Who's Stalking Now? When the first deer appears, seemingly
from nowhere, I swing the rifle round too quickly and it spots the
movement, vanishing without a sound. We wait a few frozen minutes up in
the high seat, until the stalker decides it isn't coming back, and
whispers that we should hunt from the ground. Once I'm halfway down the
ladder, the muntjac skitters past almost in mockery. There are probably more deer living
wild in the UK than ever. No one knows how many; they are secretive,
wide-roaming animals, and populations fluctuate each year. But they
breed quickly, lack predators apart from humans, and are superbly
adapted to life in the British countryside. These islands'
six
free-living species total well over 1m animals, who thrive even
though 350,000 are shot and 74,000 are involved in car accidents every
year. Anti-hunting, pro-animal charities and
much of the general public question the ethics of stalking. "It's a
bloodsport, a branch of the entertainment rather than the
food industry," says Alistair Currie, policy adviser for
Peta. "Many of the animals are not
killed instantly, and the killing of individual animals by hunters leads
to changes in the local deer population which lead to other stresses."
What of farmers whose crops are damaged or destroyed by deer? "As ever
with human dealings with animals," says Currie, "the solution is a
lethal one. Fences keep deer out." (People involved in deer management
claim that putting up costly fences and letting nature control deer
numbers condemns many deer to starvation, and many more to acute
hunger.) A spokeswoman from the
League Against Cruel Sports tells me it's "crazy" that "untrained
people are allowed to go out and shoot deer. At the absolute least, we
think there should be a minimum competency of gun use before people are
allowed to stalk them." With Darren "Phiz" Phizacklea, a
professional stalker, and Andy McLeish, executive chef at the
Michelin-starred
Chapter One restaurant in Farnborough, Kent, I went to investigate.
We visited an estate in southern England that didn't want to be named
for fear of activists and poachers. Once we had a deer, the plan was to
hang it, butcher it and cook it in the Chapter One kitchen. Phiz won't let people stalk until they
can hit three shots on a circular target, and then a "kill" shot on the
paper silhouette of a deer at 100 yards. I'd never fired a rifle before,
but guns are so accurate these days that I managed these immediately.
You draw an imaginary line up the front leg and aim a little way above
it. A shot will blast straight through the animal there – lung, heart –
hit a deer in that spot and it might rear up or canter a few paces, but
it's finished. You never shoot a wild deer in the head, which might rip
off part of its jaw; without a trained dog to find it, it would be left
to starve. The need to ensure a clean kill was
strictly enforced. Having a deer in your sights is not enough to take a
shot. You always shoot broadside. Phiz's dog, a beautiful creature
called Red, is trained to find and hold wounded deer: Phiz then catches
up and makes sure the second shot is true. I ask how many times a year
Red gets to to do his party trick. "Two or three." And how many deer do
you shoot every year? "A few hundred." Andy slinks off on his own while Phiz
and I creep through the forest, me in borrowed green overalls and the
wrong hat. Odd noises break the silence: a squirrel scuttling up a tree,
a crow's caw, the crack of a twig. I stand close behind Phiz, the loaded
rifle swinging from his shoulder, its barrel pointing towards my face.
Then he stops. Two fallow deer stand above us up a
hill. It's too far to shoot, so we stalk them, keeping as low as
possible, using trees and ferns for cover. At last we're close enough.
Roots web the ground, and there's no flat earth on which to rest the
gun. I find them in the sights with my arms beginning to ache. One deer
is standing in front of the other. I can't take a shot: a bullet could
go through the first one and wound the one behind. The deer can smell
us: they stay frozen, reading the forest. The one in front takes a wary
step forward. Phiz whispers: "One more step and you can fire." I flick
the safety catch off, close my finger round the trigger. Through the
sight I make out the pelt of the creature's fur, the glint of its right
eye. I wait, barely breathing, for it to take the final step. Finally,
it turns round and lumbers calmly back into the forest. My hands are
shaking when I stand up. We jump at the sound of a shot. Andy
is upset: he took a shot, but can't find the kill. There's no fur on the
ground, no blood. In darkness now, Phiz and I trudge back to the Land
Rover to pick up Red. The dog finds a scent immediately and leads us to
the deer just 50 feet away, hidden in bushes. A fallow buck, a yearling,
shot through the heart. The fur is spikier than you expect. As we drag
the warm dead weight to the boot, Red laps at the dripping wound in a
kind of ecstasy. You have to
gralloch deer quickly – within half an hour in summer – or the beast
will
start to stink [ That is tosh - Editor ]. Back at the euphemistically named larder, a tiled
room with a drain in the middle, Andy removes the feet, hangs the deer
upside down, cuts away pizzle and rectum with a mechanical frankness.
The blind eyes stare as he slices the throat, and the head jerks
repeatedly, as if in protest, as blood and viscera splatter on to the
floor. Phiz checks the lymph nodes and liver for signs of disease.
Eventually the windpipe peels from the neck like a garden hose, then
Andy cuts the head from the body, still attached to guts and pluck. The
smell is like dank vegetation; rank apples, ferrous and unforgettable. [
It is quite nice in fact - Editor ] I visit Chapter One a week later for
the butchery and cooking. Andy shows me how to place little nicks round
tendons, cut round bones, yank away the skin with its strange ripping
sound. One shoulder, matted with hair and dried, bloody grass, is
mangled and useless, but the two legs, saddle and the other shoulder
will make good cooking. Andy joints the animal, then separates each
muscle from the leg, removing the sinewy silverskin that lies between
them with a butcher's skill.
His resulting recipes – bresaola and venison wellington with chestnuts
and sprouts – are here. Stephen Pinker, in his fascinating new
book
The Better Angels of Our Nature notes that while killing animals for
meat is "part of the human condition", hunting is declining in
popularity. The number of US households that hunt dropped from 30% to
20% between 1975 and 2005, while money spent on hunting fell by 15%
(rising by the same amount for wildlife watching). Pinker see this as
part of an ongoing trend against cruelty and sadism in the human
species. "It remains to be seen," he adds,
"whether the decline [in hunting] will be reversed by the locavore
craze, in which young urban professionals have taken up hunting to
reduce their food miles and harvest their own free-range, grass-fed,
sustainable, humanely slaughtered meat." The tone may be ironic, but
he's right. That deer, free to forage for its food and live wild,
enjoyed a better existence than a farmed chicken or pig. Its end was
swift. And the desire to kill an animal for meat is not of itself
sadistic: by necessity it implies a starker appreciation of the origin
of food. But if there is something bloodthirsty
in stalking, insofar as I – with zero kills to my name – experienced it,
it is not the infliction of suffering but the willingness to kill a
sentient creature for the satisfaction of finding one's own food. To
many meat-eaters, that pleasure may be curious and conflicted, but it is
not cruel.
Locavores The word "locavore" was the word of the year
for 2007 in the Oxford American Dictionary. This word was the creation of
Jessica Prentice of the
San Francisco Bay Area at the time of
World Environment Day, 2005. It is usually rendered "localvore" by
some, depending on regional differences. The food may be grown in
home gardens or grown by local commercial groups interested in keeping the
environment as clean as possible and selling food close to where it is grown.
One often cited, but not universal, definition of "local" food is food grown
within 100 miles of its point of purchase or consumption.
Farmers' markets play a role in
efforts to eat what is local. Preserving food for those seasons when it is not
available fresh from a local source is one approach some locavores include in
their strategies. Living in a mild climate can make eating locally grown
products very different from living where the winter is severe or where no
rain falls during certain parts of the year. Those in the movement generally
seek to keep use of
fossil
fuels to a minimum, thereby releasing less carbon dioxide into the air and
preventing greater
global warming. Keeping energy use down and using food grown in heated
greenhouses locally would be in conflict with each other, so there are
decisions to be made by those seeking to follow this lifestyle. Many
approaches can be developed, and they vary by locale. Such foods as
spices,
chocolate,
or coffee
pose a challenge for some, so there are a variety of ways of adhering to the
locavore ethic. A related movement is the 'underground
supper club' phenomenon, in which organizers use sustainable ingredients and
use a Website to inform a waiting list of those who donate a given sum to pay
for the food used.
QUOTE
Who's stalking now?
UNQUOTE
The deer population is huge and to a large extent parasitic. They go to
our crops. So they live round us, near us.
QUOTE
A locavore is a person interested in eating food
that is locally produced, not moved long distances to market. The locavore
movement in the United States and elsewhere was spawned as interest in
sustainability and eco-consciousness became more prevalent.
UNQUOTE
It is
fun perhaps, an entertainment. Eating local meat for most people means rabbit
at best. Gutting them is a messy, smelly business.
