Widening The Scope

Well, I’m only six posts into this blog and I’m already breaking one of my ground rules: that I would only eat domesticated animals. It started innocently enough with a conversation with a co-worker who is an avid hunter and lives in far western Nebraska.  I typically don’t talk about my home butchering endeavors with people anymore because they tend to find it … odd. But I figured a hunter who just mentioned that his son has two deer  “hanging in the barn right now” probably would indulge me.

He could see how interested I was and not only offered me a very generous hind quarter of one of the deer aging in the barn (doing his part, he said, to broaden my tasting/blog experiment), but he also offered me an opportunity I couldn’t refuse: an elk hunting adventure.  A buddy of his has a herd of elk on his land and, for a fee, you can hunt one.  We agreed he will do the shooting and then let me help with the dressing and butchering. In the end, I will get half an elk for my freezer.  (Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think I’d be saying that.)

There were other “wild game” themes running throughout the week that made me start rethinking this aspect of my blog. At our office chili cookoff, one co-worker brought chili made with wild turkey meat that he had hunted himself, and it was drop-dead delicious.  In addition, I had recently signed up for a deer butchering class, not because I had planned to start hunting but because it was an opportunity to practice butchering closer to where I live.

A conversation I had with another hunter friend recently also started to sway me, even before I was offered the free deer meat. “My wife, who will not eat beef or wild birds, will eat our deer because it’s so good,” he said in an e-mail. “People I’ve served it to swear it’s high-quality beef.” The same guy said he never makes his deer meat into sausage because he doesn’t want to cover up the awesome flavor of the meat with spices. Could he be exaggerating? Possibly, but it was enough to make me think it was also possible I was really missing out on something good. I had to reconsider it.

One last bit about wild game, and another sign to me that it was meant to be a part of this blog…

I happened to be in Kearney (central Nebraska) for a work conference this past week and it happened to coincide with the annual gathering of the International Association of Falconry and Conservation of Birds of Prey. They pretty much had taken over the hotel, including coming into the exhibit area for OUR conference and eating food paid for by our host! It was a hoot! And if they weren’t partying outside your door in the hallway until late into the night, their hunting dogs were barking their heads off outside your window on the other side of the room. Truly insane.

But I had to give it to these guys. They would talk to anybody for literally hours to tell you about the sport, which goes back some 3,000 years and includes using dogs to find game birds or jack rabbits, followed by the hunters who flush them out, and then finally sending the falcons or hawks into the air to catch and kill them. Whoever heard of such a thing!

An owner gets her dog and falcon (visible perched inside the truck) ready for a morning of hunting.

Falcons can either be bred or captured for this purpose. They call the process of assimilating them “imprinting.” And this is done, I am told, by making sure everything good comes from their human. The training is also carried out this way: They are tethered with increasingly longer strings until they can reliably come back from 100 feet or so to retrieve food.

A falcon gets its wing measured.

A hunter poses with his peregrine falcon.

One guy told me that hunting this way is about 11 percent the reliability that gun hunting is and “really makes you run your butt off.”  He also said the whole findprey/flush/flybirds is “more of an ideal.” It often doesn’t work that smoothly; a lot of things can and do go wrong. In fact, I was told that just yesterday a bird was released to chase a rabbit, swooped down and missed, and then just kept on flying and didn’t come back. The owner was going to try to find the bird today, with marginal odds of success (the birds do wear a tracking device).

Falcons hang out on perches in the morning prior to the hunt.

This international meeting comes to Nebraska every six years. They say this area is great in terms of game and huntable land. A lot of these folks have a lot of affection for the state. In the raptor pen at the hotel (pictured above), the birds would occasionally try to fly, only to get about a foot before being yanked back by the tether. The guy next to me said, “See, they love to exercise their wings. They can’t wait to fly.” My co-worker, who also happens to be a vegetarian, said it looked more to her like they were trying to get away, and I pretty much agreed. But they still looked majestic and powerful, even in captivity. I have seen wild ones perched alone in a high branch along the interstate when I’m making my drive between Lincoln and Kansas City and often wonder about them. I never knew they could be used in this way.

A hunter poses with the bounty (in a freezer set up by the hotel just for this conference).

Getting back to the reason I didn’t include wild game initially in this eating endeavor, it has nothing to do with hunting. I don’t have anything against the sport. It's just not anything I’m particularly interested in. I think I may have excluded it in the beginning because of sustainability reasons (which I don't consider an issue with deer, elk, etc). Also, because I'm not a hunter, I didn't foresee any circumstances where I might be able to procure wild game for my cooking adventures (this also is turning out not to be a barrier). But I think hunting is still relevant (and have decided to include it in the blog) from the standpoint of wanting to better understand people’s relationship with their food.