Hunting, foraging and the pursuit of animal ontologies

Abstract

Climate change and the ecological crisis are fueling growing critiques of human exceptionalism within calls to reconfigure human-nature relations. This paper explores how some self-provisioning hunters and foragers in Victoria, Australia are invoking animal ontologies within their attempts to decenter the human and create sustainable, emplaced lifestyles and diets. For this cohort, hands-on food provisioning serves as a means of re-constructing the human as animal through the embodied physicality of food procurement practices, and the multispecies engagements and intimate understandings of local ecosystems these practices entail. Meat eating remains a complex ethical conundrum, however, and I examine how their conceptualizations of the human as animal serve also to justify their killing for food. This is evident in self-provisioning hunters’ construction of the embodied human as both predator and prey and through their desires for reciprocity through the eventual return of their own bodies to the food chain within their local ecosystems.

Keywords:

• Animal ontologies
• foraging
• hunting
• meat
• omnivory
• Victoria, Australia

Introduction

“What does it mean to live at a time when the way we feed ourselves threatens the social and ecological fabric of the planet?” (Muir 2014, 1). Historian Cameron Muir poses this question at the outset of his book that lays bare the devastating impacts Western agriculture has had on the ecology and communities of what is now called Australia. In grappling with such questions, dietary transformations have become a practical means through which people are expressing their concerns about the myriad ecological and social issues we face. Agroecology, regenerative agriculture, farmers’ markets, food swaps, and organic, fair and slow foods are just a few of the well-established movements promoting more ethical and sustainable foodways. Concomitantly, there has been growing interest in self-provisioning, predominantly through growing fruit, vegetables, poultry and livestock, but also through the pursuit of wild foods via hunting and foraging.

As with dumpster divers (Giles 2021; Carolsfeld and Erikson 2013), back-to-the-landers (Calvário and Otero 2014) and freegans (Edwards 2023; Gross 2009), some hunters and foragers pursue wild foods as a conscious form of resisting the commodity orientation of the industrial food system. Such movements aim to reinstate food as a source of nutrition that embeds people within their local ecosystems, rather than as goods to be bought and sold. This paper examines how some self-provisioning hunters and foragers in Victoria, Australia are looking to animal ontologies—by which I mean theories of ways of being animal—in developing more sustainable lifestyles and diets. They believe that the fundamental conceptual problem underpinning climate change and the ecological crisis is human exceptionalism and a distancing from our fundamental animality. In seeking to remedy this disconnect, they enact food provisioning as a means of embracing the human as animal through the embodied physicality of their food procurement practices, their orientation toward food as meeting their corporeal needs for nourishment, and the multispecies engagements and intimacy with local ecosystems these practices enable.

Hunting in Australia takes many forms, but is usually enacted for subsistence, recreation, or pest control purposes (Bray et al. 2018; Gressier 2016; Sharp and Wollscheid 2009). The Victorian hunters I describe, who invoke animal ontologies within activist ideologies, constitute a small and anomalous minority of this broader hunting community. While they hunt for food provisioning rather than leisure, they are not subsistence hunters as traditionally conceived, given they are not dependent on hunting for survival, but chose this practice despite having easier means to feed themselves available. Neither do they hunt for recreation. They are motivated by acquiring food, and while all enjoy the time spent in nature and some do love hunting, others indicate that they do not particularly enjoy it. Lying for hours in the bush on cold winter days keeping still and quiet in the hope of a deer materializing can be uncomfortable and boring. Walking for hours in all sorts of weather through thick bush, the anxiety of having Australia’s numerous deadly snake species lurking in the leaf litter, and the numerous trips coming home empty-handed can be draining. Even a successful kill comes with the weight of ambivalent emotions, along with the bloody, messy and physically demanding labor of processing the meat. Yet, this cohort believe that hunting and foraging are the most sustainable and ethical means of eating, so they persist. In this paper, I refer to this very particular cohort as “self-provisioning hunters,” and the following discussion is focused solely on this subset of the broader hunting community.

Between 2014 and 2016, I conducted ethnographic research into these practices in Victoria, Australia. Located in Australia’s southeast, Victoria is the second smallest state geographically, yet it has the second largest population and economy. Owing to its inhabitants’ passion for food, its capital, Melbourne, and the state more broadly, are renowned for their rich culinary scene (de Solier 2013). Alternative food movements are thriving, and while hunting and foraging remain niche activities, participation is growing. Despite its controversial nature and vocal opposition, hunting continues to be popular, with 58,332 people licensed to hunt game in Victoria on June 30, 2022 (GMA 2022b). This represents a 100.2% (28,931) increase in the total number of licensees since 1996, with the greatest increases in licenses for deer hunting, which has seen an increase of 522% in this period (GMA 2022b). Along with Sambar, Fallow, Red and Hog deer, licenses are available to hunt eight species of native duck, several species of quail, pheasant and partridge, and introduced species deemed pests, including wild rabbits, goats, pigs, foxes and dogs.

As a grassroots practice with no licensing requirements, foraging’s popularity is more difficult to quantify. However, the profusion over the past decade of workshops and resources indicates a substantial growth of interest in the practice. During my research, I cooked and ate with interlocutors, and participated in formal mushroom and weed foraging workshops, informal foraging trips, hunting conventions, food swaps, farmers’ markets, and animal rights debates and protests. I spent time with numerous conventional butchers, as well as a specialist game butcher, and I visited two wild meat abattoirs. I conducted over 30 formal interviews with hunters and foragers and had countless informal discussions with food, animal and environmental activists, farmers, restauranteurs, chefs, retailers, butchers and consumers.

While I conducted research among numerous hunters and foragers, in this paper I focus on six key interlocutors, for whom I use the pseudonyms Ella, Dan and Maria (foragers); and Michael, Kai and Simon (self-provisioning hunters, who also forage). They are all highly educated, politically progressive, white Australians in their forties and fifties. With their cultural and social capital, they could earn high salaries should they choose, but instead feel obligated by the climate and ecological crises to radically transform their lifestyles in their attempts to live as sustainably as possible. Consequently, none continues working formally in the areas in which they were originally educated. Each earns the money they need through work in varied roles within community organizations, through offering workshops around food provisioning, as writers, gardeners or laborers, or through selling the vegetables they grow.

As Counihan (2021) observes, food activists exhibit varying commitment to their cause, and I focus on the individuals who constitute the more radical edge of the movement, tailoring their lifestyles and pursuing food procurement practices that many would consider extreme in their orientation toward ethical and sustainable living. They feel the urgency and scale of the challenges we face leave them little choice. They consequently constitute a valuable case study given that despite the broad public concern expressed about climate change generally, and industrial animal production specifically, consumption patterns have not transformed apace (Kupsala 2018, 197). Moreover, while there is a large body of research on Indigenous hunting and foraging in Australia, literature exploring non-Indigenous hunting remains sparse. To this end, Bray and colleagues’ (2018, 219) argue that given the dynamic nature of hunting in contemporary Australia, more research into hunters’ values and practices is required “in order to facilitate more constructive dialogues about the role of hunting in food production and consumption.” The prevailing negative stereotype of hunters in Australia continues to invoke an image of an uneducated “redneck, barbaric, and bogan” subset of the community (Adams 2013; Keil 2021), rendering the highly philosophical and considered approach of the self-provisioning hunters in this cohort an interesting counterpoint to enhance our understanding of an inherently complex, high-stakes practice.

The ethical orientations of self-provisioning hunters and foragers are evident in two broad streams of ideas, around which this paper is organized. The first stream is that of emplaced, sustainable living, where I focus primarily on foraging. Self-provisioning hunters and foragers often look to learn from Indigenous Australians, who have engaged in these practices for over 60,000 years, and I go on to examine the complex politics of non-Indigenous hunting and foraging on unceded lands. I then turn to the second stream of ethical orientations through exploring hunters’ conceptualizations of appropriate killing, eating and, ultimately, dying. Through this discussion, I argue that in their efforts to create sustainable, emplaced lifestyles and diets, hunters and foragers invoke animal ontologies to justify their self-provisioning practices within efforts to reframe the human as animal in a more-than-human world.

Emplaced, sustainable living

On a cold, drizzly morning in June 2016, I participated in a paid ($15 AUD per person) weed foraging walk in Melbourne’s densely populated northern suburbs. Our guide, Dan, who has published books on weed identification, framed weed foraging within the permaculture tenet of “making the problem the solution.” He described having first started to ponder the potential value of weeds when he was pulling out some chickweed in his garden, and then thought, “Why am I killing you when I don’t even know who you are, what your story is?” Wandering through the profusion of weeds growing in car parks and empty lots, Dan continued to speak to plants in second person: “You grow fast. You like full sun and disturbed open ground.” Perhaps because of this personification, I found myself feeling a rush of empathy toward these maligned pavement permeators. The mood was evidently contagious and another of the weed walkers, upon hearing that weeds are frontier plants adapted to growing in areas of disturbance, wondered aloud: “Do you think they have memories of glaciers?” Brows furrowed as we pondered this proposition, before Dan went on to tell us how weed knowledge ensures you feel, “enmeshed in nature, wrapped up in it like a big hug.” He spoke of the multiple senses required for foraging; of getting your “eye in” to distinguish a particular weed’s life stages, and how to recognize their smells and feel their distinguishing textures before tasting their bounty.

The walkers enthused over how connected to place they felt through knowing and naming floral life. They felt empowered by nourishing themselves through their own labor, and one commented that she had come along because she wants to be able to provide food for herself and loved ones in the case of apocalypse; a prescient sentiment given the food supply chain issues during the subsequent COVID pandemic. All of us left that day humbled by a newfound respect for a category of floral life that we had previously either ignored, or seen as a garden nuisance. It was a valuable lesson in decentering human perceptions and assumptions, as the categorization of “weed” obfuscates the inherent qualities of the complex and diverse plants deemed as such.

Social media bombard people with a dizzying array of dietary directives, including advice to eat local, seasonal, nutritious foods, while avoiding excessive food miles, waste, and the hyper-processed foods of multinational companies (Ramachandran et al. 2018; Gressier 2018). Against this backdrop, people are embracing weed foraging as an ethical and sustainable food procurement strategy. A week after the workshop, a Melbourne-based weed foraging advocate, Ella, offered me her explanation of why the practice was growing in popularity:

People are feeling as physical creatures hemmed in in terms of their own wildness… It’s like ‘no, no, this has gone too far, I feel too distanced from everything that makes me a fundamental animal.’ I think weed foraging taps into a whole lot of extreme lacks and suspicions and concerns that people are having in this point in history, and answers a lot of them simultaneously. Both in terms of nutritional quality, in terms of knowing where it comes from, in terms of zero ecological impact, in terms of tapping into a hunter-gatherer human ancestry and interacting with the landscape.

Ella is one of several of my interlocutors who explicitly articulated this desire to reconnect with the human-as-animal through hands-on food-provisioning (cf. Poe et al. 2014, 914). Long distance solo hikes piqued her initial interest in foraging, as she wanted to carry less by feeding herself from the land. She started looking into traditional Aboriginal bushfoods, but found many indigenous plants to be labor intensive to acquire and prepare. She then started learning about edible weeds, and eventually coauthored a book on the subject. Foraging gives Ella a strong sense of fulfillment, while reducing her cost of living and need to participate in the formal economy. She commented that zoo animals become “less animal” than their wild counterparts, as they are not embedded in a natural web of interrelations through which they directly meet their needs. The malaise they often experience is comparable, in her view, to the anomie she attributes to some urban-dwelling humans. Thus, for Ella, the capacity to provide for one’s own nutritional needs through a lifestyle that foregrounds emplacement and sustainability is a key lesson she draws from animal ontologies.

Self-provisioning hunters and foragers learn about sustainable living from animals in additional ways. Kai is a biology major with qualifications in natural resource management. He became impassioned when discussing embryonic diapause in kangaroos, which serves to ensure they are living within the land’s carrying capacity by delaying reproduction if conditions are harsh. The lesson Kai takes from this is that people, too, should consider the limits of the ecosystem, taking into account local conditions before acting. He and his partner grow all their own fruit and vegetables, and hunt, forage and trade in the community. He describes the environmental benefits of his diet as including few carbon emissions, virtually no packaging and waste, and species sustainability through selective hunting. He fishes predominantly for trout, an introduced species competing with native fish, while hunting rabbits and deer, both of which are introduced species causing ecosystem damage (see Gressier 2016). Kai has also hunted ducks in years gone by, but will not hunt them in dry years given the impact of drought conditions on duck numbers.

For Michael and his partner Bec, their motivations for their off-grid, self-provisioning lifestyle are manifold, but core among them is sustainable living. They shun flying and driving, gather wind-fallen wood for heating, use solar energy for power, practice permaculture, barter and swap grown and gathered foods, harvest roadkill, and forage and hunt using basic technology, such as bow and arrow, and spear. All the food they consume is that which is available on foot. Like Kai’s family, they share back-to-the-landers’ motivations. These, according to Calvário and Otero (2014, 143), involve “the search for a simpler, self-sufficient, autonomous (free from wage labor and market), close-to-nature, and ecological way of life… [and] a critique of materialist mainstream culture, modern farming practices, and the globalization of the agri-food systems. Back-to-the-landers perceive their choice as a lifestyle project and a way for social transition toward ecological sustainability.”

Michael and Bec’s rejection of consumerism and largely self-sufficient lifestyle in rural Victoria mean they require only a modest income, with the family sustained by just two days a week of waged labor, the income from which is required to service the mortgage on their block of land. They are transparent about the failures they have had in learning to live off-grid, and they freely share knowledge within their community. They are also always learning. Like other Victorian self-provisioning hunters and foragers, Michael and Bec look to Indigenous Australians in seeking more emplaced and sustainable lifestyles. However well-intentioned, the politics of settler-descended Australians learning from and emulating Indigenous ways of being are incredibly complex, as Michael and Bec, and indeed myself as a settler descendent, certainly understand. For this reason, before continuing to explore their hunting and foraging practices, it is important to consider how these politics play out in this context.

Learning from Indigenous Australians

Indigenous Australians have been hunting and foraging across Australia for over 65,000 years. British colonial occupation violently disrupted these practices, and through the legal determination of Terra Nullius (land belonging to no one), First People’s long histories of emplaced living were erased, and their capacity to hunt curtailed, by settler land theft and colonial rule. Settlers and their descendants have since continued, both intentionally and inadvertently, to marginalize Indigenous ways of being and knowing. While the hipster hunters Carruthers Den Hoed (2016, 219) describes in Canada demonstrate “little concern for or even awareness of Aboriginal discourses of hunting,” Victorian self-provisioning hunters and foragers exhibit substantial interest in Indigenous foodways and have actively sought out Indigenous people from whom to learn. They are also very cognizant of the politics of undertaking hunting and foraging on unceded lands. Their beliefs tend to lie at the radical edge of progressive politics; they are acutely aware of the nation’s horrific colonial past and recognize that non-Indigenous Australians’ lifestyles are all inevitably underpinned by ongoing Indigenous dispossession.

Michael and Bec are involved in grassroots efforts for reconciliation, including work to promote truth-telling about the nation’s colonial past. They see learning about Indigenous culture and connecting with Country, including via foodways, as a means of showing respect. There is resonance with this view among some Indigenous leaders, such as Kombumerri scholar, Mary Graham (1999), who has long argued that reconciliation requires, on one level, greater connection to and care for Country by settler Australians. She argues that non-Indigenous Australians should adopt “locally-based, inclusive, nonpolitical, strategy-based frameworks, with a very long term aim of simply looking after land” (Graham 1999, 107). Graham stresses the need for all Australians to locate themselves, to have a relationship with land, and to learn to be good custodians. To this end, Michael and Bec have spent much time with Indigenous people seeking to learn about ways of living in and caring for Country. They consume a wide variety of native foods, with some examples including the flowering groundcover commonly known as pigface, the spinach-like warrigal greens, and the small, tasty fruits of the lilly pilly, along with various insects, native fish, crustaceans, eels, and some mammals and birds. Such an interest in bushfoods subverts the long-held disregard by settler Australians of Indigenous Australian foodways, which stems from the scorn early settlers exhibited for the food-producing capabilities of native ecosystems, and the dismissal of Indigenous Australian diets as primitive, if not repugnant (Newton 2016; Gressier 2018).

While self-provisioning hunters and foragers’ interest in Indigenous foodways is well intentioned, there are risks associated with white Australians efforts to learn and “Indigenise” more broadly (Porter 2019, 143). If more white Australians follow suit, Porter (2019, 143) warns of the “sheer exhaustion this would wreak on Indigenous people and organizations, already often overwhelmed and under-resourced, managing the sudden interest in their practices after centuries of being totally ignored […].” She goes on to suggest that “For those, like me, with imperial eyes, we assume that the world is open to us as knowing subjects, that we can make the world knowable to us through our empirical endeavors. Learning is our privilege, knowledge of the world virtually a right” (Porter 2019, 143).

There is, of course, a fine line between respecting and making space for diverse knowledges, and appropriating them, which hunters and foragers navigate differently. Kai is cautious about pursuing bushfoods as he does not want to contravene what he sees as appropriate behavior. “I’m not Dja Dja Wurrung [the traditional owners of the region in which he lives]. I can’t harvest Murnong (Microseris sp), I can’t harvest a lot of stuff because I’m not Aboriginal.” Kai wants to avoid any form of cultural or dietary appropriation, and so he prefers eating introduced species, such as deer and rabbit, which has the additional advantage of removing a non-native animal that is causing ecological damage.

Echoing a broader critique of alternative food networks (Edwards 2023), Mayes (2018) observes that alternative food movements in Australia are predominantly middle-class white spaces, drawing on white agrarian imaginaries, that can be exclusionary of nonwhite people and those in lower socioeconomic positions. He suggests that ethical consumption practices risk “perpetuating economic disparities as well as masking racial inequalities in regard to labor and spatiality” (Mayes 2018, 109). Self-provisioning hunters and foragers are certainly operationalizing their practices from a position of privilege. They are not motivated by poverty, lack of food security, or the basic need to survive. As highly educated white citizens, despite at times pushing boundaries of legality, they construct their practices of gleaning, bartering, dumpster diving and consuming roadkill as virtuous activism, rather than as the “the irregular, black, hidden, shadow, parallel or underground economy, involving criminal activities” attributed to those in the global south undertaking parallel practices of acquiring foods outside of mainstream commodity transactions (Edwards 2023, 12). Yet, relative to some aspects of alternative food movements, certainly in terms of affordability, foraging and hunting are arguably less exclusionary, as they can be undertaken on public land, with foraging, in particular, requiring no specialized equipment. Edible weed books can be purchased cheaply, and plenty of information is freely available on the internet. Hunting is more complicated and, if you are using a firearm, ammunition and a license are required, with the first two ranging considerably in cost. Fees for licenses to hunt are inexpensive, however, at $60.12 AUD for a deer or game bird license and $80.18 AUD for a license to hunt both in the 2022 season (GMA 2022b, 5). There are also exemptions for Indigenous peoples: “Traditional Owners acting in according with a Natural Resources Agreement are exempt from the requirement to hold a Game License and can hunt on their recognized Traditional Owner Settlement Area in accordance with agreed terms” (GMA 2022a).

Victoria’s self-provisioning hunters and foragers are deeply political and engaged with social justice. They recognize there are no quick fixes to the entrenched disadvantage of Indigenous Australians, but they try in various ways to work toward greater equity. Yet, as Maddison and Nakata (2019, 7) point out, “all settlers are complicit in the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples.” That is because, as Macoun (2016, 86) observes “No politically pure or righteous way of being, acting or thinking as a white person or non-Indigenous person can exempt us from our political context, even though it is a context we collectively create, recreate, and may hope to change.” This cohort of self-provisioning hunters and foragers would not deny this. Transforming relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians will be the work of generations, but their awareness of their own ongoing privilege, their desire to learn about Indigenous practices, and their respect for Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies motivate attempts to move forward and not repeat the mistakes of the past.

Accountable hunting

I now turn to the second stream of animal ontologies pursued by self-provisioning hunters through exploring perceptions of appropriate killing, eating and, ultimately, dying. At the heart of self-provisioning hunters’ ethics is the belief, shared by many hunting cultures globally that hunting, if practiced with care and respect, should be “a long-term relationship of reciprocal exchange between animals and the humans who hunt them” (Nadasdy 2007, 25). This is not to say that the exchange is equivalent and direct, but rather within the cycles of life and death, there are times of taking and giving. These hunters describe developing such beliefs in response to the dominant Australian paradigm of meat consumption. Meat has been sanitized and disembodied from its origins for decades, owing to the “feeling of guilt, shame, and disgust when [people] think (as seldom as possible) about the industrial processes by which domestic animals are rendered into products” (Bulliet 2005, 3). In recent years, however, there has been a shift among some consumers toward a confrontation with the fact of animal deaths (Kupsala 2018).

About a decade ago, the treatment of animals in intensive livestock production increasingly horrified Kai. He came to feel hunting was a far less cruel means of procuring meat. He has become an outspoken “real food” activist and holds workshops teaching people to forage, grow vegetables and fruit, raise animals, and kill them. He thinks if people are going to eat meat, they should experience killing. Confronting the inherent violence of consuming animals leads, in his view, to people pushing for better conditions for animals, less wastage, and a greater understanding of the implications of meat eating.

Proponents of this approach argue that the intimacy of facilitating, or at least witnessing, animal death reinstates a more honest relationship with food (Kupsala 2018). Writing of human-animal relationships more broadly, Haraway (2008, 36) argues that responsibility derives from “being with” animals, as “touch ramifies and shapes accountability.” She goes on to argue that “Respect is respecere—looking back, holding in regard, understanding that meeting the look of the other is a condition of having to face oneself. All of this is what I am calling ‘sharing suffering’.” Simon, a self-provisioning hunter in his early forties, articulates the significance of this kind of presence and connection in relation to food provisioning:

Killing is personal, and that goes for plants as well as animals. You know, it’s the end of that being’s life… So I think it’s almost common courtesy, to be there physically, obviously, but also mentally. I’m mindful of what I’m doing and try and not see this as a piece of meat in front of me, but a person… another being that’s an intentional agent in the world.

While Simon believes his commitment to being mentally present at the time of killing makes his practice more ethical, Naisargi Dave (2014, 434) argues of intimate killing generally that “another reading is possible: that the act of intimacy, insofar as it relies on the witnessing human subject, constructs the animal as theoretical, as a mere object in the [witness’s] autobiography.” Dave’s suggestion, then, is that while the killer may feel that they have been noble in sitting with the difficult emotions through confronting the consequences of their meat-eating face-on, the animal still loses its life and serves merely as a prop in the self-aggrandizing narrative of the killer. Gillespie (2011, 120) similarly suggests that “justifications for DIY slaughter as a way to connect to food […] conceal what the process really does. DIY slaughter connects participants to the violence against the animal, and not to the animal him/herself.” Intimate killing, then, continues to be a highly contested practice that hunters see as a more honest relationship to meat eating, while animal studies advocates find it an anthropocentric and unconvincing justification for continued killing.

In view of these critical animal studies arguments, I was interested in how self-provisioning hunters describe killing. Contrary to some of the heroic discourse I heard among trophy hunters during my research in Botswana (Gressier 2015, 2014), there was less aggrandizing of bush skills and hunting prowess. Each, like Kai here, openly shared reflections on their failures:

Last year I shot a stag in the heart, it was such a massive stag, and it ran. And we spent two or three hours following the blood trail through the bush, and we never found it. So it’s there, a rotted carcass now, and I felt massive amounts of guilt. That was the first deer that has ever got away. And we tried everything, we really tried to find it, but that was really frustrating, and it was such a waste of natural resources. So, I was guilty of that, but I was also guilty of the fact that I put it through a lot of pain.

While emphasizing his efforts to redress his mistake, Kai does not represent himself in particularly heroic strokes. His guilt is not relished or seen as legitimizing hunting, but rather is a cause of continuing emotional discomfort that ensures he hunts with care. Returning to the subject of his animal killing workshops, Kai commented: “I have had grown men cry. I’ve had adults leave at the last minute, and they’re like, “I can’t do it.’ And I’m like, ‘yes!’, because there’s a fair chance after this weekend, they’ll reevaluate how they think about meat. And that’s what I’m trying to achieve.” For Kai, experiencing emotional discomfort is less about alleviating guilt than changing behavior through increasing respect for the real costs of meat eating. Indeed, none of these self-provisioning hunters is simplistically pro-meat consumption. They believe we should be eating much less meat, and never that raised through intensive animal rearing. Consequently, they value intimate killing for the accountability and care they believe it fosters, but also because they see it as “natural” given it is how all predators necessarily hunt.

As with the other hunters, Simon’s concern for animal suffering results in him only taking a shot when confident of a clean kill:

I’ll always try and make as swift a kill as possible, but I wonder whether our cultural obsession with suffering is really another side of the coin of our fear of death. I think that’s where the whole vegan impulse comes from; we don’t accept our own embodiment, and the finiteness of our life, and the fact that we all suffer. We don’t accept it for ourselves, so when we have empathy with other creatures of other species, then we project that [antipathy toward suffering] on them as well.

With these kinds of discourses, self-provisioning hunters counter their critics through pointing out that killing and dying are inevitable in nature. They believe we constantly distance ourselves from this fundamental reality in urban Australian culture. Simon justifies and finds some level of peace with killing through analyzing the ways in which his cultural inheritance makes an ethical quandary of what in nature is simply the realities of the food chain.

No amount of rationalizing completely dispels their ethical concerns, however, and Kai’s angst leads him to restrict his hunting to the winter months, when he struggles to obtain sufficient nutrients from his garden and foraging. “I think I turn a lot of blokes off when I say I eat vegetables all the way through summer, because they expect me to be killing something, which is a masculine thing,” he told me, before continuing: “But as a male, at times it’s a pain in the arse to go kill something, because I struggle emotionally. But that’s part of being human, I think, to actually face what it is to be human, as opposed to having this bullshit bravado thing.”

As a brief aside, the dictates of heteronormative Australian masculinity are evident, and, indeed, hunting broadly remains a highly gendered activity. Meat-eating and hunting have long been associated with masculinity (Sobal 2005). Patriarchal constructions of women as lacking physical and psychological fortitude have historically alienated women from the practice, as has the history of association between hunting and sexuality, with men constructed as the predatory hunters sexualizing women as prey (Kalof, Fitzgerald, and Baralt 2004). In keeping with this gendered paradigm, all the self-provisioning hunters I came to know were men. Their female partners were integral to raising livestock, growing vegetables and foraging, but consistently chose not to hunt. While their reasons differed slightly, they articulated a distaste for direct killing.

There are a growing number of female hunters in Victoria, however, they remain in the minority at 4.2% (GMA 2022b). Notably, the few women hunters I encountered did not share the ethics and motivations of the self-provisioning hunters. These women derived from recreational hunting families and had been socialized into the practice for the purposes of time in nature, family and community bonding, and the challenges and rewards attributed to successfully stalking, killing and, sometimes but not always, eating a desired animal in the course of the hunt. By contrast, most of the self-provisioning hunters did not have familial hunting experience, but rather had come to it independently because of their belief in its ecological benefits.

Interestingly, like hunters, male foragers at times perform a kind of hyper-masculinity. Maria laughed derisively while telling me about the handling of a Scotch Thistle she witnessed at a foraging workshop:

He had leather gloves on and cut it down with a sword! And I’m, like, “get out of here!” And then chopping it all up and cooking it for hours. I’m going “what the hey? I mean, get a pizza, this is nuts!” It’s a bit of a guy thing. It’s kind of like the hardcore end of the edible weed thing. Like some of the guys who run foraging walks to collect nettles. Instead of eating the nettle cooked, what you can do is, if you put the back of the nettle with the back of another nettle, so it’s two leaves like that so the bits that prickle you are facing each other, and the smooth side is on the outside, you can put it in your mouth and eat it and look like a real hero, a he-man thing. “I’m so tough!” like eating hot chillies and stuff like that.

These examples suggest that despite the politically progressive bent of most self-provisioning hunters and foragers, traditional gender roles and relationships persist within some aspects of their food procurement practices, even while the power dynamics I observed in other aspects of their lives appeared more equitable. Animal ontologies are arguably evident in claims often heard in hunting circles of the “predatory instinct which survives in modern man” (Ortega Y Gasset 2007: 119), who exhibits atavistic longings for the authentic masculine rite of hunting (Giacomelli and Gibbert 2018, 168). In this respect, and in the gendered nature of hunting more broadly, there emerges some dissonance and discomfort for these socially progressive male hunters.

Justifying meat eating

Returning now to questions surrounding the legitimacy of hunting, the moral complexity self-provisioning hunters express about their practices raises the question of why hunt? Why eat meat in the first place? In most cultures, meat carries a heavy symbolic load, and what people eat or construct as taboo reflects their morals, values and ideologies, while confirming their membership in various social configurations (Fiddes 1991). In justifying meat consumption, self-provisioning hunters’ moral positions again draw upon animal ontologies. Simon was a vegan for many years before reverting to meat eating and taking up hunting. Cohabitating with a cat and discovering that “animals are in fact people” was his trigger for a shift to a vegan diet. Seven years later, through becoming a parent, he came to the realization that humans are in fact animals. In his words:

We see ourselves as our little rational self, and our body is just like a meat taxi that we go around in. But the actual bodily reality of my wife becoming pregnant, and then going through labour, and then a person coming out of her, and then seeing that person—who was basically helpless when she was born—and then learning to have all her faculties as an animal and as a human, just the whole experience really made me realise that we are our bodies, and, also, that that is an animal body.

Animals, he points out, cannot photosynthesize, so must continually take the lives of other animals and plants, both of which he describes as “persons”. He challenges vegan philosophy because of what he sees as differential treatment of animals and plants: he believes they are equally worthy of care and respect, and equally legitimate as food. He strongly disagrees with the vegan notion that beings worthy of respect must not be utilized, and vice versa. To this end, Plumwood (2000, 295) similarly argues that because all biological beings are food for other beings, to construct animals as inedible as per vegan mandates constitutes “a deep rejection of ecological embodiment.” Self-provisioning hunters and foragers ardently concur with this idea, and Simon points out that predation provides a necessary ecosystem service that ensures “dynamic vitality in a materially finite world… We are animals, basically, and ecosystems work by animals eating the flesh of other organisms, whether they’re other animals, or whether they’re plants. I love nature, and I can’t see nature as being inherently wrong in any way. So, to me, there can’t be a fundamental ethical problem with predation.”

It is, indeed, a paradox that even while Australians value nature highly, many continue to experience discomfort about the fundamental workings of ecosystems as underpinned by predation. Death, put simply, is seen as bad. In his ethnography of the Runa Amazonian hunting community, Kohn (2013, 19) grapples with the multispecies relationships within hunting contexts and points out the problem of transferring moral values in the realm of inter-human relations to the natural world:

Projecting our morality, which rightfully privileges equality, on a relational landscape composed in part of nested and unidirectional associations of a logical and ontological, but not a moral, nature is a form of anthropocentric narcissism that renders us blind to some of the properties of that world beyond the human.

As we saw above in Simon’s comments above, self-provisioning hunters articulate a similar line of argument through their critiques of veganism and the moralism they see as disconnected from nature’s processes. To this end, Kai’s rationalization for meat consumption draws on human physiology and the notion of humanity’s place as predators within the food chain. “Having that biology background,” he says, “it kind of formulates this understanding that you’re just an animal, you’re a part of that system, and that is why I’m still a meat eater…. We have a place in an ecosystem. We’re not above nature.” Our biologically determined omnivory serves for him as a legitimizing moral position for meat eating.

Self-provisioning hunters believe, then, that the vegan notion of placing oneself “above the food chain” through rejecting the fundamental tenets of predation perpetuates, rather than challenges, human exceptionalism. They also point to the impossibility of doing no harm. In Kai’s words:

Instagram and Facebook, there’s great transparency, so I can see what a vegan person is eating the entire year. And all through winter: tomatoes, eggplant, zucchini, all summer vegetables. So there’s monocrop agriculture, and massive food miles… you can’t have a double-based principle like, “I’m a vegan, because I want animals to be looked after,” then you can’t not understand that by eating shit food, you’re actually adding to habitat loss, biodiversity loss.

Self-provisioning hunters’ close identification against vegans, so evident in their anecdotes, stems from both arguments they have, and from their own moral ambiguity about meat consumption. Both Kai and Simon described having a vegan voice inside their heads challenging them at every turn when hunting. While their positions on the legitimacy of meat consumption may be oppositional, rather than being a politics of difference, self-provisioning hunters’ strong identification with and against vegans stems, I believe, from fundamental similarities. This is as both groups are making considerable lifestyle changes in order to conform to their strongly held values and desires to live an ethical life.

Eating and being eaten

Among self-provisioning hunters and foragers, such conscious food choices result in a deep appreciation for the food obtained. However, how these individuals define eating well varies. In Canada, Carruthers Den Hoed (2016, 215) describes hipster hunters as prioritizing healthy food that is untarnished by the degrading practices of industrial production. Gastronomic sophistication is their core goal, which contrasts with the self-provisioning hunters and foragers in Victoria for whom eating well is about good food, certainly, but more so about sustainability and reengaging the human as animal. Ella describes how foraged foods are about far more than just taste:

While I was on the Yarapinda [hiking trail], I ate quite a lot of these things called bush coconuts. They’re like an insect ball: a big larvae inside a wooden ball… Knowing about the life cycle of that larvae, and how it related to that tree, and what that wasp did when it hatched, and how it existed within that desert ecosystem, and how it was quite a high protein, high fat food for Aboriginal people, and then having to climb up these trees to break them down, and then squat on your haunches to be able to get enough leverage with a rock to get them open, and then to scoop out the larvae with your fingers. So by the time you’re eating it, it’s not just about what that larvae tastes like, it’s about that entire story… It’s changed a lot how I relate to food, because I’ve ceased to see it as pure oral gratification.

Eating well for Ella, then, involves recognition of the whole context of food acquisition, including the wellbeing that comes with self-provisioning. She waxes lyrical about how foraging reengages the physicality of the human as animal. She describes honing visual proficiency through scanning a landscape to locate the food it holds. Ella believes people’s whole posture changes when they become attuned to their environment in this way. She speaks of the physical strength and agility foraging develops, and how she has been so focussed on accessing something like a bush coconut, that she has hardly noticed that she somehow “monkeyed up a tree.” Foragers believe such a fixation on the end goal has substantial mental health benefits, in that anxiety and stress are dampened in the singular pursuit of the foraged item. In Ella’s words, “it is so completely its own end point. It has no further motive.”

Self-provisioning hunters describe a similar effect, where they mute the noise of the conscious mind through attuning to every noise and physical sign of an animal’s presence. In Michael’s words:

I find that stalking an animal is the total embodiment of my creaturely self. I feel like putting myself into the mind of that animal, and also understanding that animal’s characteristics and its senses, where the wind is, the noise that I’m making… I often feel like a clunky twit. But there are times when I kind of overcome that and feel like there’s a whole other side of myself.

This sense of embodiment and deep ecological belonging comes with a sense of obligation. Plumwood’s (2000, 300) concept of sacred eating encapsulates a belief shared by self-provisioning hunters’ that “the animal can be made use of responsibly and seriously to fulfill an important need in… a reciprocal chain of mutual use which must ultimately include both hunter and hunted.” In this vein, self-provisioning hunters believe that if we are to challenge human exceptionalism, we must get better at accepting human bodies as food for nonhuman others. However, becoming food is a persistent cultural taboo, and Australian authorities are quick to kill sharks and crocodiles on the rare occasion they eat a human. This response stems from a worldview that “denies the most basic feature of animal existence on planet earth – that we are food and that through death we nourish others. The food/death perspective, so familiar to our ancestors, is something the human exceptionalism of western modernity has structured out of life” (Plumwood 2008, 324).

This is not the case for self-provisioning hunters and foragers whose practices force attention to human corporeality and vulnerability. As Kohn (2013, 17) observes of Runa hunters, “one’s ability to destroy other selves… highlights the fact that one IS an ephemeral self…. that can all too quickly cease being.” The hunter’s status can quickly change from that of predator to prey, and self-provisioning hunters and foragers tend to highly value the danger element. Ella, for example, firmly believes that decentering the human requires the embrace of vulnerability. She talks about the risk of experimenting with unknown weeds or plants, and the multi-day tests she undertakes, rubbing a plant initially on her lips or tongue, testing for a reaction, before proceeding to ingest a small amount. She takes such risks, she says, because: “I feel by ceasing to be physically vulnerable, I cease to be properly alive and animal.” She told her family that if she dies on a hike, not to be sad: “If pushing it in that way was something that messed me up, it seems worthwhile. Because that’s the decision I’ve made to stay attached to my own vulnerability within the environment. I don’t feel like I can properly enjoy the environment, or love it, without being a little bit vulnerable to it.”

This vulnerability extends to the desire expressed among self-provisioning hunters to integrate their mortal remains back into local ecosystems. Michael talks about taking himself into the bush “like an old dog” when it is his time to die, so he can compost and return to nature. Ravens and eagles fascinate Simon, and he would like to have his corpse left to the birds in fulfilling his commitment to corporeal reciprocity. He went as far as emailing the Department of Cemeteries and Crematoria to apply for this “sky burial,” but they refused, to his great frustration, stating this would not preserve the dignity of the dead, or accord with social norms. Simon does not fear dying or becoming prey, but feels exhilarated by the thought of becoming part of a bird’s physiology in this way.

Such ideas are at odds with broader Australian cultural values that tend to construct death and suffering as negative. Aging is something we fight, and we enlist technology in the service of prolonging life as long as possible. This stems from the Christian belief that the soul departs the body postmortem and ascends from earth to heaven. “Death becomes a site for apartness, domination and individual salvation, rather than for sharing and for nurturing a community of life” (Plumwood 2012, 81). Yet, as Heldke (2018, 255) points out, “dying is far more a part of what we do than flourishing. Every organism dies, but not every organism flourishes; ought not our conception of the individual come to grips with this?”

Conclusion

Climate change and the ecological crisis are forcing us to take stock of the implications of our actions for all of the earth’s inhabitants. This in turn requires consideration of how to “rethink ‘the human’ after the anthropocentric bubble has burst” (van Dooren, Kirksey, and Münster 2016, 3). There are frequent calls in the literature to challenge human exceptionalism, but often no road map for doing so. Simon has read extensively about the diverse cultural groups engaged in hunting across the globe. Yet, he does not support the idea of the wholesale appropriation of another cultural group’s way of being. Rather, given his lack of exposure to a relational ecological cosmology within his upbringing, he sees a need among those wishing to engage in hands-on food procurement to develop their own conceptual framework. Even while he describes feeling quite isolated in this pursuit, within the emergent philosophies around hunting and foraging I have encountered, there has been a considerable level of consistency in the values espoused by this subset of self-provisioning hunters and foragers, most of whom do not know each other.

Self-provisioning hunters and foragers are looking for inspiration about emplaced, sustainable ways of living in other cultures, and in nature and among animals. This is not to say they aim to emulate the ontologies of any particular animal species. Instead, they recognize the human-animal as unique, in the sense that every species is unique. They see homo sapiens’ capacity for moral thought as biologically enabled and integral to our animal being. Self-provisioning hunters exercise this capacity thoroughly as they struggle to make sense of the complexities of the life and death conundrum.

In doing so, they look to animal ontologies which they enact through their efforts to reengage as actors living sustainably within local ecosystems, while shunning intermediation through being present, touching, looking back and accepting accountability. They feel connected to place, confident in their self-sufficiency, satisfied by their rewarding labor, and revitalized by reengaging with their embodied capabilities, or, in their terms, with “being animal.” Cycles of life and death are celebrated, gratitude is given for sustenance, and eventually the ultimate reciprocity is sought through the return of their own bodies to local ecosystems. Self-provisioning remains a somewhat fringe activity, and likely will for the foreseeable future. Their practices are unlikely to be scaled to the extent of solving the myriad complex problems of our times, but self-provisioning hunters and foragers offer a window into one of the creative means through which concerned community members are seeking to transition to a more sustainable future.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).