new.orangutang,
i donāt mean to belittle your concerns about breaking out of your accustomed ways. you donāt see me hunting squirrels at this point, either.
but someone kills the meat at the supermarket. and any ācivilizedā person who saw how it happened, and how that animal lived her life. . . :ā( :ā( :ā(
well, that civilized person might see hunting wild meat in a new light.
Starfish, your idea is brilliant! Me & my friend will definately do that this summer, in addition to skinning and butchering snakes.
As for the posts surrounding the ātabooā of taking a life, thatās never been such an issue for me. I just get physically nauseous at the sight of blood and innards. Even when I bleed I can hardly stand to look at it. However, I have some friends for which that is an issue, so I will definately take those words to heart if they come to me with those concerns. Thanks guys!
@new.orangutan: if you have a good relationship with your uncle, why not go hunting with him?
Just a few words of encouragement here. For me, going out and hunting a deer, bringing it home and being able to take care of all the skinning butchering, cutting and wrapping and then being able to serve beautiful juicy roasts to my family and friends is one of the coolest things I do. When that all comes together I feel more a part of the big scheme of things than just about any other time. I love being able to do that and I am so grateful to the deer and all the spirits for allowing me the privilege of taking part in that. One of my favorite times each year is hunting season.
Cutting meat with family and friends is such a great thing to do. I have a friend that I have hunted with for several years now. Heās 73. He raises beef for his living and does slaughtering for others. He also cuts hay for a few farmers. We get together and cut our deer at his place. He and I cut, his wife wraps, we have a great time and we just split whatever meat we cut between us.
Another old guy that I know used to cut wild game for hunters. I did the skinning for him and used to help him cut sometimes. Heās about 75 now, we used to have a lot of fun at his shop that he had behind his house. Hunters would come in at all hours with their deer or elk or moose. When they did we would all stop and help them bring the animal in. Then Bob would get out the whiskey (Iād have a coke cause I donāt drink alcohol) and weād listen to the story of the hunt. Like hunters have probably done with each other for thousands of years.
It would be quite a sight sometimes to come in and see a dozen deer and maybe an elk or a moose hanging there ready to be skinned. A lot of work for me but it was beautiful too. To me it represented the abundance of what creation provides for us and how some of us still participate in that harvest.
Hunting is a beautiful thing.
Thank you, yarrow dreamer, timeless and heyvictor for your support.
Yarrow dreamer, what I meant by the ācivilized people donāt kill animalsā is that they donāt do it as part of their everyday activity. Sure they may do it as a job, though even that segment is reltively small and different, but that job stops when they go home. They donāt carry that on into their everyday lives - it is just a way of making money, and so it is different, it is not even really about killing the animals, it is just about doing a job. At least that is my sense, are your feelings different?
I totally agree that hunting is better for all involved, but it is so much harder, and I mean that not physically or at least not just physically. For me at least, I would have to break out of the everything is an object mindset, which I have done mostly, but itās still there, hanging around subconciously, and I fear that if I go into hunting with that mindset it will be worse in soem ways than getting meat from the supermarket. Maybe that is just fear, I donāt know.
Thanks for the stories of hunting heyvictor, I understand the value and beuty of it, I think, as much as an āoutsiderā can.
Timeless, I feel like, I donāt know, thatās a good question. I justā¦ hmmmā¦ oh, shaca.
heyvictor,
Just a few words of encouragement here. For me, going out and hunting a deer, bringing it home and being able to take care of all the skinning butchering, cutting and wrapping and then being able to serve beautiful juicy roasts to my family and friends is one of the coolest things I do. When that all comes together I feel more a part of the big scheme of things than just about any other time. I love being able to do that and I am so grateful to the deer and all the spirits for allowing me the privilege of taking part in that. One of my favorite times each year is hunting season.
As a man who has hunted whitetail deer in Wisconsin (Deer hunting is a huge tradition up here) for over twenty years now, what you said in the above quote and the rest of your post really resonated with me. Thank you for saying it.
Two years ago I harvested a whitetail doe with my rifle right before dark. I remember dragging her up over the crick bank and looking at the starlit sky saying to myself this is what itās all about. This is heaven. About a hour later my dad and brother-n-law stopped by and we cut her up. Iāve always enjoyed the cutting up the deer just as much as the hunt. I have known a few hunters who donāt.
Also, some of my fondest memories have been cutting up deer with my two grandfathers, uncles, cousins, and father. I can only imagine how magical it must have been for indigenous cultures with authentic kinship bonds.
Iām really thankful the deer are still on this journey with us. Here is an article by Richard Nelson talking about the importance of the hunt and the tradition in Wisconsin.
http://wnrmag.com/stories/1998/dec98/nelson.htm
take care,
Curt
[quote=āheyvictor, post:3, topic:778ā]I think you ridea of starting with small creatures and building up might be a good way.
Basically the more you do it the more you get comfortable with it.[/quote]
Iām in agreement. Iāve been observing my dad fillet fish since I was 5 years old. When I filleted my first walleye I felt absolutely no queasiness, in fact it was more like an enormous sense of accomplishment mixed in with excitement about the challenge. This week, I learned how to skin a rabbit from TrollSplinter and I was just fine. He was surprised that I didnāt feel the slightest bit icky about my first rabbit. My response was, āWell, you know, fish. Itās just like a fish.ā
that picture is fucking sweet.
I found this out yesterday, and thought Iād share. If you ever have the chance to skin a weasel, remember that they REALLY smell. Iād somewhat suspected it would, since Iād read that weasels often leave a skunk-like scent.
SunflowersFTW, the first thing I killed was a rabbit, my brother Devan wanted to skin it so I got lucky and got to watch instead of do. The smell was new to me and hard to handle (I wore a bandana with essential oil over my face! How things have changed. :)) but my brothers curiosity was infectious. We could move the limbs and watch the tendons and muscles āworkā, see the shit in the intestines and the full little bladder, pull out the lungs and see where the arrow had pierced through. It was beautiful and intimate. The guts on old road kill still get me a bit queesy, but my curiosity hasnāt gone away. Maybe if you treat butchering as learning/play time the queesyness can be overcome? Good luck finding what works for you.
Wow. I wonder if the urge to connect with an animalās body for survival and fulfillment is the same urge that motivates dissection in science. I remember doing a dissection class in 6th grade and I was not queasy, it could have been some ancestral memories poking through my subconscious.
Good pictures of a young man skinning a racoon.
<<Maybe if you treat butchering as learning/play time the queesyness can be overcome? Good luck finding what works for you.>>
Hey, thatās not a bad idea. Iāve been trying to acquaint myself with anatomy and physiology lately, thatās a helpful way to look at it.
"Iāve been trying to acquaint myself with anatomy and physiology lately, thatās a helpful way to look at it. "
Everything I know about anatomy and physiology I learned from cutting up dead animals.
I used to skin bears for the game wardens when they killed bears that came to town. I had to turn in the gall bladder in order to prove that I didnāt sell it for Chinese medicine.
This was a major bummer because there was no other reason for me to gut them just to get the skin off. Consequently I got pretty good at knowing just where to make a small cut so I could remove the gall bladder without having to completely gut the bear.
I saved the meat from the fresh ones but often the bear had been in the back of the game wardens truck all afternoon by the time it got to my house.
After one season of doing that I quit. It was too wierd. I had to skin a lot of bears and they are too much like people when you get the skin off. Iāve eaten them and rendered lots of the fat. Iāve tanned the skins and made rawhide for drums, but I have never killed one. I had a license twice and even had them in my sights but couldnāt pull the trigger on one.
Iām trying to explain that to this one that keeps visiting my place lately. Iāve had three visits today! It drags out salted deer hides and licks all the salt off. So given enough time it drags out a lot of hides. I have a bunch that are just in plastic barrels so they are a piece of cake for a bear to get into.
If it was fall and the bear was fat I might reconsider my position on killing bears.
whoa. that made me shiver.
how so?
When you skin a bear, you can see that the front legs bend the same way our arms do and the lower legs look like a very muscular manās forearm. The front paws look very much like human hands.
The back legs bend like our legs and the back feet look like a human foot.
Itās very eery to look at.
Iām trying to figure out my bear situation here right now. This is really the first time I have had a bear that persistently keeps coming back and getting into my stuff. I have a big brown one that comes through here every spring but only stays about a week and moves on. Iāve learned to put up with that because it doesnāt last long and really doesnāt do much damage.
This is a smaller black one and it seems to have set up house here.
I came to the conclusion today that there is a message here for me and when I get it, the bear and I will be able to move past this annoying relationship that we have now. Up until now itās just been a mild inconvenience but it took a very nice large hide this morning that I had already done quite a bit of work on, so it seems to be demanding some kind of acknowlegment from me.
Wow. heyvictor, hearing your bear (and other) stories really helps fill a gap in my personal experiences, living in the city right now and having precious little interaction with wild animals. thank you for sharing them. 
As I become more and more familiar with human anatomy (as a bodyworker and just as a human who moves), I have gotten very curious about comparing animalās experiences in their bodies to oursālike how it feels to move their limbs, how their particular strengths (shorter/longer/stronger/differently shaped bones & muscles) help them do what they need to do. We mammals all have more or less the same equipment, just expressed differently for our place in the world.
I had a really interesting conversation recently about seals and their hip bones and flipper-legs and fantastic fur, compared to how we swim and keep ourselves warm (I recently learned that seals have WAY more blood volume than we do, as part of their amazing warm-blooded-in-arctic-waters magic).
Iāve slowly continued to read a book, The Gift of the Whale by Bill Hess, in which some northern native folks who have traditionally lived very close to the whales (bowhead and beluga) related their stories of shamanic journeying under the water with the whales, to understand the whalesā lives and needs. Part of the journey involved āputting on the whale parkaā, or crawling into their skin.
Bears and humans have such an overlap of their āplace in the worldā, I donāt feel too surprised to hear what you say about our bodies under āthe bear parkaā and our skins.
What if we could āput on the bear parkaā for a while and see how it feels. . .
Just a side note about bars.
My wife and I saw three grizzlies yesterday! Appeared to be a mother and two pretty mature cubs. We were on our way to our daughters house and they crossed the road in front of us.
[quote=āyarrow dreamer, post:27, topic:778ā]Bears and humans have such an overlap of their āplace in the worldā, I donāt feel too surprised to hear what you say about our bodies under āthe bear parkaā and our skins.
What if we could āput on the bear parkaā for a while and see how it feels. . .[/quote]
Ha, that reminds me of one of my favorite novels, āThe Hotel New Hampshireā by John Irving. One of the characters wears a bear suit made from a real bear. When sheās in the suit (which is most of the time), she moves and acts like a bear.
