Dead’s Not Always Just Dead

By Nathaniel Hoffman

A hunter, a rancher, and a rabbi walk into a bar.

This may sound like the start of a bad domestic cervidae joke, but it’s not far off from a conversation I had recently with Gary Queen, past president of the Idaho Elk Breeders Association.

I spoke to Queen on the fourth floor of the Idaho Statehouse after his industry, the farmed-elk industry, staved off new regulations on importation, fencing, and the proper use of its animals.

The Senate Agricultural Affairs Committee did pass a bill that lets the Idaho State Department of Agriculture license elk farms and potentially shut them down. Elk farmers supported the licensing measure though it’s a far cry from what they have requested in the past: permission to keep more game species behind fences, watered down penalties, and even less regulation.

“What our primary goal is now is to give assurances to the public and to the governor that we’re responsible operators,” Queen said.

Elk breeders are still taking stock after the public relations disaster that ensued late last year when a large group of domestic elk got out of their fence in eastern Idaho and roamed for weeks, eventually spurring an emergency hunt.

But in the halls of the Idaho Statehouse, heady debates on the ethics of death have taken the place of bureaucratic discussions of livestock rules.

Sen. Clint Stennett, a Ketchum cowboy-boot-wearing Democrat made an impassioned speech about chasing elk in the wild for years, only to get a 300 point bull a few years ago that pales in comparison to some of the farm-raised animals in Idaho.

“The 300 point bull that I shot three to four years ago… fit inside some of these grain-fed monsters,” Stennett declared.

Committee chairman Tom Gannon, a wry retired Naval officer from Buhl, retorted with some philosophy of his own: “Was the elk dead when you finished?”

Depending on the credence you give living things, the preferred method of dispatching one may vary.

Which brings us back to the rabbi.

Queen said he once had a rabbi from Seattle call up and ask if he could visit the ranch to slaughter an elk.

Queen, who raises the stout ungulates for meat, breeding stock, trophy animals and their antler velvet, desired in some circles for its health properties, agreed to the operation.

A shochet, as those practiced in the task of Jewish ritual slaughter are called, is extensively schooled in Old Testament ethics and intent on a painless and quick kill. This is accomplished through an efficient single stroke with a very sharp knife across the neck of a kosher animal that is to be eaten.

Queen figured he would shoot the animal and then turn it over for slaughter, but the rabbi corrected him: the elk would have to be restrained so that he could slit its neck.

Queen refused. He found the method unethical.

Interestingly, PETA and several European groups have also determined Jewish and Islamic slaughter to be unethical, though I do not think they are motivated by the same logic as Queen.

Queen had also just echoed Gannon’s philosophy of death: a dead animal is a dead animal.

The first animal I ever killed was a brown and white goat in the far north of Namibia. Four of my young students (on that day, my teachers) held the animal down while I cut its neck. I had fasted that morning, wore no shoes or shirt and thanked the animal profusely for the meat.

The meat we get at the supermarket in Boise is likely killed in a more mechanized fashion and may only be thanked after it is brought to the table cooking in its own juices.

The elk ranchers want to have it both ways. They want to be considered agriculturalists. Raising useful stock animals for their component parts.

But they also provide opportunities for tourists to go hunting, emphasizing the hunting experience and praising the majesty of the elk. I have no doubt that Queen and his fellow elk ranchers love the elk and see in elk production a niche business for which there is a growing market.

But there is a difference between farm and field that must be preserved.

Ted Rea, the new president of the Elk Breeders Association, a trophy hunter originally from Texas, told me that the key to finding a “symbiosis between man and animal” is attaching a monetary value to wildlife.

“I look at wildlife, fishing and ranching as the new agriculture,” he said.

Rea has a vision of private game managers all over the world selectively raising big bulls, big trophies, to be shot for the best price.

“What you killed out in the wild is what some sucker passed up last year,” Rea said.

Shane Koch, a 15-year-old who I have hunted and fished with for a few years told the Ag committee quite a different story. 

For Koch, hunting, the chase, is about being a sportsman and feeding your family.

Walking into a fenced area and killing a trophy animal is closer to murder, Koch said.

“I don’t feel it’s much of a sport.”

Shane Koch’s first deer is just as dead as Rea’s big bull, but whose heart is fuller? Whose family is better fed?

Nathaniel Hoffman writes from Boise. Read more of his ideas at www.xutos.org.