Pink Poop and the Case for Hunting

I recently spent a couple days reading a book by Steven Rinella called Meat Eater: Adventures from the Life of an American Hunter. Part memoir, part confessional, part putting a civilized world that tends to be anti-hunting on Oprah’s couch to ask, “What exactly is your problem with killing things?”

My husband bought me this book for Christmas this year. Neither of us was familiar with or watched Rinella’s show MeatEater on the Sportsman Channel. The topic of hunting has been more interesting to us of late because of the offers of some spectacular wild meat that has come our way. We also have been invited on at least two hunting trips out in western Nebraska this coming fall, invitations that, while I will not do any actual shooting, I plan to accept.

As someone who has never hunted before and maybe picked up a gun two times in my whole life, I appreciated such a thorough picture of the hunting lifestyle. Rinella comes from a hunting family. Both of his brothers hunt also, and he has had many hunting adventures with them. They all love the outdoors and feel a great deal of accomplishment in being independent (and well-fed) during hunting trips that are sometimes days long.

Meat Eater by Steven Rinella

After a while, the amount of killing in the book did begin to wear on me. This is especially true for the portion of the book that covers his fur-trapping and trophy-hunting phases, both of which he has closely examined (and re-examined) as he has gotten older. He confesses to killing some animals illegally, mostly for the money but also because he found it hard to resist the urge to not act on his deep knowledge of animal behavior (required to be a successful hunter). In other words, just to prove that he could. Particularly sad and wrenching was his story about the unnecessary trapping and killing of an otter, whose habits he had been tracking over the course of several days. While he acknowledges that he experienced great joy at watching the otter live and play, the temptation to hunt it was stronger. He is very regretful about those times and said he has learned his hunting boundaries from experiences like that and how they made him feel. He still is an avid hunter, but his understanding about why he hunts has evolved over time, boiling down to essentially hunting so he has enough food to feed his family.

While he defends the lifestyle, I do not believe even he thinks the earth could sustain a world full of hunters. Mostly he wishes people would be more understanding about hunting, less against it, although I think talking about his cravings to sink his teeth into his bloody prey makes him look a little overzealous and might not be the best way to convert his critics.

One of his biggest points in the book, one I happen to agree with whole-heartedly, is that hunting provides a source of meat that is known and fresh. He laments that becoming “civilized” has meant becoming estranged from the source, more compartmentalized and detached from the processes that must take place in order to put meat on the table. According to his calculation, man has hunted forever. To hate the act of hunting, he says, is in some ways to hate yourself. (Woah! Watch out Dr. Phil!)

Hunter and author Steven Rinella

He uses another experience to bring home the point that meat has been adulterated in unhealthy ways in order to appease our modern sensibilities. He describes visiting a salmon farm, which housed a couple of pet seals.  The seals’ diets were composed almost exclusively of salmon. Proof of their salmon diet could be found on the rock island where they lounged: It was stained bright pink from the seals pooping out salmon that had been fed pellet food containing red dye.  (The red dye gives the farmed salmon that orange-pink hue that wild salmon get naturally from eating certain crustaceans.)

You don’t have to be a hunter to argue that we shouldn’t be eating that crap. And you also don’t have to start hunting your own salmon. But certainly we should be making the case to the food industry that we’re just fine eating normal-color, farmed salmon if that means not depleting the world's stocks of wild salmon, still getting to eat sushi, and have normal-color poop.

While after reading the book, I still do not feel compelled to starting hunting, one aspect of it that I totally get is the freshness of the meat (one of the reasons why I started exploring home butchering in the first place), although to hear his descriptions of packing meat out after he has killed and butchered an animal makes me wonder how any of the meat harvested deep in the back country can ever make it out and still be edible. I think it’s commendable that he values the meat of the animals he’s hunting and not just the kill. He cares that the life of the animal is not wasted, an important point to make since it’s likely other hunters are reading his book, too.

My favorite part of the book was a section at the end of each chapter called “Tasting Notes,” where he discusses some of the stranger things he’s eaten, how he prepared them, and what they tasted like. Squirrel, beaver, heart, bear, and mountain lion, to name a few. Since part of the reason I’m on this blogging journey is to experience some new flavors, this was particularly interesting to me. Fun fact #1: Bears and mountain lions are carriers of Trichinella spiralis, which causes trichinosis, the same parasite that can infect pork. So boys and girls, be sure to make sure to cook those bear fillets to well done. Also, a great description of the author researching – through trial and error – whether old timers really did eat beaver tail (he concludes that they probably did). And singing the praises of squirrel meat simmered in the slow cooker with some cream of mushroom soup. (When he gets a craving, he traps them in the small garden behind his Brooklyn apartment when they try to steal his tomatoes.)

Lastly, for you anglers out there, the parts about fishing are a major selling point. My husband, who also likes to fish, liked it when I read the parts about Rinella’s fishing adventures aloud to him. Those stories have a very you-are-there quality about them.