal. They are the fucking cleanup crew of nature, the cats. Anything with a limp gets taken out, you know? And I have these two cute, fluffy ragdoll cats. They're the sweetest cats in the world. But they're fucking vicious, man. They're vicious to each other. They're definitely vicious.

They catch something outside. My cat was 18 years old, and she killed a bird in the courtyard. Fucking 18. My cat was 18 years old and she killed a bird in the courtyard. Fucking 18. The estimates on the number of wild birds, you know, songbirds that are killed by cats, both domestic and feral here in the States, it's like a billion a year. I'm not kidding you. They think it's the biggest threat. I believe it's estimated to be the biggest threat to wild songbirds in

North America, is cats. They are hunters. They are hardcore. Yeah. And there's way too many of them. There's so many of them. And, you know, people love them as pets. Yeah.

Here it goes. 3.7 billion birds annually. Oh my God. Yeah. annually. Oh my god. Cats that live in the wild or indoor pets allowed to roam outdoors kill from

1.4 billion to as many as 3.7 billion birds in the continental US each year. 3.7 billion birds in the continental United States. Yeah, that's amazing.

So your kitty cat and that bird feeder, bad combination. Oh, my God. That is amazing. Yeah. That's amazing. Yeah. That's amazing. What a crazy animal a cat is.

They're just these little killers that allow us to take care of them. And you pick them up and they purr because they just can't eat you. You're just too big. Right. That's right. That's really the relationship. My friend is a cop. Much better than saber-toothed tigers.

Yeah. My friend's a cop and he said one of the craziest things was where they would find people that had died in their house and they had cats. Cats just go right for your face. Yikes. Just eat your face off. So they'd find this person who had died a week ago, and they just ran out of cat food. The cat just eats your face.

What is this? Domestic cats. 6.9 billion and 20.7 billion mammals, mostly mice, shrews, rabbits, squirrels, and I don't know what a vole is. V-O-L-E. It's like a mouse. Each year, according to a study published last year in Nature Communications,

that is insane. Between 1.4 and 3.7 billion birds and 6.9 and 20.7 billion mammals. Well, I'm not a big fan of mice. So,

fuck them. I like cats. Not big into mice. Right. I i pick sides we all pick sides we do you know and that's you know when we have a cat that's part of our family or a dog that's part of our family and obviously they're they're very different species but they become family yes you know and that's another vegetarian argument that has a real logic to it and has an ethic to it of, well, you wouldn't eat your dog. Why would you eat a deer or a cow? Right.

And yet we as a species, you know, we're very tribal. As a species, we're very tribal. We identify with a group, whether that's all humans or whether we have wolves that become dogs that hunt with us or cats that we adopt for various reasons. And that group becomes family. You don't need family. No. Well, have you ever watched that Penn and Teller show, Bullshit? They had an episode on animal activists and the people for the ethical treatment of animals, like what the roots of their argument and their ideas are.

They don't want pets. They don't think we should have any captive animals. No pets, no pet dogs, no pet cats. Everything's free to roam and do as it will and no eating any animals which is like what kind of world we're gonna live in then well there was a there's a fascinating I think it was Cleveland Amory who was one of the founders of the fund for animals I believe I have this right had a vision you know of you know the world, and it was separate predators and prey.

Separate them? Like in the wild. So how do the predators eat? Magic. Magic. And unicorns. I mean, yeah. That's hilarious.

So he wanted to stop any sort of cruelty even in nature. Right, right. Well, then you're going to get cannibalism done. I mean, there's already a huge problem with cannibalism in the bear community like bears when male bears come out of dens they actively search for cubs they want to eat cubs it's one of the first things they do they do it to try to bring the female to estrus and they also do it because they're hungry and they they're cannibals right when i was I was in Alberta, some friends of mine run a hunting camp up there and they saw a male bear kill a female bear's cub. And the female chased the male off the carcass and then the female finished it off.

Her own baby. Wow. She just ate it. Once it was dead, she started eating it. Wow. And they were like, whoa. And they said, and they had been, I mean, these people, they live in northern Alberta, okay?

They've been around some animals and wildlife their whole life, and they're like, even for us, that was like, whoa. Yeah. Because there's really good documentation and research also, you know, that animals and not just, you know, orcas or some, you know, dolphins, something that we assume is or have good evidence that they're really intelligent, that they have a wide emotional range, you know. And including grief, you know, including mourning for the death of family members, including their, you know, the calf, you know. So there's it's and I think this is one of the unfortunate things that happens is that when we get into these black and white struggles, you know, hunters versus animal rights activists or anything like that, any similar kind of black and white is that. any similar kind of black and white, is that each side has its argument,

and each side doesn't really want to acknowledge too much that there might be some validity to either the argument on the other side or just to the reality of the world. Like, animals have feelings. Not just they can physically suffer, but they have emotional, you know, they have emotions. You can see it in your dog. You can see it in wild animals sometimes. They have emotions. And that's tough. And often on the hunting side, it'll be, oh, that's just so-called anthropomorphism.

You're just projecting human. Well, there's pretty good research on a wide range of species. They have emotions as well as the ability to physically feel pain and suffer and i think it's really helpful when we get into these kinds of conversations across those lines to be able to at least acknowledge you know yeah or acknowledge where you know pita you know or other animal rights groups at least or acknowledge where PETA or other animal rights groups, at least not acknowledge where they're coming from. You may not agree with their arguments or conclusions. Same as some people might not agree with you hunting.

But at least acknowledge there's a, for you hunting, there's a valuable experience and an ethical impulse to confront you know, confront what it means to eat meat, for example. For vegetarians and animal rights activists of various kinds, there's an impulse to prevent suffering and respect life. You know, there are honorable and understandable impulses on both sides, even if we don't agree with what all the conclusions are. Yeah, and I think it speaks to what we were talking about earlier about reward systems that are in place to ensure survival and ensure certain types of behavior and activities. I mean, it only makes sense that an animal would feel remorse

if its child got killed. That's why you take care of it and protect it. I mean, if you've ever seen a mother cow around its calves, if you go near those calves, the mother will go crazy. And there's built-in systems that are established to make sure that these animals continue to procreate and continue to stay alive and make sure they have healthy populations. It's just the same reason why our emotions are in place. I mean, it's all really kind of a grand scheme to ensure breeding and ensure community and ensure all these.

I mean, we will call it emotions. We'll call it civilization. We'll call it communication between sentient beings. But really, it's what it is, is all these different systems that are established to make sure that we stay together. We keep together. We breed. Systems that are established to make sure that we stay together. We keep together we breed we Ensure that we stay alive and continue to have food and make sure we make more people and I mean It's I don't want to break it down. It's cruel and say like, you know, all romance songs and every every book on

Companionship is bullshit every movie that shows an awesome relationship is just a ridiculous biological trick that's established to make sure that you continue to stay alive long enough to make more people. But really, that's kind of what it is. Uh-huh. You know? I mean, I don't want to break it down so much to that

because I think there's beauty in all of it. You know, there's beauty in love. And look, there's, in a strange way, there's beauty in watching that grizzly bear maul that moose in the middle of the driveway. There's beauty in watching that marten chase down that rabbit. I wouldn't want to be the rabbit, but I'm not really sure I want to be the marten either. I don't think I have to identify with it to appreciate the spectacle, the amazing spectacle that nature is providing. And we throw the word awesome around a lot now, you know, the last 10, 20 years. Yeah.

But the old word awe, you know, the power of that. And there's beauty, but there's also sometimes borderline horror or fear. But nature is awesome in that. I mean, life and death and our own lives and deaths, you creation of life, the taking of life, watching it happen around us, doing it. There's awe and there's beauty. There is undeniable, undeniable awe. You know, I watched this documentary on Komodo dragons. They're intense.

Oh, my God. They're so gross. But they're so awesome in their grossness. And one of the things about it was how they will bite like a water buffalo on the leg and their mouth is so toxic. They're so toxic with bacteria and their saliva so funky that just one bite and that thing's dead. So they just follow it. Wait around. Yeah. They wait around a couple of days. And slowly but surely, all the toxic shit from their mouth, like, ugh. Yeah, no thank you. Yeah. That's not even, you don't even see their teeth in that one. Like, look at the one above it where you see their teeth. Ugh, God.

I mean, what a crazy animal. And that's another thing that I think is amazing and beautiful is just the biodiversity of the world. And I think, again, I hate to keep bringing up the same theme, but I think we've done ourselves a disservice by creating these cities. We've done ourselves an amazing service in that, look at that, all the funks drooling off of his face. What a fucking creepy monster Komodo dragons are. The funky slime coming out of his mouth. But we've done ourselves, I mean, we've made an incredible thing. It's incredible that we don't have to go out and hunt our food.

So because of that, we could develop iPhones. We could figure out how to make 4G L LTE, and better laptops and cars that drive themselves and all this cool shit that we have. It's amazing. It's great. Because without our easy access to food, no one would have the free time to develop all this stuff. So I think it's imperative that we do have cities. It's imperative that we do have an easy supply of food. Because you're not going to get all this electronic equipment and all this stuff that we have. You're just not going to get it if everybody has to forage. So we've enriched our lives in this way.

But in doing so, we've somehow or another forgotten that we're a part of this wild world. We're a part of wildlife. We are wildlife. We're just not wild anymore. Right. Or if we are wild, we're not wild in the sense that the way we look at the rest of the wild world. Right. But we are.

Sure. And, I mean, there's arguments in anthropology that actually there were lots of societies that had a lot more leisure time than we do. You know, hunting and gathering societies would spend, you know, four to five hours a day, quote, unquote, working, hunting and gathering. And they had lots of time for, you know, ceremonies and all kinds of other things. It depends on where you are in the world and how harsh the conditions were. But, you know, sort of the original leisure society may have predated agriculture. Certainly, they had no iPhones, and maybe that was a blessing. Who knows?

But four or five hours of hunting and gathering is exhausting, and you really don't have enough time to develop a car. No, no cars. Yeah, after you've figured that out, after you've done your hunting and gathering, then it's about cooking. And also, there's no days off because you don't have any refrigeration. Right, depending on your climate. I mean, they could dry things and do certain things,

but clearly not a frigid area around the corner. But what you're talking about, whether it's cities or just modern society, that high-tech, high-speed world that most of us live in, where many of us don't feel like we have much free time and we're running around and doing all these things in cities, usually. When I talk to people who become hunters as adults, by and large, that's part of why they did it. They wanted to reconnect. It's part of why they garden. It's part of why they did it. They wanted to reconnect. It's part of why they garden. It's part of why they raise chickens. It's part of why they do all sorts of other things

that you understand and value too. They want to get back in touch with those, not only the hands-on skills, but just the world they inhabit beyond the domesticated, concretized city. Concretized. You know? That's a good word.

You know, the pavement, you know, beyond the pavement into nature. And whether it's a little garden patch in your backyard or, you know, hunting around the Missouri breaks, you know, there's a sense of wanting to reconnect so that all these practices hunting gardening raising chickens in part are like an antidote to modern life you know people want to reconnect to some of that or is it or are we clinging to the past and trying to ward off the inevitable right are we trying to ward off this this inevitable symbiotic relationship we're going to have to computers? We're going to be a part of the Borg. Right.

Well, you know, have you read Richard Louvre's work at all? No, who's he? He was a journalist, I believe, for many years. His first really famous book was called Last Child in the Woods. And then his follow-up book was called The Nature Principle. How long ago is is kind of um let's see last child in the woods came out what 2006 I could be wrong about that date we'll know in a moment I think but you know his argument is in part I supposeO-U-V. Right there. He looks very serious. Look at him. He's a neat guy. And his argument is that we all need nature for our mental, physical, emotional, spiritual health.

First, he focused on kids, and then he moved it to focusing on 2005, I guess, was the first book. And he says that actually, the more high tech we get, the more we need these sorts of experiences. And he's not a hunter, but he does fish and he, you know, spends a lot of time outdoors, and that we need that neurologically, not just in some romantic sort of throwback fantasy, but we deeply need it because we are wild. And what does he use to establish that argument that we need it? I mean, he's got all kinds of research and umpteen citations of different sorts of studies and cultures and different things that happened to kids at first in his first book and then to adults if we're deprived of that. If we're always in front of a screen, for example, if we're just never out in the dirt, you know, never out in the woods.

We certainly evolved in the real world in nature not in cities right um and our you know we're hardwired for that three-dimensional textured um i mean i guess there's textures in the city too but but that kind of natural surrounding in whatever climate, that's what really nourishes us, not just physically in terms of food, but keeps us sort of sane at some level. To whatever degree we're still sane. Yeah, that's the argument. Are we sane? And is sane even a rational request or just a hope? What is sane? What is sanity and our sanity?

What's health? In comparison to the sanity of someone who lives in a tribal environment in the Amazon. I mean, they would look at us and laugh and go, you're not sane. You people are fucking crazy. You've been crazy for 2,000 years. Yeah, what are you doing? You know, like, I don't know who's right because I don't want to live in the jungle. Right.

You know, I mean, I think they're crazy. Like, you don't even have TV, stupid. And I don't. And it's easy to have that either or. Like, either we're now in the city, you know, or we're in the Amazonian jungle. Yeah. No, right? And Louvre is not some kind of romantic throwback.

Oh, we should go back to the garden. You know, it's not that. But that these experiences that, you know, the experiences that you have gardening or the experiences you have hunting are deeply human, valuable experiences for us. And to not have them, to have a culture, to have an individual life

or a whole society that has no connection right it's all supermarket it's all drive-through but big max you know during the time that we're not hunting and we're not gathering and we're not farming there's time for philosophical pursuits, creation of literature, all sorts of writing and different communication and wonderful conversations over meals. You had no part in creating and the building of community and the bonding of friendships and the evolving of ideas that a lot of these things can be thought of by some people as being more valuable than the collection of food. Sure. Absolutely. They could be. And I think that the risk is in having it be like,

oh, we have to go back to the woods and live in the woods to be real humans. No, no, no, no. That's not it. Or to say, that's just ancient history. Give it up. Stop having these fantasies about the past, just live in our cyborg future. Right. No, to be healthy human beings, whether it's a, you know, just a walk in a park or being part of a community garden in a city, you don't have to leave the city. You can have

some experiences of connection with the, you know, the earth, right. In LA. Yeah. You know, you can have some, some, well, I always wonder, and this is like a reoccurring theme with me. Like, what are we, what are,

what are we doing as a race, as a species? Like if you could step outside of ourselves, if you could hover a mile above earth and your objective free from any influence of our culture, you're some calculating being that sort of is gathering up all the data and information and all the behavior patterns that you're seeing exhibited by this bizarre species. What is this thing doing? Well, this thing is creating technology. That's what it's doing. path of innovation, ever accelerating path of creating new and better technology, new and

better devices, new and better things. And it works all day in order to obtain the latest and greatest of these things. And that therefore fueling the creation of these things while longing for the past, while longing for some little house in the prairie type fucking situation where everybody died of polio. That was a terrible time to be alive. But you look at it on TV and you're like, oh, it was awesome back then. Ma and Pa.

Yeah, we longed towards a simple past. We longed towards people that would hold hands in front of the dinner table and say our prayers and everybody was a good person except for the few bad people who wore black hats you could spot them a mile away. You know, I think in this ever more and more complex life, we long towards this time where things were simple. And that's one of the things that I believe is very appealing about the idea of hunting and gathering your own meat.

And it's very primally enriching because we do reward our system. We give ourselves the opportunity to participate in those reward systems that are set up and have been established for thousands and thousands of generations. And it's one of the only ways to do so. that have been established for thousands and thousands of generations. It's one of the only ways to do so. And that experience that you talked about, like locking eyes with that deer and having that intense experience of seeing that deer alive, the intense experience of taking a life,

and how my sense, as you were describing it, is that the primalness of that, in part, is a sense that this is really familiar. Yes. This is really old. Yes. Like a cellular level memory. This is old, old stuff. And for me, when I took my first year, it was so shocking emotionally.

I mean, it was shocking I finally succeeded. I was surprised. How many years did you try for? Um, I did not succeed the first three years. Uh, how many days were you going out? It's a, it's all the, the main season we have in Vermont is a two week rifle season. And I wasn't able to hunt the full two weeks. Um, usually it was, you know, less than half of that time, probably, um, a little bit bit in other seasons but mainly it was in the rifle season so it wasn't really years of hunting it was weeks of hunting right um stretched out over years but the the deeper shock was you know as you say it's sort of that sense of loss of life

you know the for me it was a sense of grief that this beautiful animal is dead. Right. And do I ever want to do that again? I really wasn't sure at first. And you were by yourself this entire time? When I took the deer, yeah. Yeah, I was by myself. It was the process over the next few days of butchering that deer that felt really familiar. You know, it was almost like a ceremony.

I was doing this, the knife and the, you know, skinning and then in the kitchen with a leg, you know, and taking apart this amazing animal, all these layers of muscle and bone. And that is what gave me the sense of this is really old and familiar. And I'll probably do this again, you know, in another year, maybe not next week, but next time deer season rolls around, I'll probably hunt again. No, in another year, maybe not next week, but next time deer season rolls around, I'll probably hunt again. And that sense of deep sort of primal familiarity is common. I mean, I've heard, I've read accounts of this, people who are not hunters, but who have had a sort of hunting-like experience. George Monbiot, I'm not sure how you say it, he's from the UK and has advocated for veganism and against veganism at various times.

Really? What a conflicted guy. Yeah. But very much an ecology, environmental advocate. He has this passage that he wrote about having this experience of, environmental advocate, he has this passage that he wrote about having this experience of, I think it was being with like a spear going after fish, like flounder in shallow water. And his account of it is very much, this felt like it was thousands of years old, like this primal connection with ancient human existence.

And I think it's valuable for people, even if we live in a high-tech world, to have some connection to that. Well, I think these are genetic imprints. These are things that are written into our code that it was really important that you kill an animal in order to survive X amount of thousands of years ago. Those people that did that and bred, I believe they gave that genetic information to their offspring and they carried on, on and on and on. And then when you tap into it, it lights up. Like when I locked eyes with that deer and that deer was bouncing around on the side of this hill and it saw me and I saw it and I locked eyes with it and then I'm looking at it through the rifle scope. There was like this light bulb that went off in this area of my mind that was illuminated for the first time it was like

check out this part like you don't even get in here without doing this and it was like oh this is what the hunting thing is like it illuminates this ancient genetic variable this ancient genetic pathway and it felt psychedelic It felt like I was on a drug and I'm not, not like a lustful, I must kill. And no, it was like this weird sort of, it's an altered state. Yes. Animal spiritual connections, very strange, strange experience, which I was, I was shocked. I expected the sense of loss. I expected the sorrow. I expected all these different.

The sorrow never really came. There was a sense of loss, but there wasn't a sense I did something wrong. There wasn't a sense like I shouldn't have done it. And part of it was also because I was seeing bones everywhere and mountain lion shit. I'm like, this is a goddamn war zone I'm in. You know, when you're in the breaks, you find these ropes of shit. And I say ropes because. Yeah.

Shit that was filled with hair because these animals were just jacking deer and whatever the hell else they got a hold of. You know, we're in a war zone. Right. It was a nature war zone. So I didn't, I didn't, for a bunch of reasons. And also because I knew I was going to eat it. I didn't feel bad about it, but I did feel like, wow, this is intense.

This is intense. But the surprising part was the altered state. And I feel that still. I mean, it's changed over the years. I mean, I've been hunting for like a dozen years or so now, and my experience has changed. It's not as shocking or quite as intense as it was the first time but it still remains powerful and i'm still in an altered state for like hours or days yeah afterward and a state of thankfulness too which is also like there's a warm happiness to it a thankfulness that you are successful and now you have this

meat and you're gonna provide this meat to your family you know like my friend Duncan sent me a photo of some elk meatballs that his girlfriend had cooked for for them and their friend from an elk that I some elk that I gave him and it made me feel so good that my friend was eating some meat that I had given him from an animal that I had killed. Yeah, I mean, you're grateful to the animal, to the land, and then grateful to be able to provide. Yeah, I'm grateful that you have this established community feeling,

bond feeling with your friend where you give him meat, and then they're cooking this meat, and he takes a photo of it. But it's all bizarre, you know know like this digital representation of this thing and it's sent to you through the air and you can't smell it it arrives on your phone you're like hey man we're in the woods bro this is nature well it's kind of sort of weird you know yeah it is it's all it's all very odd it's all very odd. It's all very odd. And I do wonder if what I'm doing by getting into hunting is just clinging to the last remaining gasps of a dying world. It's possible.

Yeah. It's possible. But I sure hope it's not really dying. Do you do much hunting outside of your home state of Vermont, or is that mostly what you do? That's mostly what I do. I mean, I've hunted a little bit down in Massachusetts where I have a friend and my uncle. I've hunted out of state a little bit. Do you go on trips? I've never gone on a moose trip.

I haven't. I mean, moose technically do get hunted in Vermont in small numbers. Is it hard to get a tag? It is, yeah, because it's such small numbers. But I haven't really, except for when I was in New Mexico, but I was in New Mexico already for something else. Right. And I've never really gone on a hunting trip somewhere far away. And I don't know, I might at some point.

I have a friend who's been trying to get me out to Colorado. And I have a friend who lives in Colorado as well. For deer or elk? Either. Either. And I love, you know, this particular friend in Colorado I'm thinking of, I'd love to hunt with him. You know, he's a guy I'd love to hunt with, really enjoy his company. But I don't have like these fantasies of big, you know, big Western or Alaskan hunts or whatever.

So your hunting is almost like you're doing it almost entirely for food. You know, yes, but if I just wanted food, there are much more efficient ways to produce that. I could raise chickens. Right, sure. It's a guaranteed thing. Unless they get taken out by predators or disease or something, you raise these chickens and then you have meat or you raise chickens and have eggs or so on. So the prime motive for me to hunt, as the prime motive for humans to hunt when it started, you know, way back, is food. That's essentially why I hunt. that's been drawn between, this distinction drawn between hunting for utility, utilitarian food, and hunting because you enjoy hunting. You know, whether you call that sport hunting or recreational hunting or whatever you call it.

And the problem with that is that, one, for most of us, they're not separate. I mean, you hunt because you enjoy something about hunting and it's meaningful to you and the food is meaningful and you get food from it that's why i hunt both of those reasons traditional subsistence hunting cultures those people love to hunt yeah they also totally depend on the food yeah so both it's both you know it's not really a separate thing i don't think it probably really ever has been for any hunting culture yeah um so or fishing or fishing exactly right so it's for both yeah uh it's enjoyable and they're you know if it wasn wasn't enjoyable, we'd probably find other ways to do it.

And that's probably why it's enjoyable, because it provides food. I mean, it stimulates these areas that we're talking about, these primal need areas. Right. So, yes, food is my primary sort of motive in terms of a product, materially. Materially, food is my motive. It's not to have a big set of antlers on the wall. If I end up with a big set of antlers, I'll probably keep that skull and antlers like you do, but it's not the point. Right.

But it's the experience of it. And as I got into it more, as I started to have more relationships with other people that I really respected and who also hunted, then it's also part of that. If I'm hunting with someone, you know, that I really enjoy their company. So there's social and, you know, natural experience motives that are very much just about the process and the experience. Right. And then there's the food. Right. But they're they're all you know they're all interwoven yeah i think there's some people that want you to feel bad about it so they don't want to they don't want you to be enjoying it sure and if it was i sadistically enjoyed killing right i would find that disturbing yes

and i do find that disturbing when i see people talking about or acting about hunting or anything else that way. I don't care whether it's a cat or a dog or a wild deer. To sadistically enjoy causing pain and or taking life, that's problematic. Which is one of the reasons why that's the number one accusation that anti-hunters will label on hunters, that you're a sadistic person, you enjoy doing this, is the enjoy that moment is sadistic right not the kind of light bulb goes off in some part of this ancient you know human mind that that's a different kind of an altered state some people might describe that as exciting or pleasurable i guess yeah it's not like a as said, it's not for you a lust to kill. No.

It's not that. But there's something that is magnetic and powerful about it. Yeah, there's something insanely primal about it. But one of the weirder things that people lobby at you, that people insults that they send your way. One of the big ones is you can't get an erection so you go kill animals. Or you have a little penis so you kill animals. Like it gets brought to this weird sexual lust thing.

I'm really confused about. I always get confused like what is the root of that? Because so many people go to that one. They go to that one whenever I watched. No matter who the hunter is that people are attacking, like whether it was the Walter, the dentist guy who killed Cecil or whatever, it's so many of them go to that, that it's this person is sexually inadequate. So they're going out and killing animals. There's this bizarre connection.

I don't understand that one. No, maybe we should just blame Freud for that. I don't know. I mean. Maybe, right? I mean, part of it is we have a tendency to, in our society and culture, maybe since Freud, to link any kind of like aberrant behavior or motive or desire with sex. Yeah. Which is crazy.

Aberrant behavior or motive or desire with sex. Yeah. Which is crazy. But there's also been a longstanding story that's been told by critics of hunting that, you know, violence toward animals through hunting is the same as sort of sexual violence toward women. Right. And that women, like Mother Earth, the association between women and earth and nature, and men are these dominating, domineering, violent, macho. Evil. Right.

And there's a, you can sort of see the logic and the sort of cultural roots of all of that. you can sort of see the logic and the sort of cultural roots of all of that. Part of the problem, and Mary Stange wrote this fascinating book called Woman the Hunter back 25 years ago. And part of her argument, she's very much a feminist, you know, and a hunter. And part of her rebuttal to that parallel around sexuality is that the same story is told both by the sort of mainstream culture that portrays men as domineering and women as nurturing and, you know, men as, as violators and women as victims, you know, which has happened certainly historically that relationship exists. Right. Right. But the parallel to, to nature, um, as man, the hunter, as a cultural myth, which is very strong in our culture, that the critics, sort of ecological feminists and so on, the critics of that are retelling the same story. same story it's men play this role and women are inherently nurturing inherently not the sort of sexual violent you know lust driven sort of male And her argument is, let's break this down. Let's also have women as hunters being honored and respected and accept that strong women and hunting can be compatible.

And women are not inherently nurturing always. They can life takers they can be hunters you know they can provide for their family through through taking life and hunting does not have to be motivated and isn't motivated for most hunters by some bizarre twisted sexual thing yeah you know whether it's women or men that's not what the real experience is. Well, I don't think they really mean it. I think it's just a simple go-to criticism. They like to latch on to it. I don't think if you gave them a quiet room and said,

okay, why do you think people hunt? If you're correct, you're going to win a million dollars. So I want you to really do your best to try to calculate and formulate the actual process that's going on in a person's brain when they're hunting an animal. I guarantee you they're not going to go with get it up. They're not because then they want to get that million bucks. They would try to figure it out and they would try to be objective about it. It's a cheap go-to insult.

I think it is. And I think that when it's something that's... When people hear a hunter talk about the experience of hunting the way you're talking about it and what that food means and what that moment is like when they hear that they respect that in general you know right most non-hunters who have no experience as long as they eat meat most likely and even even some vegetarians i mean right and some vegetarians will make exceptions for meat that's been hunted. Right. I mean, they can really respect that in general. It's when there's no experience of someone speaking about it that way.

And it's just some picture of some guy with some zebra or, you know. Yeah. It's so incomprehensible. Yeah. It's so removed and there's no story that can be understood right so it's kind of i get having been a vegan and having had a pretty dim view of hunting myself for a long time uh and having having had very strong feelings and still having very strong feelings about animals, I get where that hostility and outrage comes from. Right.

And I can understand why someone would even come up with that sort of bizarre theory. Yeah, I can as well in a lot of ways. as well in a lot of ways. You know, without, again, like if I wanted to win a million dollars and they left me alone in a room and I'd never hunted before and if I wanted to come up with a motive, that wouldn't be on the list. Right. Because I don't really believe it and I don't think anybody

else does either. But before I first hunted, I was thinking to myself, I'm either going to become a vegan or I'm going to become a hunter. That was what this experience, when I first went hunting, I was saying, well, one of the things that's going to happen, either I'm going to shoot this animal, I'm going to become a hunter. That was what this experience, when I first went hunting, I was saying, well, one of the things is going to happen. Either I'm going to shoot this animal, I'm going to be horrified with myself, and I'm going to be like, I'm going to eat this animal, and then I'm done. Or I'm going to become a hunter.

I just, I feel like this is one of those things that will not be solved. This is one of those things that the debate will continue to rage on, and I see both sides. I absolutely see and admire the motive that the ethical vegans want or are attempting to pursue. I also see the intense hypocrisy when I find out they have cats. It's super common. And amongst my friends. I have a good friend. She's a waitress at the comedy store.

She's got a bunch of fucking cats and she's a vegan. She gives people a hard time about meat. I'm like, bitch, you're feeding your monsters. You have vampires you live with. You're bringing them home dead things. They're probably bringing her home dead things if they get out. Probably if they get out. Yeah. I just think that this is sort of a stage that human civilization is going through that's going to

take a few hundred years. And in that few hundred years or so, we're going to evolve to be something that's almost unrecognizable in comparison to what we are now. And we're going through this process. And in this process, we're longing. We're longing towards the idea of wearing a flannel shirt and going into the woods with a bow and arrow. That's what Grandpa did. Grandpa seemed happy all the time. Grandpa didn't even have an email.

He was happier for it. He might have been. I don't know. I don't know. I don't, you know. Is there anything that's been surprising about this process and and creating this book and all this stuff you know it goes back in a way to where this conversation started because you asked you know how much grief did you get how much flack did you take and what's been most surprising in a way and most rewarding is that I've had opportunities to talk with such a wide range of people.

I've done seminars for hunter education instructors and I've talked to rooms full of non-hunters, including some vegetarians. to rooms full of non-hunters, including some vegetarians. And the conversations have been remarkably respectful and civil across those different— and sometimes in the same room, sometimes a mix of those people in the same room. I went very similar to the sort of experience you're talking about with what it felt like to hunt and actually take an animal. I went out to Colorado two, three years ago and did some seminars for hunter education instructors. And I was a little uncomfortable because one of the topics they asked me to speak on was ethics. And I thought, I'm a new hunter. I mean, I just started a few years ago and here are all these lifelong hunters pretty much in this room, 75 guys, mostly guys. And I'm going to tell them about hunting ethics.

Like, oh my God, how am I going to preach to them? But it went well. And as soon as I opened it up for Q&A and we got into discussion, these guys are talking really deeply about the experience of taking life and the sort of emotional dimensions of that. And they're talking to each other and challenging each other to bring that into the classroom with their students. I was like, wow. Two days later, I was just outside Boulder, and I'm sure you know Boulder. Boulder's the butt of every joke in Colorado and vice versa. About hippies. Exactly.

So they say all these hunter education instructors were actually joking about Boulder. We were up in the mountains at this place, but they were joking about Boulder. And they said, how do you get to Boulder? Well, you go to the edge of reality and you turn left. And it's always left. It's true. Of course. Yeah, it's probably one of the most liberal places on earth.

Right. Yeah. And, of course, Boulder, that stereotype of Boulder, is telling the same jokes, or different jokes, but jokes in return about... Evergreen. Yeah. Well, no, I mean about the rednecks. Yes.

And the hunters. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, these, you know, all these hunting jokes and redneck jokes. I was in Boulder because I was being interviewed by this ex-vegetarian who ran this show for Guyam TV, this online TV station. It's all Eastern spirituality and, you know, all that kind of thing. Exactly the people who would make fun of each other, right?

Hunter Education Instructors and Gaiam TV. As soon as we got into the conversation, we're talking about, you know, the emotional and ethical dimensions of taking life. She's an ex-vegetarian. She's now eating meat, but she's not a hunter. She's thinking about these issues, about confronting life and death. And when I got done the trip, I looked back. I was like, wow.

Those two conversations were really similar. Completely different communities who normally would think they had nothing in common, especially around hunting. And yet the very basic human questions, the journey since is that you get to see and talk with people in these places where you know there's common ground yeah in different cultures you know radically different communities there most certainly is and one of the things that i'm hoping is going to bring common ground or bring some common ground or at least bring an understanding is the emerging science behind understanding the intelligence of plants and that plants are in fact a life form that we take for

granted because they're not in motion because they're stationary and they slowly grow and we don't really you know we don't really associate them with being a life form but they are a life form and they're a strange life form that has some form of communication. Some of them can make calculations. Some of them, in fact, rare, but they exist. They're carnivorous. It's a strange type of life. And as we grow to understand that life deeper and deeper and have more respect for it and really understand what exactly they're doing when they it and really understand what exactly they're doing when they're making calculations, what exactly they're doing, they're communicating

with each other, how this network of intertwined life forms, similar plant life forms that exists in this topsoil, which is also some sort of a very bizarre ecosystem of life that these electrical impulses that they're sharing with each other are some sort of form very bizarre ecosystem of life that these electrical impulses that they're sharing with each other are some sort of form of communication. And this whole tradition of the spiritual dimensions, not only of animals, but plants too. Yes. And that this is an unshakable, undeniable truth that life eats life right and we are and we and every animal

on the planet is utterly dependent on plants yes yeah all of them none of us are none of us are photosynthesizing yeah you know i don't know if there's any way ever to get away from what we've established in this country with the giant numbers of human beings in these population centers and the factory farms that support these population centers. I don't know what the way of getting around that is. But I do think that people like yourself and other people that are proponents of at least removing your own existence from it in as clear a way as possible by doing some growing and gardening by doing some hunting by experiencing the wild of this world and going out there and getting into it understanding if this is this is a this is a real environment that coexists with the city during the same time frame on earth

and you you we all i think i don't think there's a person that looks at those factory farm videos and goes, oh yeah, awesome, fuck those cows, yeah. I'm glad those chickens get stuffed in those boxes. I don't think there's a single person that does that and I think that's also why those ag-gag laws are in effect to protect those businesses

because if that stuff gets out, people get horrified and then they vote with their dollar and they make choices that reflect the horror that they experience when they're watching those videos. Sure. I don't know if we can all collectively as a group get out of this, but I think as individuals, we can start moving away from it.

I think what you're doing or what your friends are doing when you're talking about these people that used to be vegetarians and now they're, they grew their own chickens. Now they provide food to these other people. Like that's ideal. You know, finding the people that are involved in, in growing and butchering this meat and getting it from them. Like it's a cleaner, easier way of, of existing. I don't, um, I don't, I don't know if we're ever though with the amount of

people that we have stuffed in these cities how else and my people we have stuff on the globe yeah that's insane how else we're gonna get them fed we fucked up yeah if you were that objective being hovering above say wow, wow, what a mess. Yeah. It's almost like an insurmountable student debt. Like, what did you do? You're not going to pay this off. How are you going to pay this? What did you do?

You can't feed all those people the real way. You know, oh, you've got to keep stuffing chickens into factories. You've got to keep stuffing these pigs into warehouses. Or something. I don't know what that something is. I don't know what the other alternative is. I don't know. Anything else before we wrap this sucker up?

No, it's been great. It's been good fun. Thanks for doing this. I really appreciate it. My pleasure. Tovar's book is The Mindful Carnivore, and it is available everywhere. It's on Amazon, printed by Pegasus Books, and Tovar Cerulli. Thank you, sir.

Appreciate it, man. It was a lot of fun. Good night, everybody. Good night, everybody. That was great, man.