My brilliant wordsmithing in that lyrical headline aside, please bear with me briefly for some self-serving exposition. At first, it was difficult to convince the wonderful leadership at ATL that I was deserving of a column here. What, after all, do the good people of the New York legal community and the many other sophisticated readers of ATL need with the opinions of some bumpkin from Minnesota?
Now, a solid readership (you folks really are world-class) and several legitimately viral articles later, I think I’ve at least justified my own existence. But all along, for me at least, part of what I brought to the table was the perspective of someone who is not sitting in some Manhattan skyscraper, staring out at the Hudson.
Just as our coastal brothers and sisters might stare down at the generous spaces between lights during the redeye to L.A., and wonder what those people down there could possibly be thinking, many a Midwesterner has peered eastward with questions that roam far beyond the limits of their vision. Sure, Americans in general have more commonalities than differences. Yet, part of what I’ve always hoped to accomplish with this column is making it just a little bit easier, for at least a few people, to understand the value of the differences between a place like New York City, and a place like my hometown of Long Prairie, Minnesota.
So today, I want to talk about something that probably seems a bit foreign to those ensconced in a big city existence: Deer hunting. Yes, deer hunting, the grand and noble tradition of nearly freezing to death so that if you’re lucky, you get to field-dress some game, which is just a euphemism for reaching inside a splayed abdominal cavity to pull out a steaming pile of entrails.
I really can’t think of a way to describe the physical conditions of hunting that make it sound tolerable, let alone great, and yet, somehow it is. It’s the way you feel moving swiftly and quietly in the morning darkness, the crunch of freeze-dried switchgrass stems barely audible beneath your boots, the pillars of frozen breath from the companions at your side billowing into the corners of your vision. It’s a weighty process, the power and responsibility of both taking and sustaining life. If you don’t want to hunt, try going to the most remote petroglyphs you can find after dark. Turn off anything electronic and light a candle or a torch. That’ll give you an idea of what I’m talking about.
Though many can’t articulate it, people get something bordering on the spiritual out of hunting. Even Justice Elena Kagan, who’d apparently never handled a gun before being appointed to the Supreme Court, became a convert to hunting after her friend Justice Scalia introduced her to the concept.
Deer hunting is also a big economic engine. In Minnesota, nearly half a million people participate in the firearms deer season. Combine that with bow season and muzzleloader season, and out of every 10 Minnesotans (including children), one of them is going out deer hunting. In-state residents pay $35 for a deer license — multiply that by the number of hunters, and you’ve got about $17.5 million in revenue in this state alone. Factor in the roughly 10 million pounds of lean healthy meat harvested each year in Minnesota, along with the property damage and human lives saved by preventing deer-on-vehicle car accidents that would otherwise occur, and you are well on your way to understanding the many benefits that a healthy deer population and a well-managed hunting season provide. There are states where deer hunting participation rates are much higher than in Minnesota, of course, and there is deer hunting in every state, including Hawaii.
And that brings me to the gratuitous headlines about “zombie deer” that plagued all of us last year, and are starting to spring up again. Chronic wasting disease is a neurological illness affecting some deer, elk, and moose populations. So far, there have been no reported cases of CWD affecting humans, although it is certainly not advisable to knowingly eat infected meat. Everyone in the hunting community has known about CWD just about forever, and knows that symptoms in an infected animal might include drastic weight loss, stumbling, listlessness, and eventually, death. Symptoms certainly do not include rearising after that death with an insatiable craving to devour flesh, an inability to be dispatched (barring a headshot), or anything else that would really be zombie-like. So, I guess we’re using the phrase “zombie deer” to describe deer with CWD because some of them are thin and stumble. Not really that good of an analogy.
CWD is a degenerative neurological disorder. There are similar diseases in humans, such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and no one would call one of the roughly one-per-million sufferers of CJD in the human population a “zombie.” That would be stupid and offensive. Chronic wasting disease is a serious issue, it is something departments of natural resources across the country need to keep working on, and hunters in particular need to take responsibility in addressing CWD. But calling it “zombie deer disease” is just shallow clickbait nonsense trying to cash in on the surprising longevity of pop culture’s zombie craze (meaning no offense to the fad itself; I myself just thoroughly enjoyed Matthew Broderick’s brilliant turn [spoiler alert] as the cannibalistic Barron Triumph in Netflix’s Daybreak).
You don’t have to like deer hunting to accept its place in this particular stage of our society. Deer season is not a wanton orgiastic slaughter. It’s thought out. It’s important. It’s meaningful to people. This year, let’s try to understand it a little better if it’s not something we grew up with, and let’s also try not to sensationalize one of the most pressing challenges in cultivating a healthy deer population with a lot of nonsensical, clickbaity article titles about “zombie deer.”
Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.
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