A New Breed of Hunter Shoots, Eats and Tells. [Liberals Ruin Hunting]

IHT ^ | 1 October 2012 | Dwight Garner

[bjorn14]

Who is the most famous hunter in America? If you’re over 30, the first names that come to mind are probably Sarah Palin, Ted Nugent or Dick Cheney. If you’re under 30, the answer is easier. The most famous hunter in America is Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaire founder of Facebook.

In May 2011 Mr. Zuckerberg made a pledge to consume, for one year, only meat he had hunted or slaughtered himself. He got a hunting license and shot a bison. “My personal challenge,” he explained, is “being thankful for the food I have to eat.”

If four new books are any indication, Mr. Zuckerberg is the decidedly nonmacho, non-pickup-driving embodiment of a new breed of American hunter. These young memoirists have loaded their rifles and shotguns for complicated reasons, including culinary one-upmanship. Nothing wows jaded dinner guests like a braised shank of calf moose that you’ve recently “harvested” and “dressed” — hunting euphemisms for killed, skinned and disemboweled — before bringing it to the table.

What feels counterintuitive and new here though is this: These writers have largely taken to hunting, they say, for ethical reasons. They’ve read their Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser, their Peter Singer and Jonathan Safran Foer, and are intimate with the horrors of industrial meat production.

They no longer wish to have an anonymous hit man between themselves and supper. They want to thoughtfully stare their protein in the face, to take locavorism to blood-flecked new heights. What they desire, as Tovar Cerulli puts it his new book “The Mindful Carnivore: A Vegetarian’s Hunt for Sustenance” (Pegasus), is as follows: “To eat with my eyes wide open.”

[cripplecreek]

He got a hunting license and shot a bison.

So in other words, he went to a farm and killed a cow. Not that I have a major problem with it but that's not hunting any more than going to the supermarket.

[Oberon]

I don't think Zuckerberg would disagree with you, except in one particular... he did the killing himself.

I remember once being on an airplane next to a St. Louis liberal who was horrified to learn that I was on my way to Colorado to hunt elk. I asked if she was a vegetarian, and she told me no. My reply was, "So it's not that you disapprove of killing animals... you'd rather just farm out the bloodshed to somebody else."

It was a quiet plane ride after that.

[taxcontrol]

Agreed, but hey, at least it is a step in the right direction.

[GladesGuru]

A true Liberal can be identified by the total self absorption, the continuous search for ever more “awareness” of the self. Nothing is more Liberal than a lunch in Manhattan where all are discussing the Tandori chicken. Hint: Dry, tough, poorly spiced. But - is was “ethnic”, had its own reality, ad nauseam.

[moonhawk]

Apparently you’ve never had good tandoori...

[Born to Conserve]

Killing is easy, it is cleaning your kill that earns you the feast.

[GladesGuru]

” where all are discussing the Tandori chicken”

Actually, the sentence is accurate, in that it describes that particular Tandori chicken.

I have had better, much better, actually.

But, given the NYC Chinatown possibilities, to descend to Indian or , worse yet, Paki food seemed questionable. But, the multi-kulti Force was strong in them.