Hunting and the Language of Killing

By Colman McCarthy

In the autumn woodlands of western Maryland, slaughtering defenseless wild animals is all but a civic duty for licensed hunters. New depths were reached recently when Sierra Stiles, a girl of eight, killed a black bear who had the ill fortune to come into the child’s gunsights on the first day of the state’s hunting season.

This being the height of Fall’s bloodiness, much of the media hailed young Sierra’s talent for killing. With a proud gun-toting dad looking on, she posed happily with the dead bear. Sierra is one of 10,000 Maryland children holding junior hunting licenses. The state, The Washington Post reports, stages an annual Junior Deer Hunt, with second and third graders roaming the woods with parents in hopes of helping bring down eight-point stags.

Hunting is in decline nationally--down seven percent since 1991and more than 30 percent among 18 to 24-years-old. Still, “hunting remains incredibly popular,” according to the Wall Street Journal, with more than 14 million people hot to blow away animals from squirrels to Rocky Mountain elk and fowl from doves to ducks.

I should bite my tongue, of course. Where do I get off using words like slaughtering, killing, bloodiness? Sensitive and tender souls that they are, and ever touchy about being labeled gun-nut louts, hunters who take to the outdoors in camouflaged gear would like to rest of us to camouflage our language with huntingly-correct euphemisms. It’s like Iraq. Congress and W didn’t send American soldiers to kill people. They were sent for Operation Iraqi Freedom.

To prettify the killing of animals, here’s the lingo of huntspeak:

--Animals are harvested, not killed.

--Hunters don’t slaughter animals in the wild, they bag game.

--Hunters aren’t in the woods with Winchesters and Remingtons to slaughter, they’re out there communing with nature.

--Armed parents take their sons—and daughters like precocious Sierra—not to teach the rituals of killing but to further the rituals of family bonding.

--Hunting isn’t violence, it’s a weekend guy thing. Bring your lady, too.

--Shooting deer isn’t cruelty, it’s thinning the herd.

--Hunting is about the cycle of life and death, not gore and guts.

--Hunters aren’t killers, they’re sportsmen.

--A day in the woods means connecting with your inner marksman.

--From the workplace, men bring home the bacon. From the woods, they bring home the venison.

We obtuse city-dwellers who can’t master the linguistics of the hunt, and who keep offending all those emotionally fragile hunters with our blunt talk about killing, take our guidance from Ernest Hemingway. In the woods of Northern Michigan at age three loading, cocking and firing guns, he grew up to talk straight and shoot straight. “Killing cleanly and in a way which gives you aesthetic pleasure and pride has always been one of the greatest enjoyments of a part of the human race,” he wrote uneuphemistically in “Death in the Afternoon.” “…Once you accept the rule of death, thou shalt not kill is an easily and naturally obeyed commandment. But when a man is still in rebellion against death, he has a pleasure in taking to himself one of the Godlike attributes: that of giving it. This is one of the most profound feelings in those men who enjoy killing.”

As a hairy-chested plain-speaking gunman who said “I like to shoot a rifle and I like to kill,” Hemingway gunned to death lions, rhinos, hippos, impalas, deers, mule deers, rabbits, antelopes, grizzly bears, pheasants, buffalos, porcupines, elks, owls, willow grouse, quails, pigeons, ducks, partridges, jacksnipe, blue herons, sage hens, and, finally and fittingly, on July 2, 1961 in Ketchum, Idaho, himself.