The Shotgun Conservationist: Why Environmentalists Should Love Hunting
By Brant MacDuff
Timber Press 2023

Taxidermist and young hunting enthusiast Brant MacDuff opens his outrageously selfish and dimwitted book The Shotgun Conservative: Why Environmentalists Should Love Hunting with a thick brace of the typical hypocrisy and nonsense that’s attended books of this kind since Theodore Roosevelt first started trying to sell this bunkum to the American reading public. Environmentalists should embrace hunting because it respects the natural world, MacDuff tells his readers. Vegans and vegetarians might take some philosophical satisfaction in their beliefs, he writes, but here in the “real world,” no amount of such satisfaction will stop people from eating meat. So the best thing for it is to establish a meaningful connection with all that meat before you eat it.

“We’ve removed ourselves from the environments our food comes from (vegetables included) to such a degree that people really do seem to think it all just comes from the grocery store,” MacDuff writes. “If you don't see your meat as former animals, then why would you care about how they lived or died? Acknowledging they were animals seems so much more productive to me than just respecting them postmortem.”

Readers who haven’t surrendered to the author’s gratuitous bloodlust will immediately want to point out that it’s entirely possible to acknowledge an animal without blowing its head off. MacDuff is ready for them with any number of the usual ridiculous justifications for killing – tradition, for instance, which always crops up early on such a list. “Hunting is the oldest tradition or heritage anyone on this earth can claim. Evolutionarily speaking, humans would not be what we are today without meat eating and hunting,” MacDuff writes. “It allowed us to walk upright and develop our intelligence. You can’t win a fight against a wooly mammoth, and nobody decorates a pot or paints a picture until they’ve fed themselves first.”

But not only is that gibberish, the reader might object, but even if its historical claims were true, so what? Primordial humans hunted because they had no alternatives. Primordial humans also bashed in the heads of their rivals and neighbors; does MacDuff have any confessions he’d like to make, particularly involving knapped cudgel-heads? 

It’s completely bankrupt, as all appeals to mere tradition always are. And the rest of the book’s attempts to justify killing animals as an expression of appreciating them (here referred to as a “confusing ethical miasma”) are equally tired and equally empty. “I am an environmentalist and an animal lover. But the more I hunt, the more it all makes sense,” MacDuff writes. “Not because I’m not bothered by the death of an animal, but because, more and more, I get to see myself in the cycle of nature as opposed to outside of it.” There is nothing “in the cycle of nature” about a shotgun.

Everything in MacDuff’s book, every empty attempt at justifying his own taste for bacon, is based on the same fraudulent premise. “Look,” says the killer, “someone is going to sneak into your home on a regular basis and kill some of your family members. Isn’t it better for everybody involved – isn’t it good conservation – for me to visit your home conscientiously and kill just a small, steady percentage of your family? That way won’t cut into your reproductive rate, and it allows your family to survive. Really, I’m doing you a favor. It’s a demonstration of how much I care.” 

There is no such thing as a shotgun conservationist. You are not appreciating or acknowledging an animal when you blow its head off – you’re killing that animal. Books like this are grotesque pretzel-twist attempts to justify the unjustifiable. MacDuff and his ilk should just write hymns to the joy of killing. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News.