Review by Ken Wright
Hunting – December 2000 – Colorado Central Magazine
Heartsblood: Hunting, Spirituality, and Wildness in America
by David Petersen
Published in 2000 by Island Press
ISBN 1-55963-761-7
DAVID PETERSEN wants Bambi dead, and he’s not afraid to say so. Bambi is a “sickeningly oversweetened, unabashedly misanthropic, emotionally manipulative, false-stereotyping, biologically bastardized, profit-mongering piece of Hollywood poopoo,” Petersen argues. Bambi and its personifying ilk, Petersen complains, warp young minds — and older minds, too — toward ideological and unnatural views of how nature works and what hunting means.
And although they warp in the radically extreme opposite direction, Petersen also wants to knock off today’s hunting media for the same damaging reasons.
In his latest book, Heartsblood: Hunting, Spirituality, and Wildness in America, naturalist and hunting ethicist David Petersen comes charging to the defense of hunting and what he calls “true” and “honest” hunters. In that defense he takes on not only such “kindergarten-cartoonish” images of nature and hunters as those in Bambi and those propagated by animal-rights activists and radical vegans, but he also challenges hunters themselves: at least those hunters who, through their unwillingness to stand up for a code of hunting ethics, have let the profit-driven hunting media portray hunters as a bunch of corpse-counting, trophy-seeking, gizmo-toting, bloodthirsty knuckle-draggers.
“Not all hunting is equal,” Petersen argues. “Not all approaches to hunting and not all hunters are good. Not all approaches to hunting and hunters are bad.”
The difference, he says, can be identified in spirit. “Hunting without significant effort, skill, prey compassion, conservation ethic, tenacity, humility, sense of awe in nature, and personal honor — all motivated by a deep-seeded need (spiritual if not physical) for the best that authentic experience has to offer — while it may be pursuing and it may be killing, is not hunting.”
In that spirit, he says, high-tech hunting and honest hunting are absolutely incompatible. “I share the antis’ disgust,” he says, “with such moral abominations” as trophy hunting, baiting, so-called “hunts” on game ranches, “cheater technology,” off-road vehicle abuse, and more.
Yet the goal of most modern hunting media — where most of the nonhunting public gets its images of hunting, and where the anti-hunting forces gather their ammunition for anti-hunting legislation — is not to promote this ethical hunting spirit, but to make money.
And how does a hunting magazine make money? By advertising and promoting hunting technology and high-tech hunting goods.
“The net effect and unabashed intent of all this stuff, of course,” Petersen points out, “is to reduce the need to develop traditional woodcraft skills, exercise patience, or exert physical effort and to help assure consistent kills — in effect, to take the hunt out of hunting; to buy success rather than earn it.”
This greedy cycle is leading to an increasingly impoverished image of hunters to the non-hunting public. And this is the greatest threat to hunting today.
So what to do? Petersen, a life-long hunter himself, wants to save hunting, but he also rejects the modern hunker-down mentality of most hunting groups, which holds that any attack on any hunting is an attack on all hunting. To save hunting today, Petersen says, true, honest, spirit-driven hunters — what he calls “nature” hunters — need to be willing to argue both for hunting and against unethical hunters.
Petersen’s believes: “We don’t need more hunters, we need better hunters.”
And identifying what “better” hunters means is the real prey of Heartsblood. To do that, Petersen has to stalk the most elusive prey of all: spirituality. It’s a noble mission.
“I’ve never faced a more emotionally contentious challenge than substantiating and articulating the spirituality inherent to true hunting,” Petersen admits. “So troubling is this topic that few, on either side, feel comfortable even talking about it….
“Nothing could be more in tune with nature, thus more moral, than to follow our omnivorous instincts, needs, and God-given talents as hunters, openly and gratefully acknowledging the deaths that go to nourish our lives,” Petersen argues.
NAILING DOWN this ethereal spirituality, while at the same time both defending hunting and fending off anti-hunting attacks, is a noble and ambitious endeavor. And Petersen succeeds impressively. Heartsblood is both well reasoned and thoroughly supported — if it bogs down anywhere, in fact, it’s in Petersen’s urge to offer a supporting quote for nearly every idea offered.
The real strength of the book, though, and what keeps it from falling into the popular dustbin of academic discourse, is Petersen’s ability to leaven the literary loaf with vivid, engaging personal narrative from his lifetime in the field. It’s these stories from the field and Petersen’s ability to show the hunter’s world through his eyes and spirit that ultimately allows the reader to touch that nebulous, numinous spirit-thing upon which Petersen’s whole argument hinges: “Wildness, solitude, simplicity: the Holy Trinity of nature hunting.” –Ken Wright
