On Wildlife Conservation

5/10/2025

I hunt with my friend, and when we discover scat or a pressed bed of tall grass, we will remark aloud “deer sign” to one another. Eventually, when we see a deer, we point at it and say “deer sign”. When we see crushed beer cans at the bottom of these otherwise pristine valleys, we point and say “dumb-ass sign”. We hike, hoping to at least hear a turkey over the course of an eight-hour day in the foothills. Occassionally, over the distant roar of ATVs and BMX motors, we wonder aloud whether this ponderosa with its flat-shouldered limbs and this clear mountain run-off would be accepted by a turkey for the eden it is if it meant hearing motors whine all day.

Should I be so critical of this noisy infringement on nature, seeing as my hope is to kill an animal and take it from its home? Suppose I would be less of an impact in that sense, if I didn’t waste all this effort hiking rough terrain, and just got into BMX? It might be less of a sin to drive something from its home than to kill it. Those turkeys, wherever they are, should count themselves lucky to be alive.

On the road to Wisconsin, my father tells me about an argument he had with a friend. He tells me about all the activist expos they had visited, and posted about in the last year to prevent programs that would exploit natural land set aside for wildlife. One, a pipeline in Alaska, would cut clean through the migration path of the caribou there. I don’t understand how he reconciles that his customers, lifetime bowhunters all, gave so much to these charitable causes and then proudly voted to have them all destroyed in a single month.

Show me an environmentalist who rejoices in the caribou saved from hunters by the construction of an alpine oil pipeline. When I sit in the woods, and gently manifest a big dumb tom to appear, charging in a waddle toward my decoy and into my sights, I hear the ghosts of many friends who ask me how I can bear to kill an animal, to do that to nature. I wonder how anyone who holds conservation above killing can fail to justify their own suicide.

I sit in the misty, clean air of a Wisconsin birch forest and steep in the shame of being human and being alive. I ponder the love I have for all turkey but one.