In Hunting and the American Imagination, Daniel J. Herman’s admirable history of hunting in America during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Herman challenged the assumption that America, as dominated by the cultures of British and Central European migrants, had always embraced hunting and hunters. Herman constructed a narrative that started with the rejection of hunters as undisciplined dangers to ordered agrarian and mercantile societies; secondly, followed the championing of the image of the nineteenth-century hunter as one who embraced individualism and defeated nature as he moved ahead of the farmer who domesticated the continent; and thirdly, concluded with the hunter-naturalists and early environmentalists of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century who as sport hunters embraced nature and science as transformative agents and yet recognized that nature needed protection or the avenue of virtue might disappear as wild America became a historic phantom. Herman concluded the volume with some thoughts regarding the twentieth century and the future, first pointing to the increase in the numbers of hunters in the early 1900s due to the big-businesses of gun-making and the freedom of automobiles which could move urbanites into the remaining wild with unprecedented ease and then secondly to the decline in hunters in the last half of the twentieth century. Indeed, the twentieth century ended with the potent challenges of animal rights and urbanization on one side, and the plaintive calls from authors like Paul Shepard encouraging urbanites to venture out occasionally in order to live more-authentic lives on the other. In the most recent decade, popular foodies have encouraged toward more-authentic palates by doing the same with either periodic hunting or weekend homesteading.

If Herman was right, the American heritage of hunting was “invented” and “reinvented” over several centuries. Herman hinted, although he did not quantify—as such would be an impossible task, that each “reinvention” of hunting in American history was marked by an increase in the number of hunters as well as by an increasingly popular opinion of the “hunter” in the media, whether in print or paint, of the era. The most recent decades have witnessed a dramatic drop in the percentage of hunters in the American population, and although the occasional bump in overall numbers may give hope to some who wish to see American hunting cultures continue, I fear that it is a false hope unless significant changes occur.

Last December, I sat down with one of my history classes to watch an episode of the popular show, MeatEater. In the era of social media, podcasts, streaming video, and cable television, Steven Rinella is the evangelist of contemplative modern hunting and his marketing juggernaut and media blitz of the last four years have breathed new energy into an educated, middle-class, and predominantly male hunting culture. In the episode, Rinella and his friend Ryan Callaghan (a member of Backcountry Hunters & Anglers), took two novice hunters, Helen and Brittnay, out West in pursuit of elk. The new hunters, both women, faced different struggles and rewards as they spent days in the snowy mountains chasing fleeting elk herds through the trees and mountains, and as the audience watched, they tackled the highs and lows of the physical exertion and the monotony of waiting. In the end, one of the initiates shot a cow elk was introduced to the processing and cooking of the animal.

The episode was about introducing new generations to hunting, generations to whom hunting culture is increasingly unfamiliar. It was a tale of Hunting Recruitment, if not Retention and Reactivation. Both women had been introduced to hunting culture by working with the MeatEater production, but neither woman had a model for participation until interacting with Rinella and the crew. In the end, the episode left the observer with just a taste of the frustration and effort of the chase, as well as the joys and poignancy of its deadly conclusion. The show hit many elements of the challenges to hunting in America today and hinted at the questionable future of this unique blood sport which has the potential to sustain the body, mind, and spirit of its human participants just as it compels them actively to seek the good of the animal game which they ardently pursue.

Yet, I was left with the question, “Why elk?” Why start beginning hunters with limited experience in the outdoors and with firearms on the large game to which many hunters (especially those from the Eastern US) turn only in their hunting prime—that is, if they have the resources of time, money, and opportunity? In some ways the show addressed the question in later episodes in which Helen and Brittnay went whitetail-deer hunting in the farmland of Wisconsin and were successful in taking deer while stand-hunting. There may have been less “wild” in this last hunt, but the women were confronted with challenging shots and challenging decisions. What caught my attention, however, was that before Rinella put the women in their deer stands but after they had hunted elk in the West, he took them squirrel hunting in the farmland woodlots, and that both Helen and Brittnay thoroughly enjoyed hunting the bushytails. It appeared that they appreciated how the diminutive quarry tested their developing skills and they delighted in the repeatable excitement of making multiple stalks.

In his The Way of the Hunter (of 1988), sportswriter Thomas McIntyre described his “maddening infatuation with animals” as a boy and he traced a seemingly normative trajectory for modern hunters through small game hunting, the pursuit of game birds, and finally the quest for various species of large game animals. McIntyre remembered the shift in foci as he developed as a hunter:

“They were at first rabbits and the like, the so-called small game, which after the inevitable tempering of the innate bloodthirstiness the young of all predator species possess—that fearsome, genetic egomania that in their own minds sets them above the entire rest of nature and is a birthright granted to ensure their early survival—came to loom far larger than the adjective small would imply. (3)”

It was during the hunt for birds that McIntyre “first came to see that I loved animals and being at large in the open in the pursuit of them, being an active participant in the timeless round of the hunter and the hunted, choosing not to try to place myself beyond the wild . . . but rather to wade right into it” (3-4).

One hundred and thirty years earlier, the idealist Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) similarly argued in Walden that hunters developed during their lives, but he also contended for a transition between the “hunter and fisher” and the man, who “if he has the seeds of a better life in him, he distinguishes his proper objects, as a poet or naturalist it may be, and leaves the gun and fish- pole behind.” Yet Thoreau still maintained that boys should be sent afield with guns (“make them hunters,” he wrote) so that through immersion in the natural world they might acquire a love of nature and become “if possible, mighty hunters at last, so that they shall not find game large enough for them in this or any vegetable wilderness, —hunters as well as fishers of men.”

Boys with guns in the woods might become Nimrods, mighty hunters, of the highest human caliber.

Reflecting on the work of the historian Herman, the evangelist Rinella, the modern sportswriter McIntyre, and the self-emancipator Thoreau, questions have filled my mind:

If we are to address the future of hunting, when and where might we find historic models for comparison and advice? Clearly no other period neatly fits our urbanized world isolated from nature by technology and devoid of a natural frontier by the effects of a staggering and expanding population and the ease of transportation.

Has the pattern that Thoreau of the nineteenth century and McIntyre of the twentieth century celebrated been consistent throughout America’s past? What was the role of small game, say the squirrel, in America’s first centuries and how did popular America perceive hunting?

Is there a parallel in the past to the present press and populace seemingly so antagonistic to hunting? If so, how was the press antagonistic to hunting and did the press ever shift its perspective?

Did this popular show, MeatEater, demonstrate a new trend in the recruitment of hunting or perhaps a new trend in American hunting itself? Are new hunters skipping a traditional apprentice stage that focused on pursuing small game and moving directly to killing large game? If hunters are now skipping that important stage of deadly play and exploration and now killing animals at a distance from elevated, insulated stands with 6.5 Creedmoors will the next generation understand the poignancy and immediacy of mortal hunters killing other mortal creatures?

What is the role of small game in the future?

In an America with woodlots and cornfields being replaced by subdivisions and media, talking-heads, and legislators set on “safety” and sanitizing the experience of the old and the young, thereby removing sometimes dangerous (but enlivening) play and weapons from the world, what is the future of hunting? If Thoreau was right and we no long play and kill nature in nature, will the next generation seek the good of the natural world or be more concerned with a human-made world destroying soil, sky, and squirrels because they do not love them?