A Vegan at the Hunting Camp

Thoughts on hunting and hanging out with my Uncle Russell and his boys

Me and Uncle Russell

I hadn’t been to a hunting camp since I was a child. My father was a member of a local camp called ‘Union Meadows’ along with other men from our church. We went out there a handful of times with some Peterson uncles, cousins, and my siblings and ran around the forest all day, built forts, shot BB guns, tromped through the snow, took saunas, and hung out playing board games. Although, I don’t remember it too clearly. 

We have home videos of some of those trips, and it’s an interesting phenomenon when you’re unsure if you have a first-hand memory of something or if it was implanted there by a photo or video. Either way, I definitely remember the buckets of water with a peanut-butter-covered Coke can on a string hovering over the water, acting as homemade rat traps. 

While I always enjoyed nature and spent countless hours—no matter the season—in the forest behind our house with my younger brothers, hunting never appealed to me. Like many children, I traumatically remember shooting a finch with my BB gun and feeling really really really bad after pulling the trigger, seeing that pop of feathers, and then picking up a shockingly light teensy bird that was mostly frail bones and sinew and had been minding its own business and did nothing to warrant me sending a copper BB into its chest. 

I was only eleven when my father passed, never went to the hunting camp after that, and I never got into American gun culture. Fast forward a decade or so, and I became a vegan. Fast forward another decade or so, and I’m a vegan wearing a Goodwill-bought camo jacket and walking into a hunting camp for the first time in over twenty years to hang out with my Uncle Russell and my avid hunter cousins.

And I’m very glad I went. I wrote in the Uncle Russell piece how the small camp was a shock to the senses, the fresh deer skull hanging from a tree, the white bone plates with crevices of bright red flesh lines, the snout a deep bloody crimson, the bear rug draped over the edge of the bunk bed, the bare turkey legs hanging from strings in the woodshed, the fluffy limp bird my cousin shot getting noosed up beside them, or my cousin’s dogs gnawing on large hunks of recently-extracted bone. It was a lot to take in. And there was no vegan option for dinner as Uncle Russell’s mashed potatoes had more dairy than a freaking ice cream cake.

But I didn’t expect a catered meal, never felt the need to push my beliefs, and was there simply for the experience. And I learned that the hunting camp isn’t all about getting deer; it’s also about hanging out. It’s about camaraderie, getting into nature, facing the elements, and spending time with friends telling stories. 

It’s a little camping trip… but with deadly intentions and great story-telling. 

As a vegan, many have asked how I felt out there and how I rationalize the experience. Going out into the forest to shoot animals would seem to go against everything I believe in. Obviously, I wasn’t personally carrying a gun and would never be able to kill anything, but when it comes to hunting, I’m not as black-and-white opinionated as some might think.

Not to bore everyone with a digression into veganism (there are YouTubers like Earthling Ed for that), but there are a few reasons I feel comfortable at the hunting camp. For one, as stated, I grew up in that environment. Despite nine years in Europe, I am still very at ease in rural America doing ‘rural America’ things. I like to think I can inhabit both of those worlds pretty seamlessly. 

When it comes to veganism, I’m not evangelical. I don’t expect nor push anyone to eat how I eat. The younger, newly-vegan me quickly learned that nobody likes to be told what they should and shouldn’t put into their body—and that’s something I’ve taken into other areas of life and has helped me connect with people even if we don’t align on religious or political grounds. As a rule of thumb, passionate arguments on any of those subjects very very rarely inspire someone to change. Nobody wants to be told how to live, what to believe, or what should be on their plate. A conversation on such topics can be helpful if both parties are open-minded, hear the other perspective, and don’t feel the urge to change the other's opinion. But unless specifically asked, I hardly ever talk about the reasons for my dietary choices. 

When it comes to hunting, there are a few things that I have respect for. Hunters are usually conservationists, have a deep understanding and respect for nature, and usually want to preserve it. Hunting and fishing are highly regulated activities, animal populations are monitored, and it’s not a bunch of men willy-nilly going out and killing anything that moves. So there’s quite a bit of overlap with a hippy like me. 

And I’m here to build bridges. 

It might sound strange, but I also respect the element of eating what is being taken, and how there’s a direct connection to the animal… and to death. In a world of plastic-wrapped slabs of supermarket meat, it’s easy to forget there was a living being attached to every piece. Hunters know that connection and where their meat comes from—some of it anyway. 

It almost frustrates me more when someone who eats meat is grossed out by seeing dead animals or whole beedy-eyed fish on ice at a market in Spain. Or when they shudder at the sight of a pig head with its mouth wide open or a line of chicken feet in the case at the butcher shop. Vegans always get made fun of for making plant-based things “appear” like meat. The counter joke is that most meat consumers in America go to great lengths to disguise the animal source of the protein they’re buying. There are no eyeballs, feathers, or fur; it’s pre-packaged ground beef, chicken breasts, fish fillets, or some breaded processed stuff like nuggets. Most never want to think about the source of the meat, the animal, or the factory farm in which it lives its short life and is slaughtered.

Again, a hunter—or a farmer for that matter—knows the relationship between meat and death. Hunters know the animal and its sleep patterns, can look at it, draw back, send an arrow, and then walk up, pull out a knife, slice it open, and pull out the bloody innards (I have an Uncle Jimmy story on that in the future). I couldn’t do any of that in a million years, but I believe—like a hunter—people who eat meat should at least stop and think about their relationship to meat, animals, and death. 

The dietary habits of the world would shift immensely if, to eat four baskets of chicken wings in the evening, one had to kill and defeather twelve chickens in the morning. I would never demand anyone become a vegan tomorrow, but if one eats meat but could never actually kill an animal, I think they should ponder why that is. 

I think it’s important to engage in introspection and live in alignment with one’s values—whatever they are. 

Most hunters seem to do that—at a minimum, they don’t avoid thinking about those things. And that’s why you won’t find me throwing red paint on my uncles, laying in front of their trucks during hunting season, or trying to get them to change their ways. 

That’s why I can go to a hunting camp with no judgment.

It’s also just fun to hang out. I know people and have uncles who go to the hunting camp and don’t even hunt. They go to spend time with the guys, cook a nice dinner, and bullsh*t. The non-Apostolic hunters also usually drink a lot of beer. 

Quick aside: back in the fall, a customer at the bar offered me some of his steak bite appetizer. I kindly declined and told him I was a vegan but then proudly stated that I was recently at the hunting camp. “Ah, at least you could go and drink beer,” he said. To which I responded that unfortunately for me, there’s no alcohol in my uncles’ hunting excursions and mine was a meat and alcohol-free hunting camp experience.

But I truly enjoyed it for the camaraderie and quality time. Also, as a writer, I noticed there’s a serious story-telling tradition with hunting.  

Out there, stories are almost a form of currency; the best hunters usually have the best stories. Respect is garnered through tales of spending hours if not days out of cell service, in the middle of nowhere carrying a pack, sleeping under the stars, facing the elements, stalking the prize, and then finally bringing it home, which can be a whole other ordeal. “I sat in a blind, shot a four-pointer with my rifle, and then threw it on my four-wheeler,” doesn’t score too many points. The longer and harder the ordeal, the better the story and the more respect earned. 

There’s a danger involved with serious hunting that most don’t think about. The weather turns, people get lost, and other predators are out there stalking prey as well. Like going into the ditch on a dark back road in the heart of winter with a dead cell phone, a minor mistake or mishap when hunting can lead to one directly pondering their own mortality.

Prolific hunters have those stories in spades. Naturally, the most valuable ones are first-hand accounts. When those runout, they share the escapades and pictures from close friends and relatives, and then legendary tales of famous hunters heard on podcasts or seen in videos. 

That was a lot of the time at the hunting camp, sitting on chairs, chewing tobacco, and swapping stories. And I heard a lot of great ones. My Uncle Russell and cousins have done a ton of hunting and fishing around the country. I also watched videos and saw some pictures that I didn’t need to see—actually watching an animal get shot makes it too real for me. 

I heard a lot of great stories at the hunting camp and contributed none of my own, which is more than fine. Because I now have a story, a story of visiting the camp, going bird hunting, riding a four-wheeler with my uncle, taking a sauna, eating the first-ever UP hunting camp tofu sandwich, falling asleep to a movie way past my bedtime, and waking up and enjoying long, slow cups of coffee with Uncle Russ and my cousin Troy. 

It was the quality rural American time with family I’d been longing for. I feel like I know my uncle a lot better, even though he prefaced a lot of things with, “This ain't goin’ in the book…”

It ain’t all goin’ in the book, but it’s a story I’ll have forever. 

‘A Vegan at the Hunting Camp,’ I’m proud to hold the moniker, honored they had me, and I’m very glad I went.

Born and bred “in the bush” as Uncle Peachy would say

Uncle Nick, Uncle Jamey, and a Johnson brother

Uncle Steve with his bow and a deer

My father’s only decent buck

The Union Meadows Hunting Camp