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Facing a Sensitive Soul's Aversion to Hunting

November 17, 2009 - My ex-wife did not grow up in a hunting culture as I did, and in the first year of our relationship, that incongruity caused me to make two innocent mistakes while cooking and processing venison.

Readers might learn from my faux pas when facing a similar situation, common in Maine in 2009. A recent statistic shows that a majority of this state's residents now live in suburbs, exurbs or cities where folks accustomed to seeing plastic-wrapped meat on Styrofoam trays might view hunting and slaughtering farm animals as foreign to the extreme.

My first blunder with this city-bred woman could have proven disastrous, but she took it in stride. My thoughtlessness would have offended plenty of folks, though.

Our first venison meal, a braised roast, came from my first bow-shot deer, and it started on a positive note. I used a favorite recipe to cater to children and finicky-adult palates, which created a complexity of flavors while assuaging the gamy flavor.

This foolproof method might help turn fussy eaters into wild-venison fans with an appreciation for food that has no preservatives, antibiotics or other chemicals found in domestic meats. It's also low in cholesterol and fat.

The recipe begins with seasoning the roast with fresh dill, sea salt and black pepper before browning all sides. Then, after smothering the top with horseradish and a large chopped onion, simmer the roast in beef broth and dry red wine until tender. Then add more dill, salt and pepper to taste.

That evening so long ago, this venison recipe created a meal that smelled delicious, but potential trouble cropped up.

As luck would have it, she sliced off a venison chunk with a perfect star-shape near the center, a star that I had noticed and stupidly ignored before cooking. However, the long simmering had opened the hole, so it was quite gaping on the plate.

"What's that?" she asked after a few moments, genuinely puzzled.

The star came from the wound channel of a five-bladed broadhead, which could have proven disastrous for a diner unaccustomed to such things. Much to my surprise, shock really, it bothered her little.

The next mistake involved cutting up two large bucks at the same time. Both of them came from Anticosti Island in Quebec, where one hunter can legally shoot two deer.

As I cut, she wrapped, and the sight did gross her out. I've processed meat all my life so I am quite fast, and soon we had a 5-foot stack of sliced meat mounded on the kitchen table. She had helped wrap deer before, but well over 100 pounds of raw, boned meat from two large bucks proved more than she could handle.

Which sensitive souls can understand. A dozen years ago, someone talked me into making 12 pounds of deviled ham for a wedding. I ground the meat with a hand grinder before mixing it, creating an odd reaction that surprised me. So much slimy, squishy meat ended my desire to eat deviled ham again.

But fresh venison doesn't bother me because I grew up in a rural culture. In my youth, my father would hang a freshly shot deer in our cool, ledge-walled cellar and skin a hindquarter. We'd eat off the exposed meat until the entire deer had aged enough to process and freeze.

When I was 7 years old, my mother would give me a sharp hunting knife in a leather sheath and send me down the cellar stairs to whack steaks off the skinned hindquarter. My father had taught me to slice perpendicular to the bone, and the skill was similar to cutting bologna for a sandwich – getting the right thickness evenly across each slice.

Seeing a carcass affects many folks, though, and why not? It's easy to understand the aversion, and a quick anecdote says it best:

One early November night decades ago, a woman and I stopped at a store with a well-lit yard. As we walked behind a pickup, this anti-hunter and staunch vegetarian glanced at a doe lying in the body of the truck.

The deer's bulging eyes, dangling tongue and dried blood on white hair around the empty abdominal and thoracic cavities caused her face to turn chalky white and her legs to go wobbly, an honest response to what she considered a repulsive sight.

Hunters must understand this effect on some non-hunters, just as meat eaters who don't hunt must realize that whether folks kill their own meat or buy it from stores, something died for us to live. Even a veggie such as a winter squash can earn an identity – say a butternut that grew the fastest in the family garden plot before being consumed in one meal.

Such logical thoughts create common ground for building dialog around hunting ethics.

KEN ALLEN / ALLEN AFIELD, Portland Press Herald, November 15, 2009


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