Along the Way

ALONG THE WAY A Thick Slice of Prime Rib Excites Those Primal Urges

Let me make it clear at the outset that I am not the person who shot Bambi's mother. It may have been my dad or my brother, who between them probably killed about as many deer as there are commas in this piece. For some reason, even though I grew up in the wilds of north Idaho and my dad and brother were dedicated hunters, I never developed an interest in hunting. I tried, but it just wasn't in me. It wasn't that I had some moralistic attitude about shooting animals for food, although I did enjoy the movie Bambi as a boy, and I remember crying when his mother was shot by a hunter. But understand, I grew up routinely seeing deer and bear hanging by their back legs in our garage, watching them being skinned, smelling the puddled blood, then eating them with my family. When I left Idaho and came to live in San Francisco (which is, incidentally, named for Saint Francis, the patron saint of animals), it was inevitable that I encounter my share of the garden variety vegetarians who regard meat-eaters as wicked and/or misguided people. A while back, while on my way to a prime rib dinner as part of a celebrity function I was covering as a journalist, I discovered the following hors d'oeuvre for thought on a poster affixed to a telephone pole: MEAT IS MURDER. There also was an ancillary sermon explaining why. Vegetarians tend to be a pious bunch who don't emphasize a vegetable diet because they love vegetables but because they believe that killing animals is wrong. Personally I can respect the feeling that motivates that point of view while remaining an unrepentant carnivore. Many things in life seem unfair when you put them on an idealistic graph. One of the facts of Nature is that there are two kinds of animals: those that eat grass and those that eat the ones that eat the grass. (Vegetarians should note that in a sense all flesh is grass.) If you happen to be one of the grass-eaters, it's a bad deal. It means that you've got to spend your whole life looking over your shoulder, like an accountant who made off with some Mafia money. And you're never going to get much sleep or be able to sleep very deeply. The only animals that sleep soundly are the predators. The average antelope on the veldt will catch a minute or two of sleep at a time, with luck, and some plains animals that are always being hunted actually sleep with their eyes open. Cats, the most serious predators of all, have earned the right to sleep much of the time strictly because they have a biological heritage of not living in fear of being eaten like the animals they prey on. They're fortunate enough to be the eaters instead of the eatees. Cats need meat in order to live they live by eating life. So if you're a vegetarian who moralizes about killing animals for food and you like cats, then you're hardly being logical about your ideals. I like cats and am not disturbed by the fact that they are in essence vampires incarnate. As a boy I had a .22 rifle, but tin cans and bottles were my prey. I just couldn't get into going after animals, including the countless birds my dad and brother constantly stalked. But I did do some fishing, possibly because it didn't require as much dramatic commitment as hunting game, was a much more leisurely activity, and usually yielded quicker results. I suspect that the kind of lake fishing I used to enjoy is to hunting game roughly what playing slot machines is to playing poker. Well I don't hunt, but I just can't imagine a buffet where salads are the sole bill of fare. If Noah really did get all of those animals to coexist on his ark like the amicable menagerie in Rousseau's painting The Peaceable Kingdom, I suspect it was just until they could resume their natural roles of predators and prey when they returned to the land. And I'm bored by the argument that meat is murder, especially coming from those who have any leather in their wardrobe, on their books, and so on. As a mammal, I'm stuck with a racial heritage that includes hunting, herding, and farming. I'm not personally hooked on the challenge of the hunt (surely not as long as there are waiters), yet a good prime cut stirs something primal in my appetite. That's why when I go back to Idaho to visit, I look forward to eating some elk or bear meat if I can get it otic meat not available to most people. I enjoy seeing animals anthropomorphized, too, as in Bambi. I'm a carnivore with a sense of humor. It's interesting to note that Disney's most successful film, The Lion King, gives equal time to predators, which have upstaged the deer at the box office. As for Bambi, I'm more curious about why all of those parents named their daughters after a male deer than I am about who shot his mother.