Meat Eater Steven Rinella Quotes

Maybe stalking the woods is as vital to the human condition as playing music or putting words to paper. Maybe hunting has as much of a claim on our civilized selves as anything else. After all, the earliest forms of representational art reflect hunters and prey. While the arts were making us spiritually viable, hunting did the heavy lifting of not only keeping us alive, but inspiring us. To abhor hunting is to hate the place from which you came, which is akin to hating yourself in some distant, abstract way.

My own reasoning was certainly complicated, so much so that I can’t fully explain it. At some level, I’m sure I viewed the act of releasing fish as a form of contrition. There was definitely a connection in my mind—or reverse connection, as it were—between killing upward of a thousand furbearing mammals for money and then spending money in order to let other creatures live. And while one might argue that you can do a better job of letting things live by not catching them in the first place, you can’t actively let them live until you’ve had a chance to kill them.

Driving around the West, I was like an illiterate man staring into a book; he doesn’t understand what exactly he’s seeing, but he damn sure knows it’s important

One August day a few years back, my friend Dan Bogan and I spent a whole day up on a hill that was shaped like a woman's chest. We were hiding in the cleavage, out of sight.

When I was done plucking the birds, the blood and the scattering of white feathers gave my campsite the appearance of a pillow fight gone horribly wrong.

To sit in a tree and watch the coming of dawn is a strange thing. As soon as you can see the ground with any detail it seems that you’re twice as high as you thought you were. Tree stumps go through brief periods when they look like people. The root wads of overturned trees look like bears. You can’t tell whether the trail you’re sitting along passes through a large meadow you should have noticed earlier or just a slight opening in the trees that you wouldn’t have noticed earlier. But as the light comes up enough to make out the individual leaves on the ground, you realize that you’re only as high as you thought you were. The stumps go back to being stumps, the root wads back to root wads. The trail begins to look like how you remembered it.

On the most basic level, agriculture leads to more food; more food leads to more people; more people leads to professional specialization; professional specialization leads to invention; invention leads to the development of greater weapons; the development of greater weapons leads to conquest. What this meant, over the centuries, is that agricultural people basically kicked the shit out of hunters.

Maybe stalking the woods is as vital to the human condition as playing music or putting words to paper. Maybe hunting has as much of a claim on our civilized selves as anything else. After all, the earliest forms of representational art reflect hunters and prey. While the arts were making us sprititually viable, hunting did the heavy lifting of not only keeping up alive, but inspiring us. To abhor hunting is to hate the place from which you came, which is akin to hating yourself in some distant, abstract way.

[LSSU] was the kind of school where students had a lot of pride. Not the raucous strain of sports pride... And not academic pride... It was more of a geographical pride. Kids were proud to live in that tough wilderness setting, and the best way to prove your mettle was through achievements in the wild.

The remainder of the lion... was still in my freezer that spring when I happened to turn up at the Rock Creek Lodge. This bar... is regionally famous for its annual Testicle Festival, a liquor-filled carnival where ranchers, hippies, loggers, bikers, and college kids get together in September in order to get drunk, shed clothes, dance, and occasionally fight... But on this day the Testicle Festival was still a half year away, and the bar was mostly empty except for a plastic bag of hamburger buns and an electric roasting pan that was filled with chipped meat and a tangy barbecue sauce. I was well into my third sandwich... when the owner of the place came out and asked how I liked the cougar meat. ...When I left the bar, the man called after me to announce a slogan that he'd just thought of: "Rock Creek Lodge: Balls in the fall, pussy in the spring!

While I was heading into the woods in order to put fur coats into stores, they were heading into the woods to put food on their plates. It was an utterly simple equation. For them, the value of an animal was fixed. It did not change according to markets and trends. A 110-pound deer provided about thirty thousand calories of energy and five thousand grams of protein. Of course, that deer has a potent spiritual significance as well, but that potency was supported by the universal usefulness of its flesh. We need to eat to survive. We need to kill to eat.

Anthropologists have always debated the forces that drove nomadic hunters to push themselves around the world... Imagine that you’re a hunter moving down the coastlines of Alaska and British Columbia, the first person to ever set foot on that land. …You come to the edge of a hundreds-of-feet-tall glacier that terminates at the ocean in a sheer cliff that’s calving house-sized chunks of ice. You have two options: one, turn back and make your home at the last place along your route that looked like a suitable habitat; or two, build a skin boat, load up your family, and paddle southward, trusting that there’s another side to the glacier. For thousands of years, this continent belonged to those people with the tenacity and curiosity to choose option number two.

Twentysomething years later, I no longer hunt over bait at all. My reasons for this are not based entirely on ethics. Instead I am not interested in using artificial bait becsuse I am not interested in hunting animals that are doing artificial things. To go out and find a deer by solving the riddle of its natural patterns is far more enticing to me than finding a deer by interrupting those patterns. Baiting is not, in my opinion, a type of hunting that fosters an intelligent understanding of animals. But if you enjoy it, go ahead.

took them everywhere, even to drive-in movies. While their favorite foods were marshmallows, Mountain Dew, and venison jerky, they were also big fans of live seafood. We used to fill a kiddie pool with a few inches of water and then populate it with crayfish and chubs that we netted from our lake. Watching the raccoons chase around their dinner in the water was better entertainment than anything you’d find on TV. But the problem with raccoon ownership is that the animals begin to go wild and crazy when they’re around seven months old. Critter got so territorial and aggressive that he’d attack you whenever you brought him a marshmallow. He somehow mistook the gesture of offering the treat as an attempt to steal it. He got to be so dangerous to be around that I had to drive him way back into the woods to release him into the wild. Some weeks later a buddy of mine pulled up in his truck and said he found my raccoon. When he opened the door, out rushed a raccoon that was certainly not Critter. The animal ran across the driveway, bit my dad on the leg, and then scurried up a tree. We then had to get a .22 and kill the raccoon in order to check it for rabies. Critter was never seen again, and we came to blame his maleness for his bad attitude. That’s why we got both a male and a female the second time

When I’m not hunting, I always think that I like hunting because it puts you into risky situations that make you feel especially alive. But when I am hunting, I’m tempted to dislike hunting for the exact same reasons.

In December 1860, a force of Texas Rangers and American cavalry ransacked a Comanche camp that contained more than seven and a half tons of dried meat. At the time, there were only about fifteen people in the camp.