A Hunter With A Conscience -- Former Vegetarian Examines Philosophy And Balance Of Life In `Bloodties' Book

"FROM MY GUT the elk begins his slow combustion, the physiological sense of warmth and well-being that those who live in cold climates note and which fills me with a sense of indebtedness to him. He gives me this place, my strength, and I like to think that someday my bones will fertilize the grass that will make his grandchildren fleet."

- Ted Kerasote, former vegetarian

Do the least harm possible.

Those words form the rudder that steers rural Wyoming author and outdoor writer Ted Kerasote, who has spent every moment of his adult life diligently striving to do just that.

Striving, not necessarily succeeding. For Kerasote, a deep-thinking, mindful person - so gentle he regrets killing ants, so thoughtful he catches house mice alive in a trap, then bicycles them some distance away to be released in a field - "least harm" is not as clear-cut as it sounds.

Kerasote's quest to conscientiously weave through earth's inevitable chain of life-taking-life-to-sustain-life is chronicled in "Bloodties: Nature, Culture and the Hunt," (Random House, $22). The book, aside from posing insightful questions about the relationship between who we are and what we eat, is likely to do something even more remarkable: Enrage both hunters and animal welfare activists.

Kerasote, a New York native raised in a hunting family, ignores superficial arguments, such as whether hunting is a necessary tool in wildlife management, and gets to the gut-wrenching heart of the matter.

He describes his evolution from strident peacenik/vegetarian to meat hunter/eater, concluding that his own form of "mindful participation" in his Wyoming environment causes less pain to living creatures than eating commercially raised vegetables.

His reasoning: Thousands of small animals, snakes, insects and other creatures are destroyed when fields are cleared, planted and harvested. Further, thousands of plant and animal lives are lost during production of fossil fuels to transport foods - even flattened on roadsides by trucks. Where, he asks, do we get water and electricity to grow potatoes in Eastern Washington? Hydroelectric dams, which snuff out salmon.

A life is a life, he says, whether it's a beetle or a grizzly bear. And if animals must die, Kerasote believes he owes it to the creature to do the killing himself.

"When I looked into that web, so full of pain," he writes, "I came to see that my killing an elk each year did less harm, expressed in animal lives who I believe count equally, than importing the same amount of vegetable food to my bioregion. This didn't ease my conscience; but it did make my choices clearer."

Scholars backed up his choice, telling him his annual elk cost the earth about half the total ecological damage of the caloric equivalent of commercially raised potatoes - and far less compared to the equivalent in rice.

Not everyone can make Kerasote's choice, particularly urban dwellers. But they can make informed choices.

He is convinced it's impossible to sustain life without "foreclosing" others. But he says humans should take responsibility for the lives they choose to end. Acknowledge the taking. Respect it, regret it - but ultimately embrace it.

Few people do that, he believes. And some who profess to do so are fooling themselves.

"Supermarket vegetarians" who eat commercial produce "don't want to face the fact that life feeds life," he said. "They suffer from the illusion that they're living gently on the planet." They don't prevent death, he argues - they merely place the killing in the hands of someone out of sight, out of mind.

Likewise, animal-rights and animal-welfare activists selectively choose to advance causes of certain species - sometimes at the expense of other species, which have an equal right to survive.

For the great majority in the middle, the question is more difficult, Kerasote said. Culturally, we have been trained to have feelings about killing animals. But naturally, it's a fact of life.

"The question then becomes, can a cultural being still ethically participate in natural cycles? Well, you participate whether you like it or not."

They hang themselves

Kerasote never divulges what that "ethical participation" might be for the average urbanized American. But he makes it clear what it is not. Self-proclaimed "ethical" hunters and animal lovers both take their shots.

Not directly from Kerasote, however. His technique is to let hunters and nonhunters hang themselves in their own flawed logic.

His subjects - native subsistence hunters, animal-rights activists and rich, egotistical trophy hunters who worship Safari Club International record books - prove sympathetic, comical and heinous, respectively, to readers.

Kerasote's accounts of frigid hunting trips with Inuits in Greenland are striking in their description of the terrain, the technique and the internal struggle of hunters' age-old pursuits using more modern means.

His writing shines most, however, in an engaging profile and, later, gripping account of a Siberian hunting trip with famed trophy hunter Bob Kubick of Anchorage. Kubick's single-minded devotion to "collecting" the world's animal species (some 270 hang stuffed in his Anchorage "gallery") is alternately pathetic, hilarious and in the end, disturbingly understandable.

Hunters not killers?

It's almost possible to see Kerasote struggling to maintain a straight face as Kubick and a half-dozen well-heeled hunting companions, like preteens comparing bicycle wheelies, share stories of hunting exploits over stew in a Siberian hunting camp. And it's easy to imagine the stunned look on his face as one of the wealthy hunters takes exception at being labeled a "killer."

"Hunting includes killing, like sex includes orgasm," the hunter concludes. "Killing is the orgasm of hunting. We are not killers - we are hunters."

Kerasote shifts gears from those experiences to his own personal struggle, writing of many solitary hunting trips he makes more to be among wild elk - to feel, smell and sense their presence - than to kill them. When he chooses an elk to bring down, he does so with great sadness, waiting for the proper time, place, and feeling of "permission" from the animal. Afterward, he commits details of the kill to memory to honor the animal he has chosen to "recycle" into the earth.

He ultimately urges people to look deep in their souls and examine their practices. He suggests hunters observe conservationist Aldo Leopold's "Land Ethic" dictum: "A thing is right when it preserves the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise."

And he advises nonhunters struggling with their consciences in a modern world to follow his lead, look deep and choose their foods wisely. But Kerasote is the first to assure readers he has no easy answers.

In the end, the author recalls sitting in his own organic garden, doubting his own philosophy.

"There have been moments, watching my potatoes making their way up through the earth," he writes, "when I have felt the complexity of this world hold my conscience in its claws. Which hasn't exactly felt bad, only humbling. Maybe that is what prey feels like when if finally stops struggling."