Digging deep for answers: Why do I hunt?

When I'm not busy spending every free moment hunting - you know, like when I've just had my appendix removed - I spend a fair bit of time marveling at how much I love hunting. And wondering why.

I didn't grow up hunting, but once I started, it was as if a piece of me had been missing all my life without me realizing it, but now that piece was finally in place. I realized very, very quickly that all my outdoor play as a child (except for maybe the Tonka trucks) was geared toward preparing me for this: making me alert, observant and intrigued by my surroundings.

Now I can't imagine not hunting. Getting all my food merely by going to the grocery store, tossing stuff in the cart and standing in the checkout line seems unsatisfying.

During my recovery from surgery this week, I found what may be a clue to why I love hunting so much (and no, it wasn't in a codeine reverie - but good guess). I found it in an unexpected place: a book called "Animals Make Us Human," by Temple Grandin.

If you don't know the name, you've probably heard of her. Grandin is an autistic woman with a PhD in animal science who helps slaughterhouses and stockyards design systems that keep animals calm and content. Her autism has given her unusual insights to animal behavior - she can spot things that terrify animals, but that most of us wouldn't notice.

When her new book came out last week, she was all over the radio, and I found her discussion of animal behavior fascinating, so I ordered the book. It's a good read, a real mixed bag of intriguing information about everything from cat and dog behavior to issues with wildlife and zoos.

Much of the book deals with what one scientist calls "Blue-Ribbon Emotions" that drive animal behavior. The four key ones are SEEKING (learning/exploring), RAGE, FEAR and PANIC, and three others that periodically become important are LUST, CARE (as in maternal nurturing) and PLAY.

As I read the book, I began thinking about how these emotions don't just drive animals, but people as well. I'm a firm believer that people are animals too - just a little smarter, and blessed with opposable thumbs.

In the chapter on zoos, Grandin writes about what some zoos have done to counteract the extreme boredom that causes abnormal behavior in some animals, particularly the large predators and primates. In one case, the San Francisco Zoo developed a system in which an African leopard named Sabrina had to follow a series of speaker-generated bird sounds around her enclosure until her actions finally triggered the release of food. Sabrina loved it, and she found novel ways to trigger the food release, not following the same pattern every time.

The same guy who designed that system created another one for Diana monkeys: A light would go on, and if monkeys pulled a lever, the system would release food at the opposite end of the cage and they could hopscotch over a series of platforms to get to it. A newer version of the system gave them not food, but plastic tokens they could use literally to buy food out of a machine. The monkeys loved it, and they all used it differently: some spent their tokens right away, others saved them and one figured out how to keep his mother from stealing the food he bought with his tokens.

OK, Holly, what's this got to do with hunting?

In all of these cases, the animals did not have to work to get their food - the zoos still put food out for them to ensure they had adequate nutrition. But the animals loved these systems.

"Many, many studies have found that captive animals will choose to work for food instead of just having it handed to them," Grandin writes. "Wild animals don't want a free lunch. The reason they like working for their food is that it feels good. That's because in all of the studies, 'working' actually means SEEKING. The animal has to forage for hidden food in its enclosure, or manipulate a puzzle feeder (a kind of container with food inside), or chase acoustic prey. All of these activities activate the SEEKING system. They let the animal hunt."

Ah ha!

I can't tell you how often I read or hear - whether it's from an anti-hunter or just a perplexed non-hunter, "Why would you hunt when you can just get food at the grocery store?" In fact, I remember asking Boyfriend a similar question before he got me out hunting: "If you want to eat rabbits, why don't we just raise some in the back yard? Why do you need to hunt them?"

It's a good question, because hunting - for most of us - is not cheap or easy.

Yes, there are logical reasons for hunting: It provides food that is healthier - no hormones, antibiotics or pesticides - than factory-farmed meat. It provides food that is tastier, because the animals have had a varied, natural diet. It does not require animals to have lived their entire lives in captivity, sometimes under conditions most people would consider extremely cruel.

Such obvious logic still doesn't explain why we're so driven to hunt. But perhaps the ideas in Grandin's book do: Hunting engages one of the core emotions that drive all animals - SEEKING. It is deeply, deeply satisfying.

Like a zoo animal raised in captivity, I didn't know what I'd been missing. But once the option of hunting was given to me, I discovered it was a part of my natural state of being. Who cares that it's expensive, time-consuming and difficult? It's what I'm meant to do.

© Holly A. Heyser 2008