Born Bloodthirsty

When I was seven, I learned how to kill.

I enjoyed learning, but I wouldn’t call myself bloodthirsty.

I’m not sure if anyone has ever asked me whether I enjoy hunting. Which is interesting, because I have both claimed to do it because I enjoy it, and I’ve emphasized that I do it because it’s practical and a morally superior option to buying meat. The answer was always dependent on my crowd; on the assumptions that I’d assumed they’d already made.

I have hunted once since I moved to Durham in eighth grade. It was youth weekend, and I broke the law. I killed two turkeys with one shot. The limit is one per person. My target had been between trees, and the cloud of pellets went through its head and into the heart of a turkey behind it.

There are so many words to describe the feelings that arose within me: revulsed, nauseated, sad. But I think what made it worse was that I felt like I had disappointed people – like my dad – who take so much pride and respect in what they do when hunting. Following the limits, the regulations, and a moral and ethical obligation which befall you when taking a life.

There is an MOR article from years ago by George Philbrick titled Why I Hunt. In it, he describes a stereotype that many hunters are faced with. “Our societal image of a hunter has a neck that is roasted red, hands that are always filled with guns and Budweiser, and eyes that smolder with a distaste for life.” Philbrick wrote.

In that moment, my neck was flushed only from embarrassment, my eyes probably reflected more distaste for myself than for any of the life around me, and my hands held no beer. And yet, in my mind I had become the stereotypical hunter Philbrick so perfectly illustrated. It’s part of the reason that by this point, I’d decided my hands had held a gun for the last time, too. I would not let that stereotype become me.

All of my morals were brought into question because of this single incident. It led me to wonder not why I hunt, but whether I should hunt. Was it too late for me to redeem myself? In that moment, the solution was to unlearn the skill that had led me down this path.

The closest thing I could get to unlearning was forgetting, and forgetting is easier when you move to a new town, and that town isn’t full of the people you are trying to unbecome. Unlearning was made easier because I was now in a place full of people who disliked people “like me” just as much as I disliked myself.

I learned from my dad. I still remember the first time I went out with the intention of killing. It was in the back woods of a house down the street from us. It was youth weekend for turkeys, and I went with my older sister, Zoe. I laid in a sleeping bag on the cold ground of a pop-up plywood box covered in leaves. I slept, and they sat and watched, silently, for the birds.

I woke up when the shotgun shell hit me on the head. When we went out to track the bird down, the gaggle had scattered, squabbling loudly. She might have been the one to shoot, but this was our bird. We learned how to register it, the purpose of youth weekend, and the rules of the hunt. Prior to going, we had practiced in a shooting range.

The shooting range was a place you could run into someone from school. The store where we registered the bird was owned and run by our neighbors. Pictures of my friends and their cousins, brothers, and moms were all pinned to an old bulletin board above the register inside. They were all holding deer, fish, birds, and a variety of other animals. It was almost engrained in the culture of this little town. I would go as far as calling it a symbol of status.

Day two of youth weekend was my turn.

I’ve never admitted this aloud before, but I didn’t want to kill a turkey. I wanted to try, I wanted to be there with my dad and older sister, but to be utterly honest, I didn’t want to be responsible for death.

The kickback from the gun knocked me off the stool, into my dad. When we looked for the animal, finding only feathers and blood, I was relieved. He made us search for hours. Afterall, I’d hit it. Wherever the animal was, it probably suffered, and then died. I was content knowing it could’ve lived.

What this says about my morals, I’m not quite sure. Did it even matter whether I was the person killing those animals and bringing them home if I was eating their meat, regardless?

I’ve hunted deer, but I’ve never harvested one. Growing up in elementary school, when I tried to donate to food drives using the cans and boxed pasta from our pantry, I was scolded if I took more than two. As a kid, there were not many times I remember feeling rich. But when my dad got a deer? My lunch box spilled gold.

Bringing venison – otherwise referred to as deer jerky – made me a lunch table commodity. And that’s exactly what I did; I brought entire gallon bags of jerky to share. My dad packed them for me. He must’ve seen the weight it added to my backpack. Maybe I stood a little taller to carry it. Our freezer was full, and it fed us through the winter when he couldn’t hunt, or when prices of plastic and Styrofoam wrapped meat skyrocketed.

Many people where I lived did the same thing. When I was around eleven, I remember a dead deer hanging in our shed while my dad helped some family friends butcher it. People here were carnivores. What seemed to be forgotten when I moved to Durham, was that people here are also carnivorous.

It was forgotten, because following any version of the words “I hunt” was an almost immediate shift in the tone of the conversation. Sometimes laughter, and other times distaste. Often, it was a joke. Hunting isn’t something people wanted to perceive as a part of me, because it didn’t fit. And how could I blame them or want to do anything more than play along with the jokes, when I didn’t want to perceive it as a part of myself anymore, either?

Afterall, I felt like I had become a part of the problem. I was now part of the reason people could assume hunters have little respect for life, when in fact, I knew many that have plenty.

In reality, I think that this is something I had forgotten about myself. I think, as an Oyster River community – and possibly as a community much larger than that – we have forgotten to allow people to be more than a politically associated stereotype, and to do that without shame. A large piece of my shame was self-inspired. But it was inspired because I wanted to meet an expected perception of myself that didn’t exist whilst also being a hunter.

I didn’t like talking about it. If I mentioned hunting in a conversation where the topic had surfaced it was usually by mentioning that, “oh, yeah, my dad hunts.” Do I enjoy hunting? I’m not sure. Did I enjoy being able to share something like that with my dad when I was younger, when it was with a man who I sometimes felt like I otherwise shared very little with? Yes.

So, if I knew why I hunted from the very beginning, sitting on that hard wood ground, against bark that stuck into my back, in cold wood boxes that smelled like dirt, and on three-legged stools that made sitting painful, why didn’t I justify it with the truth?

The truth was that I hunted because I had an immense amount of respect for my dad, and the way that he hunted with respect. I hunted because I enjoy learning. I hunted because it is a skill different from so many others that we learn in today’s world.

In the world I grew up in, I allowed people to perceive me as a hunter who enjoyed the hunt as much as they did, when in fact, I did not. And I allowed the world I joined when I was 13 to perceive me as someone who was lucky enough to leave a world where hunting was expected of her, and the only reason she participated. Not because she was a hunter, or liked it, or had any type of respect for the sport. Both of which are stories I wrote for myself that are untrue.

Instead, maybe I should have allowed myself to exist outside of those perceptions; including my own. I have hunted, and I am a hunter. Will I ever hunt again? I don’t know. However, I do know that, active hunter or not, being a hunter is not synonymous with being a bad person.

That is not to speak for all hunters. There are people, like my dad, who truly enjoy the sport in ways I do not, and probably never will. And I don’t think there is anything wrong with that. Then, there are people who truly fulfill the stereotype. Which, with some exceptions, there can also be nothing wrong with. There are also people – as there are in every part of life – who hunt and lack strong morals.

But what is wrong, is preventing the stereotype from evolving, because those – like myself – who don’t fit it, feel so ashamed someone might start putting that imaginary Budweiser and gun in their hand, they don’t allow themselves to exist beyond it.

Today, I can exist beyond the stereotypes of hunters that I projected onto myself, and that, perhaps, were also projected onto me by others. Can you allow me to exist in that space as well? If it’s needed, can you allow yourself to exist in that space? Because I speak this truth as its living proof of existence: I may have killed, but that does not mean I was born bloodthirsty.

– Mia Boyd