Hunting and Fishing as a Therian
Recently, I've been making an honest effort to start supplying myself and my household with meat that I catch and kill myself. It's been a slow process because the startup is expensive and there's a learning curve to it as well, but I'm dedicating myself to doing better and better until it can hopefully be the majority of my meat source. Next week, I'm taking a 2 hour long introduction to hunting class ran by the Department of Fish and Wildlife and besides that, I've invested in a Dungeness crab trap this year and got my shellfishing license again.
For a really long time in my life and especially once I realized I was a therian, I've always felt deeply sympathetic for animals in factory farmed settings. Since moving to Oregon, I've made it a priority to soon get a large freezer and I'm working with a farmer in the rural area close to me to purchase half a cow that they process themselves. While this has been a step up for me, I still feel this sense of disconnect with my food and knew I could do better than that. I wanted to know exactly how the animal died because I'd do it myself, and if I can't do it, that's something I feel I need to sit with and reflect on if I want to continue eating meat like I want to. I know hunting is controversial, but I truly couldn't keep driving beside the factory farm chicken truck on my way to work daily with their feathers flying on the road as the wind and rain hit them and not have some sort of reflection on my own impact and cause of that. Even if I make very little impact, I like thinking that I still helped fight the issue by saving even a few animals from an industrialized, unempathetic death.
Hunting with a gun is obviously not natural and seals aren't out in the woods hunting deer, but for me, it still feels more right as long as I'm in this body. The deer for example will be in the wilderness, and it would reflect more of a natural selection type of process. The deer, rabbits, pheasants, or whatever else that avoid the human populated areas, hide better, or run faster will never be seen by me. The crabs who avoid traps and avoid the piers or the clams who dig deeper and stay further out won't be able to be grabbed by me either. It will be up to me to be stealthy, efficient, and simply gain experience as I plan to follow fair chase principles and give the animals a reasonable chance to escape. If I catch them, I can manage exactly how they die, use the whole animal, and have more care and honor in the process. I'm even expecting that for the first animal I kill, I might cry if I'm being very honest.
Last weekend, I went shellfishing for razor clams at the Oregon coast with a lot of excitement to finally go and bring home my own dinner, but it was a complete bust. The air was colder, the rain was pouring, the waves were acting rougher, and a bunch of by-the-wind sailors washed up all over the beach. All the clams buried deep down in the sand and any holes they did make were immediately covered by the jellyfish and water. Even the experienced clammers found maybe one in the entire time they were out there, but despite my lack of a successful catch, I really deeply felt in my bones and heart and body the adrenaline of a hunt. The thought that if I was a seal here in the water doing the same thing, this would have been a day I would not have succeeded all because of the environment and the good survival skills of the clams. That's nature.
My husband is vegetarian, but even he's been deeply supportive of me and even proud that I'm going this extra mile to be more "wild" and pick the most ethical way of getting meat that I can, on top of the fact that this will help save us money in the long run compared to me buying pasture raised meat constantly which is getting real pricey. Personally, I'm spiritually a therian and view all animals as having their own souls and conscience, so this is probably the most important thing I've done for myself in all of my years of being a therian. I didn't grow up with a family that ever hunted or fished so I'm starting from absolute scratch, but I feel deeply nonhuman, even in this human lifestyle. I feel like a seal who was given land, sea, and civilization for one lifetime.
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