Welcome to the first issue of CARNIVORE, in all its bloody glory. Our ancestors have been chasing and killing animals for the past two million years, and while these few pages pale into insignificance next to the cave paintings at Lascaux, we’d like to think we’re continuing in a tradition of celebrating that most human of activities — the hunt.

In a society increasingly distant from its roots, hunters are one of the few groups of people who still maintain and cherish our links to a distant past, keeping alive the very essence of what makes us human. According to Professor Henry Bunn’s address to the European Society for the study of Human Evolution, were it not for our apelike ancestors’ ability to hunt African plains game, we wouldn’t have developed our large brains, which led directly to mankind’s use of tools and the origins of civilization.

As Steve Rinella points out, to not hunt is a fairly new experiment, one which has only come to pass in the last 200 years due to the industrialization of our food supply. And to many, meat has only a nebulous, tangential relationship with the animal that died to produce it. We know the source of our food, and what it takes to get it. While the Twitterati wring their hands over whether a particular grass-fed cow was humanely Temple-Grandinized and the lumpen proletariat tuck into mechanically separated white slime hot dogs, we at least have control over some portion of our family’s diet by taking matters into our own hands. It is, however, too easy to adopt a holier-than-thou attitude once we have a wild animal in the freezer, so let’s leave that unattractive trait to the vegans. Instead, celebrate the bounty we’ve been privileged to obtain and share it, hopefully with someone who’s been on the fence about hunting.

Once you’ve piled their plate with delicious wild fare, you can off-handedly drop into conversation a few facts and numbers, such as the $12 billion in taxes we contribute to the public purse annually, or the $1.6 billion for conservation efforts spent every year. Casually mention that the American model of public lands is admired the world over, due mainly to the efforts of our oldest conservation organization, the Boone and Crocket Club, responsible for the creation of the National Parks Service, National Forest Service, and National Wildlife Refuges. And you could slip into the after dinner banter that, as an economic force, hunting supports almost 700,000 jobs.

This summer, as you fire up the grill and crack open a cold one, give some thought as to how you’ll make your coming season the best one ever. In this first issue of CARNIVORE, we’ve included a few ideas of our own and plan on implementing them over the next few months. We’ll let you know this fall how it turns out.

To preview the issue click here: CARNIVORE

Cheers,
Iain

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