Canned Hunting: a Fall from Grace

  I was left with the feeling I was participating in a game of charades—just motions and movements, gestures made to imitate the real thing.  This was not hunting.  This was bloodlust and trigger-pulling, a dollar amount spent by a weekend warrior with a penchant for death.  God, I was one of them now—these rich fuckers with no respect for the common decency of fair chase.  How far had I fallen from grace?  

 

            Everything began so innocently.  I just wanted a place to deer hunt in 2021: the year of my downfall.

 

            I had a lot of money in the bank courtesy of the pandemic.  While most lost jobs and watched lifelong businesses collapse, I was a war profiteer.  Running a meat market when folks were hoarding groceries saw increasingly large quarterly bonuses filling up my bank account—up to $47,000 in one quarter alone.  I was sitting on a large amount of money and burned-out from working seven days a week.  Longing to reacquaint myself with my favorite hobby—hunting—I scoured the web for a hunting club in my area so I could pursue deer in the fall.

 

            My search turned up empty at first.  There were no clubs in my area and I had tried the public land around Blewett Falls a few years prior.  The archery-only area was too thick for bowhunting, offering only a few yards of visibility down the trails.  I sat in a fire ant hill and left covered in bites, disheartened and defeated; never to return.  My luck finally changed when I set my sights south of the border and began searching out hunting clubs in South Carolina.  I discovered this hunting preserve that offered season-long access to “free-range” deer hunting included in a staggering $3,500 a year membership.  I had the money and was out of options, so I reluctantly joined.

 

            Included in the membership were perks that, at first, I had no interest in entertaining: a “domestic” duck hunt (pen-raised), quail hunt (pen-raised birds), hog hunt (high-fenced “guaranteed opportunity”), European tower shoot (they fucking throw pheasants off a goddamn tower); stocked bass, bream, and catfish ponds.  I was just in it for the deer stands (baited daily) and the dove field.  The doves and deer were wild at least.  After the dove hunt where my buddy and I successfully bagged one bird after not dove hunting for over ten years, I felt the place would be a good spot for meeting old friends for a hunting weekend.  Lodging in the cabins came included for one weekend a year, so I messaged my friends and organized a hunting weekend in November: duck hunt, quail hunt, and fishing in the stocked catfish pond.  

            My friend Eva had spent a good portion of the previous year taking an online hunter’s safety course so she could get a license and hunt with me.  I felt this would be a good introduction.  I went in with no expectations.  The first hunt was a duck “hunt.”  There were four of us: Eva, Dawson, another “Elite Member,” and myself.  They positioned us around this small pond adjacent to the pen where they held the mallards.  “This isn’t hunting.” I told Eva.  Ducks swam in the pond and lingered along the sides.  The two guides flushed the birds until they flew and we all took shots.  Most of the time they flew too low to shoot without risking hitting someone with the pellets and took safety in the center of the pond where they knew they would escape the shotguns.  For the most part, they were too scared to fly and didn’t fly like real ducks.  To alleviate this, the guides fired shotguns into the water to flush the ducks, killing a few in the process.  It was a terrible thing to witness, let alone participate in.  We killed a few ducks and the property manager had them taken to be dressed.  What we received weren’t even whole birds.  The wings and legs were discarded, as was the delicious skin; they were breasted out!  What a fucking waste, a travesty, a disregard for a living creature.  And it was all my fault!

 

            The quail hunt immediately followed.  We all knew these little birds were trucked out of a holding pen, into small cages, and strategically placed in the field for the dogs to find and flush.  This was an easy thing to accept.  Quail are scarce in the wild these days with the encroachment of civilization and the destruction of natural habitat.  In the Carolinas, I feel better taking pen-raised quail than shooting what is left of their wild cousins.  At least until their population grows and then I will swear off pen-poppers forever.  The bottom line: if you want to find quail, you have to go to a place that raises them.

 

            The hunt was actually fun.  Dawson and I were far better at hitting these birds than during our previous, absolute failure, at shooting doves.  Watching the dogs work the field was an amazing sight to witness, akin to losing one’s virginity or tasting caviar for the first time.  Life-changing and defining, I found my new favorite type of hunting…or more precisely “hunting.”  We bagged 22 out of 35 birds released.  But the hunting wasn’t the high-point of the weekend, it was getting together three old college friends with my godchild in tow to catch up and hang out and enjoy each other’s company.  We enjoyed it so much we decided it would be a new tradition.

            I fell further down the rabbit hole that January, celebrating Dawson’s 36^th birthday.  I paid for five pheasants and 15 chukars.  The chukars were already in the field when we arrived that bitter, snow-peppered morning.  They had to be prompted to fly.  When the dog pointed, the guide stuck his boot under the bird and kicked it into the air. The chukars flew slow, unlike the quail, and were an easy target.  I had assumed there would be pheasants mixed in, but they came separate.  I watched soullessly as they toted in cages and released them into the field.  A part of me died that day.  I just kind of ignored what my conscience was telling me and went with the flow.  They too had to be kicked to fly.

            What followed next was even worse.  For Dawson’s birthday, I paid for an extra half-peg for him to accompany me on the European Tower Shoot where 350 pheasants were doomed to be “released” (thrown) off of a 50 foot tower and met by an onslaught of 32 shotguns on 16 pegs.  I had truly lost myself at this point.  Dawson enjoyed the shoot and seemed excited when he popped one.  I did not enjoy it.  This was the farthest I had come from true hunting, but I justified it in two ways: it was included in my expensive membership and I at least got a lot of pheasants to eat at the end.  

 

            We did the same thing the following year for our annual hunting weekend: ducks, quail, and tower shoot.  Everything was the same feeling…but even the quail had lost its luster.  Same field, same guide, same dogs, same pen-raised birds.  The hog “hunt” that following Halloween was the final straw.  I wanted a hog to make into sausage and, like I always justified, it was included in my membership…a $450 value!  So I shot a sow in a 40-acre fenced enclosure out of this towering stand with an adjacent port-a-john.  I have yet to live that down, understand, or justify what I did.  To make matters worse, the processor where I took the hog hard-froze the quarters together in a massive block.  Plus they hung it far too long.  By the time it all properly thawed out in the refrigerator to separate and butcher, it was so close to turning I couldn’t even salvage the meat.  I smoked a ham and it made me sick.  The meat all went to waste.  I felt terrible.  Never again, I told myself.  New year, new me.  I would do things differently in 2023.

 

            This year I’m going back to my roots.  None of this pay-to-slaughter, farm-raised “wild game.”  Maybe this year I won’t have any meat to fill the freezer, and that will be alright.  I’ve set my sights on the Francis Marion National Forest.  It’s about three hours from my house.  Eva lives in Charleston, so I have a place to stay.  Or I might camp out in one of the many sites available on the public land.  We’re going to get back to real hunting this year, starting with wild boar in March and turkeys in April.  We’re going to camp out and hunt deer this fall.  No more baited deer hunting out of fancy boxed stands.  We’re going back to what it truly is about: the experience, nature, challenge, skill.  Eva hasn’t learned about any of that yet and those things are my bread and butter, as warming to my soul as a bowl of buttered grits on a frosty January morning.  I’m going to butcher my own game this year, like I always have save for these last two years.  No more “it’s included in my membership” bourgeois bullshit. 

 

            May the hunting gods forgive my transgressions on the sacred act, bring me back into their warm embrace, and overlook my short-comings these past two years.  I want to walk ten miles through a mosquito-infested swamp for a deer, not ten feet from my truck.  I want the full experience: woods-to-table.  I crave meaning and depth in life, poetry and art.  I want love, not a one-night stand.  I want to hunt, not shoot fish in a barrel.