Which hunting photo is upsetting?

When you spend much of your free time in the pursuit and preparation of wild game, it's so easy to forget how the rest of the world sees meat. Then along come the little reminders.

Case in point: Boyfriend and I have a story (his) and photos (mine) in the current issue of Edward Behr's the Art of Eating. The article, "Duck Hunt: In Search of California's Perfect Wild Waterfowl," is about how much duck flavors can vary not just from one species to the next, but from one county to the next.

I've worked with Behr before and I know he likes gritty realism in the photos he publishes - none of that highly polished stuff you find in most food magazines - so I selected photos for this story with that in mind.

In addition to two fairly benign hunter-and-dog shots from the field, I gave him several fairly graphic shots from the picking shed at the Salinas Club in the Grasslands. These are the three he chose:




Even I've got to admit the second one is kinda grisly. But the Art of Eating has a really sophisticated foodie audience - "Everyday with Rachael Ray" this ain't. And I've found that non-hunting foodies tend to understand better than most other non-hunters I've encountered that meat comes from formerly living animals.

So when the issue finally came out, can you guess which shot bothered some of the readers?

The third one, of the dog with the duck in its mouth.

Now I should be clear that no one complained about the morality of hunting or eating meat. Good Lord, the cover story for this issue is about "The Fair of the Fattened Ox" in Italy, which culminates in the prize-winning oxen being led off to slaughter. These readers aren't anti-meat.

But apparently some people weren't prepared to see that lifeless duck in the dog's mouth. I think it was just too close to the moment of death.

Or, perhaps, more accurately, too close to its last moment of life.

While this was the last photo I expected to upset anyone, I think I can make sense of it.

Industrial agriculture has sheltered most of us from the reality that our meat comes from individual living creatures. We no longer raise meat animals in our back yards; our neighbors no longer raise them down the street. They are fattened on vast farms and slaughtered in big facilities that most of us never have to see.

While we can intellectually grasp that meat comes from individual animals, most of us don't have to face the reality behind that fact. It's just like how we understand that people go hungry all over the world every day, but we don't get upset about it until we see the photo of the starving child, with his distended belly and flies on his face. Then it becomes more real.

And even the foodies, who are among the most aware people in our country in terms of where food comes from, aren't immune to the shock that accompanies the reality of individual death.

It's one of the things that makes me grateful that I hunt. I saw most of the meat I eat when it was still a living animal. I apologized to many of these animals for taking their lives, or thanked them, or both. And I don't take one single bite for granted.

© Holly A. Heyser 2010