With non-hunters having more and more say on hunting matters via voting for anti-hunting officials or ballot initiatives, it is more important than ever to choose how you speak to others about hunting. (Photo courtesy of Justin Moore)
March 21, 2025
By Andrew McKean
My buddy Ed has a way with verbs. He says he “stuck” a buck when he connects with his bow, he “blasts” or “schwee-schwacks” deer with his rifle, and he “gives dirt naps” to the elk he drops in the Montana mountains.
His is colorful and descriptive language, but those verbs don’t convey much empathy for the animals that will feed his family and quench his passion for hunting. I don’t care that much. I know Ed as a hard and serious hunter, and his earthy descriptions of killing wildlife form a sort of code between committed hunters. I find myself sometimes describing how I “blasted” a duck or goose.
But what if a non-hunter or even an anti-hunter overhears Ed? They’re likely to judge him—and by extension, other hunters—as a careless butcher with little regard for wildlife simply by the words he uses to describe the final part of a successful hunt.
Ed’s vocabulary is an extreme example of a debate I bet you’ve heard and maybe participated in. It’s whether we hunters “kill” or “harvest” the animals we hunt. If you think this particular choice of words is just one more reflection of political correctness intruding in our traditions, you’re dead wrong. The debate goes all the way back to the founder of modern wildlife management, the venerable Aldo Leopold.
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Leopold, the poet laureate of wildlife management, is best known for his lyrical essays collected in “A Sand County Almanac,” but earlier in his career he outlined the basis for the scientific management of America’s recovering wildlife populations. He borrowed heavily from the language of farming, which is where we get our management practices of “planting” hatchery trout, “improving” habitat and managing big-game herds for “maximum sustainable harvest.” It’s almost Biblical. We hunters reap what we sow.
In his 1933 textbook “Game Management,” Leopold described the work of newly formed fish-and-game agencies in agricultural terms: “Game management is the art of making land produce sustained annual crops of wild game.” In that construct, “harvest” is the natural term to describe hunters’ role in managing wild crops.
We’ve passed that term down through generations. To “harvest” a deer sounds responsibly utilitarian, a social contract in which we pledge to convert a commodity, wild meat, to feed our families. The term has the happy byproduct of being just clinical enough to convince non-hunters that we hunters are doing a public service and that we approach the task with unemotional detachment.
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But ... c’mon!
How many hunters have experienced that heart-pounding moment when we decide to take the life of a wild animal? All of us. It’s what unites and defines us as hunters. There’s nothing clinical or detached about it, and the charged emotion of the moment is what keeps us doing it, getting out of bed at obscenely early hours, venturing into wild places, enduring cold and discomfort, finding and killing wild animals.
The honesty of this life-taking moment confirms that humans are authentic predators, a recognition that connects each of us to nameless ancestors who fed the families that ultimately produced us. In this moment, we are killers, not harvesters, and we should be comfortable with the act and the term.
I write this with the expectation that most of you will nod in agreement. After all, you’re readers of a hunting magazine. But I probably wouldn’t describe myself as a “killer” of game to an audience that doesn’t share my deeply personal relationship with wildlife. In mixed company, I stay away from charged terms, so my description of “killing” a deer becomes a “harvest” of the same deer.
I might say I “took” a deer, or even “managed to bring a deer home,” which sounds like I gave it a ride, buckled smartly into the passenger seat. I recognize that I’m not being fully honest when I use euphemisms to describe the act of killing, but I’m comfortable with that, because it’s not my goal to turn my audience against me or my fellow hunters.
I think this is an important recognition, and I mention it this month as hunters prepare for seasons to come and reflect on seasons past. March is the month for storytelling, for recreating the details and the emotion of past hunts. Stories are the most enduring parts of a hunt, living on long after the venison or goose is eaten, and the most powerful stories bring an audience to the field, the chase, the smell of the snow and the sound of the wind in the trees. As a storyteller, I don’t wish to push my audience away with graphic or politically charged words.
If I have to sanitize my vocabulary to not alienate some people, I figure it’s worth a certain amount of euphemizing. The alternative is that I could allow non-hunters to discount all hunters as bloodthirsty or oblivious to the biological, cultural and emotional implications of taking an animal’s life. These are folks who may, then, vote for anti-hunting politicians or support ballot initiatives that seek to ban certain types of hunting.
The fact remains, I hunt to kill, and in some ways I kill to have hunted. It’s an honest verb and one that connects us with not only our ancestors, but also the rest of nature. After all, a grizzly bear that might come upon an oblivious human isn’t interested in “harvesting” us. It aims to kill us, and that’s the correct and accurate description of the relationship between predators and prey, whether you’re a human hunter, a coyote pouncing on voles or a bass smashing baitfish.
This article was featured in the March 2025 issue of Game & Fish magazine. Click to subscribe .
