Bloodties

Bloodties: Nature, Culture, and the Hunt (1993), a non-fiction book by nature writer and Sports Afield columnist Ted Kerasote, explores the ethics of hunting through encounters with indigenous hunters, trophy hunters, and animal rights activists, as well as through Kerasote’s own experiences on the hunt.

Kerasote introduces his inquiry in personal terms, by describing his close-to-nature life in the Grand Teton mountains of western Wyoming. There, he occasionally hunts down one of the region’s indigenous elk. He eats the meat and makes use of the body in other ways too: for example, his bedspread is an elk hide.

Although this is perfectly legal, and to Kerasote has an atavistic, even spiritual significance, he is troubled by the objections of his non-hunting neighbors. They see hunting—whether for food or for sport—as the oppression by a powerful group (humans) of a weaker one (animals). To explore this argument further, and to get to the bottom of his own feelings about hunting, Kerasote sets out to meet different hunters and anti-hunting activists from around the world.



First, he travels to Kullorsuaq, Greenland, where the indigenous Inuit people hunt strictly for subsistence. Their food, clothes, homes, and trade goods are all derived from the animals they hunt on the ice. This hunting is still done in a traditional way. Although they carry rifles, they only use them when they are in mortal danger.

Initially, the Inuit group Kerasote meets is reluctant to reveal their hunting practices to him. They fear that he is a spy for Greenpeace. The Inuit blame the environmental organization for harming Inuit life by exerting pressure on governments to ban the hunting of seals. However, Kerasote assuages their fears, and he accompanies the Inuit on a series of exhilarating hunts on dogsleds, culminating in the taste of steaming raw liver, eaten on the ice pack.

Next, Kerasote travels to meet Bob Kubick, a famous (or notorious) trophy hunter, noted for his fastidiousness. He once stalked a ram through the snow at 20,000 feet for several days, only to let it live because it wasn’t a perfect specimen.



Kerasote’s concerns about trophy hunting deepen when he accompanies a party of American hunters from Safari Club International to stalk bighorn sheep in Siberia. The hunters claim to be bound by rules of “sportsmanship,” but to Kerasote’s disgust, these men use helicopters to corral the sheep into position before dispatching them with machine guns.

The Safari Club hunters stress that they bring money to impoverished areas, particularly in Africa, but Kerasote is troubled by their failure to respect local laws. One of these men confesses, without shame, to having shot a zoo tiger and an endangered antelope. Kerasote is pleased when one of the hunters is imprisoned for violating an export law.

Kerasote describes his own approach to hunting. We accompany him as he stalks elk in his own mountain backyard and learns that Kerasote values hunting as an almost mystical experience, one which allows him to feel in touch with nature and his own natural history as a human being.



He argues that the urge to hunt is closely related to the urge to procreate. He suggests that men who hunt recognize a number of overlaps. Stories abound in every indigenous culture of animal-wives, and Kerasote tells his own of a hind who appeared to him as a beautiful woman. He describes killing as the “orgasm” of hunting, recalling that one of the trophy hunters he met listed his “nice-looking wife” among his trophies. Kerasote wonders how contemporary culture has come to deny the atavistic desire to hunt and kill, while simultaneously celebrating sexual desire.

Finally, Kerasote returns to the ethical question with which he began. He engages Wayne Pacelle, the head of the Fund for Animals, in a several-day debate. Along the way, he talks to several of Pacelle’s colleagues and some other activists, including vegetarians who even insist on their dogs being vegetarian. He draws out all the arguments against hunting—ethical and environmental—without finding them convincing himself.

In response, Kerasote makes what he sees as the strongest case for hunting (at least for food). Hunting for food consumes fewer fossil fuels—and results in fewer deaths—than what Kerasote calls “supermarket vegetarianism.” The supermarket vegetarian participates in an eco-system dependent on pesticides and heavy machinery which play havoc with ecosystems and kill hundreds of animals, from snakes and toads to ground-nesting birds and small rodents. Supermarket meat, too, tends to be reared in energy-intensive ways. Meanwhile, wild venison, hunted locally, consumes no fossil fuel and takes only one life: the elk’s. What is more, hunting is in our nature, and to suppress it may do more harm than good.