For author, hunter, woodsman and “hard-core,
out-and-amongst-’em … serious wildlife watcher” David Petersen,
elk are more than just a hobby, topic or even a passion; they are a
religion. If books had to have subtitles that reflected their
deeper messages, Petersen’s newest book, Elkheart: A Personal
Tribute to Wapiti and Their World, might be A Neanderthal Runs
Through It.
“For all but the last 10 millennia or
so of our multimillion-year run as Homo, hunting and gathering were
all we did. Hunting filled our days with challenge and action, our
nights with story. Hunting inspired our dreams and art and myths
and religions, helping significantly to shape what we are today,
for better and for worse.”
While Elkheart is on
the surface a wildlife book about the West’s most majestic antlered
animal, the heart of the book is an exploration of the spirit of
the hunter. And it is this spirit, for better or worse, that offers
the best hope of saving wildlife and the wild habitat they need to
survive, Petersen argues.
“Through four decades
of intimately personal experience, I’ve evolved an unshakable
belief that the essence – and thus the moral justification and
greatest reward – of so-called “sport” hunting lies in challenge,
in woodcraft, in humility, in respect (if not love) for the animals
we hunt and the country we hunt them in, evidenced by an eager
willingness to protect and propagate both.”
This
is familiar turf for Petersen. Best known, perhaps, as the editor
of Edward Abbey’s journals, Petersen also has authored four other
books of natural history and a collection of essays. He also edited
A Hunter’s Heart, a controversial anthology on the ethics of
hunting that earned him national recognition as a “hunting
ethicist.”
Among that bibliography, Elkheart may
be Petersen’s best work yet. This is a rare gem of nature writing:
a natural history book that is unusually informative, entertaining
and opinionated, thanks to Petersen’s weaving of quality research
and personal experience with personality, philosophy, humor and
some downright furious rants against what he considers to be the
most offensive and dangerous threats to wildlife and
wilderness.
In this part of the book, Petersen
unleashes his strongest tirade against the exploding elk-ranching
industry, which in Colorado alone has grown 50-fold since the
mid-1980s.
Petersen quotes Canadian wildlife
writer Kevin Van Tighem in saying that elk ranches are “disease and
genetic contamination factories.” In states that have elk ranching,
wildlife agencies report problems with diseases and parasites,
habitat loss due to fencing, and a tarnishing of hunting’s image by
some ranches’ unethical and unchallenging trophy
hunting.
The only force that can stand up to the
types of profiteering threatening big game animals and the habitat
they need – along with elk ranching, Petersen cites road building
for logging, poaching, real estate development, predator control
and public-lands livestock grazing as particularly damaging – is
love. And he challenges all wildlife and wildlands lovers to match
the love and activism of hunters.
“No one,
biologists notwithstanding,” Petersen writes, “knows or cares more
about the natural histories and daily dramas of animals in the
wild, no one is a more attentive student of animal spoor, no one
more deeply and honestly loves wildlife and wild lands and freedom
and dignity, than the hunter.”
He adds:
“Hunters, after all, historically have provided a whopping 80
percent of the funding for all wildlife programs in America.
(While, to my knowledge, no hard-core “animal welfare” group has
ever given one thin dime to benefit wildlife or wildlife
habitat.)’
Spirit is what saving wildlife boils
down to, Petersen argues. And Elkheart is a good place to get a
foothold in that spirit.
n
Ken
Wright writes in Durango,
Colorado.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Elk: Pursuing the hunt and preserving the species.
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