THE CASE AGAINST TROPHY HUNTING

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Trophy hunting is sucka sh*t

Don’t get me wrong, I would love to elk hunt one day, harvest a bull, and mount those antlers on my wall. Antlers are dope, especially elk antlers. But you better believe I’m also going to eat all of that bull. We’re talking upwards of 300lbs of delicious, grass fed red meat. Yes, please!

It’s very likely that I don’t have to convince you, dear reader, of the ills of trophy hunting, but I often find myself having to defend the practice of hunting to non-hunters because of the prevalence of trophy hunting.

Just like red meat has gotten a bad name from the ubiquitous practice of industrial meat production, so has any form of hunting been frowned upon because of how popular trophy hunting is in the U.S. And it’s this singular focus on one particular way of being that is destroying hunting in this country.

The mainstream hunting industry has heavily invested in some sucka sh*t.

Welcome to Hunting! Here’s your pamphlet on white supremacy…

I didn’t start hunting until I was in my 30s. I grew up fishing, but my parents made it very clear from an early age that guns were not something they or I was to get involved in under any circumstances. I learned later that a big reason for this family policy was because my parents were afraid of me ending up like Tamir Rice.

I never told them this, but one day I woke up suddenly, at home after they had left for work, because I thought I heard someone in the house. I reached for my phone and called 911. The dispatcher calmly walked me through what I should do and told me, under no circumstances, should I leave my room.

Guess what my dumbass did after being convinced that it was a false alarm? The last thing the dispatcher said to me as I put down the phone was, “sir, sir please don’t leave your room…sir!”

The police met me in the front yard after seemingly materializing from nowhere with guns drawn.

My life could have easily ended there and I sometimes marvel, looking back, that it didn’t.

To this day I don’t discuss rifle hunting with my mom because the thought of her Black son, out in the world with a firearm makes her incredibly nervous and fearful for how people will react to me. And with good reason.

Nevertheless, I decided to try hunting because I loved the taste of deer, the idea of harvesting my own food has always interested me, and I had a safe white mentor (he’s jewish) who shared my trepidation of other people who might have ill intent. I went out a couple of times with him and used one of his firearms, which prompted me to purchase my own.

So I started doing searches and watching videos, and the funniest thing happened.

The ads I was shown online went from blue to deep red on the political spectrum. I got shown ads on concealed carry courses and equipment, the best home defense shotgun, gun safe ads, and all sorts of “the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” type content.

It was wild, and incredibly off-putting to the point that it took me a lot longer to get answers to my firearms questions because the space I was entering was so clearly not welcoming to my Blackness.

Mainstream hunting culture is on some sucka sh*t.

“That liver tastes like a high school football locker room”

My buddy Brandon pulled up in his truck with a big buck in the back. That buck was huge and we were both geeked he had harvested such a specimen. I asked him if he kept the liver because I had been wanting to make the same deer liver pate I gave to my first hunting mentor back in West Virginia. The same deer liver pate I left out on the counter in a rush to get to work, that my 15lb orange tabby cat, Pumpkin Billy, devoured and subsequently didn’t eat for 3 days. That was some good-ass pate!

Brandon returned the next day or two with 4 of the 6lbs of liver from that buck. Six friggin pounds! That boy was big!

I could smell the liver through the cooler and plastic bags it was being carried in. The organ wasn’t spoiled, it just smelled like the liver of a male mammal that had been harvested in the middle of the rut (mating season). Deer strike car insurance claims skyrocket during the fall in large part because super horny male deer are running around paying attention to only one thing. Them cheeks.

I did the best I could with the liver, but at the end of the day, only one of my friends — who’s taste is far more sophisticated and cultured than my own — enjoyed the pate.

My friend Mike Costello of Lost Creek Farm and I have often talked about why hunting deer for anything other than food makes no sense to us whatsoever. Mike grew up around hunting culture in West Virginia, and stopped hunting when he became an adult because of how most of his peers and hunting mentors hardly ever ate the deer they killed.

On the one hand, who can blame someone for not liking the taste of male deer fresh off some booty in search of more booty?

Then again, it’s not like buck are the only type of deer other there, so why focus so heavily on the horny boys? Buck season is huge across the US, but it’s not because bucks taste good.

Many USian hunters are chasing tail that’s chasing tail, which shall now be known as Captain Save-A-Doe, aka, textbook definition of some sucka sh*t.

Hunting has a white patriarchy problem

Hunting participating in the U.S. is dropping and has been for years. This trend is particularly troubling because much of the funding that goes to conservation in this country comes from taxes on hunting and fishing equipment, licenses, and participation of hunters and anglers. I once wrote a paper about this that never got published (now that’s some sucka sh*t).

Big hunting organizations are rightfully concerned about this trend, but almost none of them seem to understand hunting culture enough to reverse what’s been happening for decades.

Academia is struggling with this same problem. Enrollment rates are plummeting and institutions keep spinning their wheels trying to stop the bleeding (how’s that for a mixed metaphor). Both cultures suffer from the same problem…

Overwhelming whiteness.

If I told you that I built my wealth investing +90% of my money in one stock, you would probably be nervous for my future and advise me to think about other stocks I could invest in so as to avoid the vulnerability of having all my eggs in one basket. That’d be good advice because if that one stock fails I’m SOL and my wealth would evaporate overnight. No smart financial person or anyone with common sense would feel good about the security of my wealth if I invested that way.

Now remember what happened to my ads when I started researching firearms and consuming hunting content. Do a YouTube search on hunting and see how long it takes you to find a non-white, non-male person. (Here’s a creator I follow whose content I really like).

Hunting culture is over leveraged on cis-het white men. They’ve gotten rich investing in this demographic, but because their cultural portfolio is homogenous they don’t posses the skills, experience, or personnel to pivot when that demographic begins to flag and lose interest.

When you think of a trophy hunter what do you picture in your mind?

There’s two type of people in this world, people who said “a white guy”, and liars.

Trophy hunting is wasteful, reinforces bad relations with relatives we hope will sustain us, and the meat almost always tastes worse than if we harvested tastier demographics (female and younger members of the herd).

Eating wild game that tastes like the back of someone’s balls is some sucka sh*t.

A Black adult-onset hunter

I became an adult-onset-hunter DESPITE the overt signaling that entering into this space was not a place where my Blackness was expected or welcomed. I still battle with the friction of being a Black hunter to this day; when I go shopping at sporting good stores, when I’m out in the woods, and when I, for example, post content talking about the issue of race and hunting.

If the hunting industry in the U.S. is going to become more resilient it has to give up celebrating a practice that is so detrimental on multiple levels. Mainstream hunting culture must embrace the more sustainable and morally defensible virtues of subsistence hunting rather than pumping out and elevating so much buck harvesting content. Doing so would be economically painful in the short-term, but far less unpleasant than eating half a pound of buck liver pate.

Spending all that time, money, and energy, just to put a rack on your wall when you could also be feeding you and your loved ones delicious, non-gamey meat is some sucka sh*t.

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WILD KITCHEN UPDATE

Guess what I’m making in this photo

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CONSIDER THIS

One grill pan to rule them all!

Don’t front, you know you wanted to know about gorgeous grill pan from the deer bone photo. It’s by Made-In, it’s made of carbon steel, and it’s dope. Those other, cheaper grill pans? Some sucka sh*t. Buy once, cry once. Get you one.

Thanks for reading!

-Jonathan