Is hunting on the brink of extinction? Is that a good or a bad thing?
In this episode, we delve into the intricate connection between the art of hunting and our profound relationship with the natural world. Our is guest Bruce McGlenn, Founder and Lead Instructor of Human Nature Hunting—a program that, as Bruces describes it, is fundamentally and foremost about helping people reconnect or strengthen their connection to nature through hunting.
By delving into the immersive process of the hunt, we uncover the journey's transformative impact, from meticulous planning to profound reconnection with the environment.
Bruce sheds light on the intersections between veganism and hunting, emphasizing the shared commitment to minimizing animal suffering and aversion to conventional factory farming. The episode culminates with a reflection on the spiritual significance of acknowledging the sacrifice inherent in our sustenance, prompting listeners to contemplate their role within the delicate balance of nature.
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Resources
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold
Wolf Reintroduction in Yosemite
S2E53: Paul Kingsnorth on the shared roots of climate crisis, transhumanism, & immortality
S2E64: How to Be Animal: a guide for confused humans—w/ Melanie Challenger, author
Here is the quote from Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet:
Then an old man, a keeper of an inn, said,
Speak to us of Eating and Drinking.
And he said:
Would that you could live on the fragrance of the earth, and like an air
plant be sustained by the light.
But since you must kill to eat, and rob the newly born of its mother’s milk to
quench your thirst, let it then be an act of worship,
And let your board stand an altar on which the pure and the innocent of
forest and plain are sacrificed for that which is purer and still more innocent
in man.
When you kill a beast say to him in your heart,
“By the same power that slays you, I too am slain; and I too shall be consumed.
For the law that delivered you into my hand shall deliver me into a mightier
hand.
Your blood and my blood is naught but the sap that feeds the tree of heaven.”
And when you crush an apple with your teeth, say to it in your heart,
“Your seeds shall live in my body,
And the buds of your tomorrow shall blossom in my heart,
And your fragrance shall be my breath,
And together we shall rejoice through all the seasons.”
And in the autumn, when you gather the grapes of your vineyards for the
winepress, say in your heart,
“I too am a vineyard, and my fruit shall be gathered for the winepress,
And like new wine I shall be kept in eternal vessels.”
And in winter, when you draw the wine, let there be in your heart a song
for each cup;
And let there be in the song a remembrance for the autumn days, and for
the vineyard, and for the winepress.
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change.
Ross Kenyon: Before today’s episode, I wanted to read a quote that Bruce McLean, our guest for today, read at the beginning of the camp that I went to that we discuss in this episode. It’s from Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet. And I thought it was beautiful and really set the tone well for what we were trying to do and what we’re going to talk about today. So this is from Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet. Then an old man, a keeper of an inn said, Speak to us of eating and drinking. And he said, Would that you could live on the fragrance of the earth, and like an air plant be sustained by the light.
But since you must kill to eat, and rob the newly born of its mother’s He says, Psalm 119. And when you crush an apple I hope you enjoy the show. Here it is. Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast with Nori. I’m Ross Kenyon, I’m one of the co-founders of Nori, and I’m also the director of creative and marketing here. Today I have with me Bruce McLenn, founder and lead instructor of Human Nature Hunting. I recently drove out to Eastern Washington. I know this is a little bit of an unusual show.
Bruce, I think it took a fair amount of sniffing me out to make sure this was legit. Actually, I don’t know. I think maybe it was just an unusual offer that came your way, but I appreciate your interest in doing this.
Bruce McGlenn: Oh, thanks, Ross. I appreciate it, too. And it’s not that unusual. You know, there’s so much of this that’s connected. It’s not maybe the most usual topic that you’re used to, but I think it’s going to be interesting to dig into it.
Ross Kenyon: I think so, too. Why do you think there is such a gap here? People who care about climate change and people who hunt, I think, often have more overlap than maybe they think that they do. I thought the students who came, so I was there observing, I was not actually a student, but the students who came struck me as very thoughtful. They were there for reverential and honorable reasons. I didn’t pick up a lot of rah-rah, kill them all, who cares about the animals. It seemed to be a much more significant kind of event.
How do you frame hunting? Why did it feel reverent to attend a workshop like this?
Bruce McGlenn: Well, I hear what you’re saying. I think hunting gets a bad rap a lot because there are people out there that call themselves hunters and are doing things like you described and they kind of get the headlines and the news. But I think and I hope that’s a pretty small sector of the hunting population. Myself and a lot of folks I know that hunt do it for reasons primarily to Reconnect to our environment and nature and our food systems and cycles of life and death and just to be closer to the planet in a lot of ways.
And that’s how we frame our program. It’s not, I mean, it is a program on hunting, but fundamentally and foremost, it’s how do we help people reconnect or strengthen their connection to nature through hunting? Hunting, I think, is such a unique opportunity that we have in this day and age still to really dig into what it means to be part of this ecosystem, to be part of the earth system as a participant in the life and death drama that has been playing out for millions of years or hundreds of thousands of years at least and In a way, it’s tapping back into that ancient experience and wisdom and knowledge.
I think that’s the real focus here. We just happen to find ourselves in a time of history that we’re going through a lot of changes. In some ways, we’ve lost connection, lost touch as a general population with Hunting and what that meant for our survival and our connection to the land. So it’s just a way of looking at that component and how do we get back to that deep connection to the land. And in the end, I think a lot of what conservation stems from is how well connected we are To the thing we’re trying to conserve or preserve or protect.
And I think with the right approach and the right mindset, hunting has a profound way of connecting people to the environment and, you know, wildlife and the food that we eat and just kind of cements that connection to the bigger picture.
Ross Kenyon: I think most people who care about climate change, I think many of them probably are living in cities. I imagine they have some forms of outdoor recreation that they’re passionate about, likely something like hiking. And maybe they garden, maybe they grow vegetables or fruit. And that’s the way that they’re involved in the life cycle. But I think for many people, flesh of any kind is something that is bought in the store. And that kind of abstraction where it’s effectively as a piece of a body has been disembodied. It has been removed from the context from being a living being.
And I think it makes it much easier to take for granted or to forget because the fruit is offering itself to you voluntarily, right? It wants you to spread its seeds, vegetables, not really for the most part. And meat is definitely not like that. But when you just buy it in the store, I think it’s easy to take it for granted. One of the things I really respect about hunting and hunters, and I did several hunting trips as a kid, is this internalization of the cost of eating meat. I think for me, every time I’ve gone hunting, it’s always been a Really emotional and somber experience.
And I think it’s good that meat should feel like that. You are taking a life and being connected to it in that way, I think makes you appreciate it and re-understand the cycles of life and death that all life depends upon of eating other things that in many cases do not wish to be eaten. I think that’s humbling and there’s almost a cosmic significance to it. I don’t want to be grandiose about it, but do you connect with what I’m saying?
Bruce McGlenn: Yeah, and I think a lot of folks that come to the program do too. It’s one of the first things. I mean, the program you attended was more of an advanced course where we focused on working with animals. Our typical course is a four-day course, and it covers the whole spectrum of hunting. But one of the things we get into fairly quickly Dealing with an animal, dispatching an animal, field dressing it, skinning it, butchering it, breaking it down into bite-sized pieces. And at first, people, they’re not sure what they signed up for, and they’re not sure if they really want to experience all of it or witness or observe it.
But then the more they think about it, it’s like, yeah, this is... This is not going to be easy, but it’s what I signed up for and I feel like it’s important. And by the time we work through the whole process and are sampling the tenderloins as an appetizer before the next meal, they They seem to have a much different perspective on the whole thing and saying, you know, this is so crazy how, I mean, first, how far removed we are from this. And then second, like this thing was a, you know, it was an animal a matter of hours ago.
And now it looks like food that you buy in the store. And they start to put these pieces together. Like this is, this is what we’re buying, but it’s, you know, it’s all wrapped up and some people call it, uh, Have referred to it as hiring a hitman to kill and wrap their meat. And I think by taking part in that whole process, at least for me, I become much more appreciative and respectful of that animal where that food came from. I want to treat it with... You know, with as much respect and take care of it as much as I can.
And I don’t want to waste any of it.
Ross Kenyon: Has anyone ever left one of your programs and committed or recommitted to vegetarianism?
Bruce McGlenn: Not that I know of directly, but people say, and I’m I’m in a similar boat in that they say I’m basically going to be a vegetarian unless I can hunt and gather my meat protein. Our family doesn’t buy much meat at all. We’re able to get enough deer, elk, and salmon. Primarily to keep the freezers full. And we’ve got other family members that hunt and fish. So on a lean year, we might be able to lean on somebody. And then on a good year, we can share it and not have to purchase meat.
I mean, the occasional package of bacon, maybe. But I’ve had vegetarians tell me that’s really a spice rather than a meat.
Ross Kenyon: I respect that a lot. Would you agree with the statement that people should be hunters or vegan, but not as much in between those two?
Bruce McGlenn: Well, it’s interesting thinking about the two, because as I understand it, vegan, vegetarianism, some of their A couple of their main values, as I understand it, are one, not to exploit animals and two, minimize suffering. And those are basically the same for hunting because it’s illegal to sell wild game. You cannot exploit it. And most hunters want to minimize suffering of animals, you know, in the process of hunting one and that’s a whole other conversation. I mean, what is suffering and who’s aware of it? And we could go down several rabbit holes about what happens when a pack of wolves takes down an elk and it’s a slow, slow death.
And, you know, is that, is there suffering? Is that? Right or wrong, I don’t, you know, it’s neither. It’s just, it’s the way it’s been happening on this planet before we came along. And I think we were part of that process. And it’s not until recently that we’ve extracted ourselves from that process. And in doing so, we could be giving up something pretty critical in terms of our connection to the land. Although Leopold, who was a, Who was a conservationist and early in his career was a forester. He was I think had a task to shoot wolves because they figured wolves were bad for the ecosystem.
And he shot one and realized that he was making a mistake. And as he watched this thing die and he, he sort of started looking at things from a bigger, broader perspective. And he talked about intelligent tinkering being, uh, One of the first steps to take care of and that, you know, if something, if a system is good, all parts of the system must contribute to that goodness. And in a way, hunting has been part of the system for a long time and with an intelligent tinkering, you don’t just pull a part out and toss it because you don’t understand it because it’s part of the whole, even if you don’t understand how it fits in.
And I think hunting can be like that and that we’ve pulled it out and we’ve almost thrown it away. I mean, hunting is on the brink of extinction in a way. A lot of people arguing against it, very few people actually hunting But in doing so and pulling that piece out and throwing it away, what are we missing? What are we losing in part of the bigger equation that we may not understand? I mean, that relationship to the land, to the animals, to the food itself, That we’ve cultivated over hundreds of thousands of years, all of a sudden, you know, in the blink of an eye in geologic time here has been kind of pulled out and tossed aside.
So I think that’s important to keep in mind, like how long, I don’t know the history of veganism and vegetarianism and how long, how far back that goes. But It’s a, you know, that’s a complicated question. And I think, I think there are merits for pursuing vegetarianism and veganism if the alternative is supporting the commercial meat industry. But if you have the, if you have the chance to hunt your own food, we’ve had several Proclaimed vegans that have come to our courses because they want that connection. They want that kind of opportunity to eat meat.
They don’t want to support the commercial meat industry and the suffering and exploitation that happens in that. So I’m not sure if I’m answering your question directly, but... I think there’s a lot of similarities when we get right down to it. And I suppose like a lot of things, it just depends on what the intention is behind it.
Ross Kenyon: I think that’s a good way to thread the needle. I think people pretty strongly Agree that factory farming is not really in the consumer’s interest. It’s great at producing calories, but I’m not sure that the nutritional quality is as good as something that is living in nature. Certainly their suffering is so much greater. I think there’s good reasons to care about that. I mean, there is middle ground too. We’ve had Beast and Cleaver, Kevin Smith on the podcast before and supporting animals that lived healthy, happy lives. And the line is always that they’ve had one bad day, the animal, the last day.
You can also compare this to Temple Grandin, right? Trying to reform commercial meat and saying that the taste of meat is ruined by stress, especially on that last day. And that even for commercial meat producers, they are also concerned with quality and not wanting to ruin meat by stress and all the hormones that flood the body in moments of extreme crisis. Well, it’s honorable to go out and harvest your own meat. Every time I’ve hunted pavolina and deer and quail, but standing over an animal that’s dying that you have put in that position is, it’s sad.
I wish I had a nicer word for sad. It’s just, there’s something about it that it’s old. It’s been done forever and it is not a laughing matter and it’s not something to be insincere about. I think as the process goes on and the harvesting has begun, it becomes less of a subject and more of an object at that point. Maybe you get used to that at some point, Bruce, and you’ve hacked that or maybe it deeply affects you. I’m not sure, but I’m not sure everyone’s capable of that or is willing, but I think it’s a good standard to strive for if nothing else.
Bruce McGlenn: You mean just the awareness of the emotional side and the sadness per se?
Ross Kenyon: I think so. I don’t think you have to be maudlin about it or overdo it. But I think certainly when people are sitting down to eat a steak dinner or a hamburger, they’re not feeling any somberness or probably even thinking about it, even if they ostensibly care about where their meat comes from. But do you still feel those feelings?
Bruce McGlenn: Oh, yeah. I mean, there’s As I get into the hunt and it gets close to taking a shot at something that’s just the emotions and the sensations are really difficult to describe. And then there’s a whole flood of emotions that come afterwards after a kill. There’s a sense of relief that he did it right and a sense of sadness and a sense of Gratitude that you’re going to have food for another day. There’s got to be, it probably taps into some survival cord deep inside of us that today we’re not limited to what we can go out and hunt and gather on the land.
But it wasn’t that long ago that if we weren’t successful, we went hungry and it’s hard to deny the fact that we’re all sitting here today because our ancestors were successful hunters and gatherers. If they weren’t, you know, they didn’t gather, they didn’t get enough food to survive and pass on their genes. And I’m also curious, when you had the javelina hunt, when you shot that javelina, did you have a chance to eat it? And what was your experience with that?
Ross Kenyon: I found it actually fairly traumatic because it was on a family friend of ours. They leased land in Texas as so much hunting happens in Texas through leases like that. It actually may have been wild pigs and not specifically javelina. I’m trying to go back in my memory. It’s been nearly 20 years at this point, but they had actually been trapped. So it was actually less of a hunt. Much of the hunting there was deer stand oriented and not tracking and wildland kind of movement. But I think it was more of a, okay, they are captured.
They destroy this land. They’re an invasive species. We’re going to turn them into pork chops and bacon. But... Yeah, I remember just sobbing and especially just the execution element of it where they’re no longer a free ranging animal that is destroying the land, but it’s almost just a being that needs to be dispatched. But it’s to bring up that memory, too, because it doesn’t feel necessarily fair in that way either, but it maybe still had to be done.
Bruce McGlenn: Well, this is, this is interesting. I think it’s very important to make a distinction between that and hunting. Um, you know, for our hunting courses, we are running them outside the hunting season and we’re not hunting. We’re using farm raised animals and, and trying to dispatch them in a, as, as humane a way as possible, uh, just so we have the opportunity to work with real animals. Um, And we talk about this in depth, like this is not a hunt. This is not hunting. This is more like farming. And the difference between that and a hunt is significant.
It’s night and day. I mean, the hunt, the kill during a hunt is a very small part of it, but the hunt can be Hours, days, weeks, or even years long. And there’s part of the planning and prep that goes into it. There’s the educational component, getting ready. And then there’s getting out there and studying the landscape and understanding the landscape, the animals, animals’ patterns, watching the weather, understanding ourselves and how we navigate in this environment. And getting away from the roads and the trails and having the freedom to go anywhere I want to when I’m out there on a hunt.
We talk about a hunt being every step is an adventure, every step is a decision. And after a few days of that, my intuition It’s much more loud and clear along with my senses. And they just get tuned up. I start to reconnect to the landscape and really tune in. And to me, that is the hunt. That’s the experience of the hunt. And Within those experiences, I’ve had many, many close calls, you know, shots that I almost had that maybe I decided not to take or the animal got away before I was able to get a good shot.
And it’s all these experiences that add up to the hunt. It’s the experience of the hunt itself. And then You’ve got the kill, the kill shot, which is also part of that experience, but a very small part of the overall experience in my mind. So I do think it’s important to make that distinction that slaughtering an animal, a confined animal, in my opinion, is not a hunt. A hunt is when you’re out there in the wild and anything can happen from Seeing nothing for several days to getting weathered out and taking shelter somewhere to working hard and back-breaking, leg-aching type work, hiking up and over ridges and mountains and chasing animals and looking for animals, looking for sign, tracking, putting all your senses into it.
And sometimes at the end of the day coming home empty handed and it would be way easier just to go to the store, but it’s that, that experience of the hunt that I think is, is really critical.
Ross Kenyon: I think so too. And I’ve done that as well. I think that is interesting to focus not merely on the killing moment, but on the broader context of that’s actually the part that’s being connected with nature. It’s not just the life and death part, but you also are out there and you’re way more observant than almost anyone else would be in the same environment. You are looking for signs of Animal life, I’m sure you’re being quiet. I’m sure you’re not actually moving a lot at points too, listening, which I think if people are hiking, they may even have music playing.
I hope not. I really hate that on the trails when people do that. Or just chatting, being social. I don’t think there’s a lot of that. You must have moments where the forest goes quiet and you’ll sit there for several minutes trying to figure out, is there a predator nearby? What just happened exactly? Yeah.
Bruce McGlenn: Right. Yeah, definitely. Um, you know, it’s not uncommon to cover six, eight, 10 miles a day, but also there are periods where you’re sitting for a half hour or creeping and, you know, maybe going 20, 30 yards and a half hour trying to get into position or just really moving slowly through the environment, the landscape, because you feel like something’s there and, uh, Going into nature, I want to say a couple things here before I forget. Stepping back just for a second, we were talking about the kill and how emotional that can be.
I wanted to say that When I’m not out in the hunt and I’m thinking about killing something, I have really no interest in doing that. If I have to do it, like slaughtering a farm animal, I try to make the most of it, make the best of it, and respect that animal. But it’s not a fun experience, and it’s not really something I want to do if I don’t have to do it. However, when I’m out in the hunt and engaged in the hunt, I have a totally different relationship with that cycle of life and death.
And it just, it seems to flow, it seems to be part of the process more in that way. It’s not that I don’t still take it seriously, but there’s a shift when I get into the hunt that this is kind of a, you know, this is a little bit of a survival Approach here that I’m going out in the woods with the intention of killing an animal so I can bring it back and eat it and feed my family and my community and we can survive another day. And if you’re living in the northern latitudes like we are, we don’t get a lot of vegetables year round and fruits.
And so in a way, Hunting animals, animals have the ability to convert cellulose into muscle, you know, grass. They eat grass and turn that into their muscle. And we don’t have the ability to eat grass. And grass basically is capturing solar energy. And so it’s just parts of the whole system that are changing form and changing. We’re ultimately all powered by the sun and it just happens to be that animals in this climate provide a really convenient and great way to preserve food in the live form until it’s needed to be eaten.
And I think another Aspect of this, you mentioned hiking and backpacking, which I’ve done a lot of growing up and skiing and I enjoy those things and they’re quite different. I mean, a lot of times backpacking, you’ve got a destination in mind and you’re going in there to set up camp and you got a mission and you’re, I mean, I’m out there observing, taking in the But I’m moving through it very differently. I’m just kind of trudging down a trail, trying to get to one spot. And that’s very different in hunting where you might have a destination, but there’s no trail per se.
And you’re wandering around and you find one thing and it makes you turn this way and you find another thing and it makes you turn that way. And pretty soon you’re 180 degrees off of where you plan to go. And I’ve heard hunting, you know, going into nature is like throwing a Pebble in a calm pool and your presence makes a splash and those ripples go out and concentric rings sort of alarming the general area of your arrival. But if you stay quiet and still long enough, those rings settle down and calm down.
And things kind of go back to normal a little bit. And it’s said that at that point, the animals, the wildlife have either forgotten you or accepted you. And that’s when the real hunting begins. And that’s always stuck with me. You can trudge out into the woods and you kind of make that big splash. But if you stay with it and tune in long enough, you start to become more part of the ecosystem. As you’re mentioning earlier, I mean, you really, really paying attention, slowing down, very quiet and that’s just not something that we do very often in this day and age.
And it’s not something that’s promoted so much in our fast-paced lives. In some ways, I think it’s quite therapeutic to do that, to get into the hunt. And it’s something I look forward to every year. It sort of helps me reset and remember where my roots are And how I’m connected to the land. And ultimately, it gets back to the topic of conservation. Because I feel like when I go through all this, I feel like I am the land. And I’m so connected to it. I can see myself in it.
And at that point, I want to be the best steward that I possibly can for that land and that ecosystem, because I see it as all the same. You know, I’m taking care of the land, I’m taking care of myself. And it’s, I think, you know, we’ve, for whatever reason, we’ve created that disconnect in our lives fairly recently. And maybe it goes back to the, you know, the Start of the farming and agricultural systems that cropped up five or 10,000 years ago. And that could be a whole nother conversation. But we’ve become disconnected to a lot of these things.
And so once that happens, we don’t care so much. I don’t think about it as much or care about it as much the things that I really don’t know about or don’t have any connection to and the vice versa. And I’m sure you can You know, imagine that for yourself too. The things that we are aware of, the things that are in our own backyard, we care more about. The things that are happening halfway around the world that we don’t know anything about, you know, we’re not as attuned to. And so in a lot of ways, getting back down to the topic of this conversation, hunting helps me connect to the land and the ecosystem itself.
In such a deep way that I can’t help but be a steward and a conservationist.
Ross Kenyon: I think if you’re able to get to the point where you can say a statement like, I am the land, at least when I am doing this activity, that’s a pretty profound level of connection here. You also tempered it with saying, I feel connected to the land, but at its strongest point, you are the land. And you are enacting its will in some ways too. The conservation element is important, but it has a much more practical bent. We started the conversation with why hunt? Why is it important to be connected?
And that’s because a lot of shows that we do are not merely about the practical effects, but about our relationship with the planet, with industry, with food, with one another. And those conversations, they all tie into climate. It doesn’t just have to be right on the nose climate. But the right on the nose point here is really important that we’ve essentially eliminated or severely curtailed many predators that would otherwise balance the amount of prey animals out there. The classic story for this is Yellowstone. Killing all the wolves and the ecosystem so radically changing because the elk just took over and ate all of the grass and we’re not doing well.
And there’s just too many of them and humans. They’ve been here for at least 10,000 years. Actually, I keep seeing the estimates for when humans came to the Western hemisphere going farther back in time, but They’ve been involved in the management of megafauna for a very long time. So just taking them out of that would be bad. But also if you don’t hunt and you also have killed off all of the natural predators like cougars and wolves, then What happens? These prey animals have evolved to be in balance with predators.
So in some ways we have removed that responsibility from natural cycles and it is up to us to either reintroduce them or to take that responsibility upon ourselves and hunt as well, or maybe even just both.
Bruce McGlenn: Yeah, this is another fascinating topic too, because there are people who believe that We should not be hunting and we should bring back natural predators and let that system fall into equilibrium that way. But that’s easier said than done. Years ago, I studied what they did in California, which was to outlaw hound hunting for cougars. Which is what they ultimately did in Washington too. And what happened in California was that they petitioned this, they outlawed cougar hunting essentially. And it wasn’t that long after that they found themselves, the Fish and Wildlife Service down there was having to kill basically as many, if not more, Problem cougars as the hunters were hunting previously.
And it just turned it into, you know, it became a liability because they were coming in and eating people’s pets and chasing runners and occasionally attacking somebody on a trail. And so it’s complicated. And I think Just like all the Leopold realized that killing all the wolves wasn’t the answer because a diverse ecosystem is a healthy ecosystem. I think the bigger picture here, the bigger issue here is habitat loss. And, you know, a lot of our most productive bottom lands that have been winter range for a lot of wildlife have been developed and into Cities and pavement or farms and ranching, and it just doesn’t, we don’t have the holding capacity that we did for wild animals not that long ago.
And so it’s, you know, it’s so, there’s so many pieces to the puzzle here. You can’t just say, well, let’s just bring back predators and everything will be in equilibrium again, because we’ve been managing, we’ve been manipulating the environment for so long that it’s, you know, we could pull a plug and just move off the planet and it would eventually reset, but it’s not going to happen overnight. And it’s certainly not going to happen overnight when we’re still, you know, here fiddling with things and changing things. So it’s, It’s really complicated.
And I think if we came to the point saying, listen, we’re going to bring back wild predators and let them control the healthy populations of prey animals and we’re not going to hunt anymore, I think we would be doing ourselves a disservice by pulling ourselves out of that equation. Yeah, I think I’ll take a break there and let you respond.
Ross Kenyon: Well, I like that the answer is not nearly as simple as just letting nature take over. There’s also so much conflict with ranchers in the West and predators. There’s actually a group in Montana that, I don’t know if you know the Property and Environment Research Center.
Bruce McGlenn: I think so.
Ross Kenyon: Think so? Yeah, they’re pretty involved with payments to ranchers to be more tolerant of livestock attrition due to predation. Yeah. And it turns out that having this sort of like market-based payment system makes them much more tolerant rather than finger wagging at ranchers saying, how dare you? We need wolves. And to ranchers, I’m sure they care about the abstract value of nature’s health, but also it’s hard to care about that when It’s a hard business and you’re losing animals due to predators. So I think there’s a more nuanced conversation around these issues that need to take place.
But a lot of this ends up in culture war territory of people who think hunters are just macho assholes, essentially. And I’m sure they look back at the people charting them as liberal, city slicker, coastal elites who don’t know anything about anything. And then once the conversation’s there, it’s basically impossible to have a productive chat. Even though we probably all care about this and probably could find productive middle ground solutions to much of this.
Bruce McGlenn: Yeah, I hear you. I’ve seen some back and forths online between pro and anti-hunters and it’s amazing how quickly it degrades into a pissing match and nobody gains anything from it. But maybe that middle ground is, you know, what is our connection to the land? And how do we maintain that? Maybe something that everybody can talk about, whether it involves hunting or not. And I was just looking through my, I make a notebook that we give folks when they attend the course, and we’ve got a couple pages of quotes in here.
And one of them I was thinking about as we were talking about that last topic, a quote by Jose Ortega Gasset. Man cannot reenter nature except by temporarily rehabilitating that part of himself which is still an animal. And this in turn can be achieved only by placing himself in relation to another animal. But there is no animal, pure animal, other than the wild one. And the relationship with him is the hunt. So the point there being that, you know, we can... We could have farmed animals and pets and still have relationship with animals, but there’s just no substitute for the relationship that comes from encountering a wild animal and sort of the dance of the hunt because it stirs things, I think, in us humans in that process that have been lost in the domestication of wildlife, the domestication of our own lives.
Ross Kenyon: I think it’s uncomfortable for people to imagine themselves as animal. So many of the things that we share in common with life in general, but maybe mammals specifically, are corporeal. They’re about bodies. Bodies are gross and difficult, and there’s a desire, I think, to transcend them. In an extreme way, you could see it even to the point of the singularity where we upload our consciousnesses and leave the body behind. In a previous show, we had a guest call it a techno Gnosticism, where everything material is bad and everything spiritual is good.
Demi Urge and his corrupt world behind and become pure spirit and pure intellect. And there’s also a number of authors that I’ve read who are saying that when you’re giving up the animal, you’re forgetting that you are not pure intellect. You are body. You are an embodied soul. And lest you forget this, this could lead to some sort of crisis. And I’ve seen them point to various different kinds of crises this might lead us to when we forget the body. You’re laughing. It sounds like you connect with this statement at least a little bit.
Bruce McGlenn: Yeah, we, the matrix reference has come up multiple times.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, really?
Bruce McGlenn: And talking about all this, but I think this delves into some questions that we’re never going to know the answer to, but it’s important to keep asking those questions. And I think it’s important to not get too comfortable and really stay focused on As much as we can, you know, what this means for us, what this means to us. And yeah, that sounds like a whole other conversation too. I’m not even sure what to make of all of it. Yeah. I mean, you can sit here and say, yeah, we are embodied and it’s the way it’s been for decades.
Maybe 2 million years to the best of our knowledge from studying archaeology. But we really don’t know for sure. It’s our best guess of what the reality is. And so I often just go back to saying, you know, there are things here I don’t know and I’m not going to know. And It seems like nature has been at it a lot longer than we have. So what can we learn from nature and what would nature do? And I think nature would include hunting and include that relationship to other physical things so that we don’t forget what that’s all about.
Ross Kenyon: One more spiritual idea that might be closer at hand. You read a quote too from, I think it was from Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer about the idea of gift and what it means in relationship to hunting. Am I remembering that right?
Bruce McGlenn: Yeah, I’ve got the book here.
Ross Kenyon: Oh yeah, I might even reread them dramatically and put them at the front of the show.
Bruce McGlenn: I’ll just read a portion here of... Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer on page 30. She says Lewis Hyde has made extensive studies of gift economies. He finds that, quote, objects will remain plentiful because they are treated as gifts, end quote. A gift relationship with nature is a formal give and take that acknowledges our participation in and dependence upon natural increase. We tend to respond to nature as part of ourselves, not a stranger or alien available for exploitation. Gift exchange is the commerce of choice, for it is commerce that harmonizes with or participates in the process of nature’s increase.
In the old times, when people’s lives were so directly tied to the land, it was easy to know the world as gift. When fall came, the skies would darken with flocks of geese honking, here we are. It reminds the people of the creation story, when the geese came to save Sky Woman. The people are hungry, winter is coming, and the geese fill the marshes with food. It is a gift, and the people receive it with thanksgiving love and respect. But when the food does not come from a flock in the sky, when you don’t feel the warm feathers cool in your hand, know that a life has been given for yours.
When there is no gratitude in return, That food may not satisfy. It may leave the spirit hungry while the belly is full. Something is broken when the food comes on a styrofoam tray wrapped in slippery plastic, a carcass of a bean whose only chance at life was a cramped cage. That is not a gift of life. It is a theft.
Ross Kenyon: God, she’s such a good writer. That’s what a beautiful set of paragraphs. That one line, that phrase, was it feel the warm feathers cool in your hand? Is that what it was?
Bruce McGlenn: But when the food does not come from a flock in the sky, when you don’t feel the warm feathers cool in your hand and know that life has been given for yours, when there is no gratitude in return, that food may not satisfy you. It may leave the spirit hungry while the belly is full.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. That’s very profound. I think that’s more profound than this entire episode. We could probably just cut that and then just paste that quote up there.
Bruce McGlenn: Yeah. That’s why you view it. Oh, go ahead. She goes on to say, how in our modern world can we find our way to understand the earth as gift again, to make our relations with the world sacred again? I know we cannot all become hunter-gatherers. The living world could not bear our weight. But even in a market economy, can we behave as if the world, the living world were a gift? And I think that gets back to partly what we’re trying to do here and that, yes, we are helping some people prepare, you know, get over their hurdles and barriers to entry.
To hunting, which can be complicated so that they can get out there and experience the hunt on their own terms. And some people that join us may not have an intention to go out and hunt, but they want to understand what the hunt is all about. And in a lot of ways, being here for four plus days, doing all this is about as close as you can get to a hunt without actually hunting. And I think it gives people that context and understanding of Why hunting is so important, why it’s been such an important part of our history and what it can do to teach us about how we are part of the system and connected in much deeper ways.
Ross Kenyon: I think. At least from the weekend workshop that I did, I think that’s certainly true. I would have liked to have gone to the, typically people go to a first workshop before the one that I went to, but I’ve heard universally good things. One of my old friends from Chicago, Annika Wu, she became a butcher I’ll check with Annika before talking about this, but I want to celebrate her. But I knew her from filmmaking in Chicago, and then decided that she wanted to be a butcher, and then has now moved on to her company’s called Bondjerk, and they make amazing...
Chinese flavors of high quality, regeneratively produced beef jerky. I imagine there’s probably other animal meats in there too. I think there’s a pork one too. Amazing, amazing quality. But I think she wanted to work her way up further back in the process of understanding what it’s like. Because butchers don’t actually harvest animals. Oftentimes the animal itself has already been dispatched and cleaned. I wanted to take that responsibility and understand how exactly it works to be involved end to end. And she found you and then I saw her posting about it.
So I got to talk to Bruce, but I think that might be an illustrative example of the kind of student that finds their way to you. Or maybe that’s not paradigmatic. I don’t know. What do you think?
Bruce McGlenn: I think so. I appreciate Annika’s approach. You know, she’s very active in women and ranching and obviously butchering and making jerky and wanted to understand the hunting side of it, too. And in some ways, hunting and ranching and farming are fairly different paths, but there’s a lot of overlap there, too. And yeah, she... She’s definitely a good example of the kind of participants we have join us here. We spend a lot of time philosophizing and talking over meals around the campfire about all of this and what it means to be a hunter.
What it means to be a mediator, what it means to be human. I think there’s a richness there that adds to the hard skills and the tools that people walk away from the course with. I really appreciate her approach. She’s actually been Involved in helping us form an alumni community for human nature hunting because that I think is also a very important aspect of all this. It’s having a sense of community along with this connection to nature and sitting around the campfire, the proverbial campfire and having some dialogue about what all this means rather than Trying to force our agenda or force our beliefs, I think.
Having a good, open, respectful dialogue is where a lot of things start and can benefit from.
Ross Kenyon: The quality of the students and mine was also similarly thoughtful and made me think. And I also like the pairing of intellectual activity with working with your hands too. I think for a lot of people, that’s not that common. They clack on plastic keyboards all day long and watch TV. There’s something nice about connecting in this way and Like I think craft in general is important. Learning skills like this is rewarding for its own sake. And I wish there was more opportunity or desire for that. And if this appeals to you, you’re listening to the show.
So you, you probably have some affinity for what I’m saying here. Bruce, right now there’s applications open for several camps or workshops of yours in the spring. Is that right? Spring and summer?
Bruce McGlenn: Yeah, we started out with shellfish foraging and March, which is in Hood Canal and a great way to kind of get your feet wet per se. It’s a very tied to table experience. We go out and forage clams and shuck oysters and show you how to do all that. And then we prepare a big meal right there with what you forage. And on up to a turkey hunting course, In the spring, and then that launches us into our Awaken the Hunter courses, which go mostly in the spring season and early summer.
The multiple day courses in Kettle Falls, which is northeast Washington, north of Spokane.
Ross Kenyon: Links to those things are in the show notes.
Bruce McGlenn: Yeah, humannaturehunting.com. I’d say if you’re at all interested in this realm, don’t hesitate to reach out. You can always... Schedule a short conversation and if you have some burning questions, this is really about being in service to humanity, what we’re trying to do here. My background is in civil structural engineering, but I shifted gears to doing this because I felt like it was a better use of my time and life energy to try to help people reconnect in this way or at least Pause and ask a few of these questions.
So if you have any interest or curiosity, don’t hesitate to reach out. I think some people who join us say they’ve learned of us two or three years ago and they’ve been following us and finally got to a point where they’re ready to make that next step and attend a course. So it might not be something that happens overnight for everybody, but at least to start thinking about it, you know, I think is a good first step.
Ross Kenyon: Thanks so much for being here, Bruce. I don’t think we’ve done a show quite like this before. I appreciate all of your time and teaching me so much and thank you for being here.
Bruce McGlenn: You bet, my pleasure. Thanks, Ross.
Ross Kenyon: Thank you so much for listening. If you could please subscribe and give us a great rating and review on Apple Podcasts or a rating on Spotify, that’d be much appreciated. It helps us get our content out to more people. You can sign up for our newsletter at nori.com. Follow us on social media. We will catch you next time.
