"Heart of the Hunter" - The Age Newspaper

John Elder
March 27, 2011

http://www.theage.com.au/environment/animals/heart-of-the-hunter-20110326-1cb0n.html

Duck shooters don't see themselves as cruel killers. To them, eating animals you have hunted yourself has more moral integrity than buying meat at a supermarket.

THROUGH the night, an owl tolls mournfully. It throbs on until the coals of the new day begin to glow through the trees with the last of the stars. The camp is alive by then, a choir of mutters and the drinking sound of the river nearby. The fire of the night before continues to smoke from its pit. Breakfast isn't much to speak of in the realm of the hunter and gatherer. Eating can wait.

In a thicket at the back of the camp, a deer hangs by a rope from a tree, one of the hindquarters already cut away and stored in an icebox by the man who felled her. Most of what remains will be shared among the crew. Her pretty head will later lie blindly among the ants. The circle of life, as they say.

The deer was shot with a rifle, the copper-jacketed bullet spreading upon entry to maximise the chance of a quick death from shock. That's the merciful thing about a gunshot; if it's done right, a white flash is all the deer or fox or duck should ever know.
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This morning is a shotgun affair. Red plastic shells packed with tiny steel balls. It's duck season, and it's against the law to fill a duck full of lead. Lead sinks to the bottom of ponds and creeks when the shot goes wide, and the ducks, while shovelling for invertebrates with their beaks, have been known to eat the lead and die from poisoning.

There are five men in the party, all from around Melbourne, known to one another as reliable veterans of the hunt: they include a builder, a retired electrician, an education officer for the Department of Justice, and Colin Wood, the Sporting Shooters Association of Australia's hunting and conservation manager for Victoria, and organiser of this year's gathering.

This is private property, horses and cows. Another group of hunters is camped closer to the shooting grounds, friends of the Dunn family who have farmed this land since the 19th century, and who have hosted duck shoots for nearly as long.

Wood's party is now walking south of the river where shooting is allowed. Their clothes bear the leaf-litter pattern of camouflage or are simply clay coloured. Oddly, given the good colour-vision of ducks, one of the men is wearing a red hat. His plan is to hide in the shrubbery.

Another fellow hauls a bag of decoys that rattle like bones as he trudges along. The mood is relaxed and expectant as they fan out across the large, damp paddocks flanked by stands of trees and jewelled with a series of ponds born from the floods, each of them looking for a place to hide.

Three hours to the west, at Lake Buloke, near Donald, is a more crowded encampment where the mood is less chilled. The annual clash between hunters and anti-shooting protesters is about to swing into vexatious and ultimately bloody action.

''It's good to be away from all that,'' says Robert Hodder, 54, who dreams of following in Hemingway's footsteps and shooting ducks in Venice. His greatest concern at this moment is a plague of mosquitoes.

These men have been hunting since they were children, and largely seem bored with the ongoing controversy. As they see it, there's more honesty and decency in killing your own food - and doing so as quickly and mercifully as possible - than buying a piece of cow or lamb that spent many terrified hours awaiting execution at an abattoir. Every duck that gets shot today will end up in the camp pot, the freezer at home or given to friends.

Hodder, who boasts a masters in creative writing and a doctorate in politics, started shooting when he was six. His father, a career policeman, got him started with revolvers. By his late primary years he was shooting rabbits with a .22 rifle. ''In those days [the 1960s], you could legally shoot from your car window just driving down the road … I'd always get a feed.''

Colin Wood grew up on farms around Kyabram at a time when society, particularly the sparsely populated rural variety, was more accepting of a boy getting about on a bicycle with a shotgun over his shoulder.

Wood was shooting quail, ducks and rabbits for the family larder ''from early on''. It was tied to survival, he says, ''because times were tough''.

These formative years seeded in Wood a belief that the hunter-gatherer experience was fundamental to being human, and latterly has led him to taking on his media-magnet role with the Sporting Shooters Association. The message he gives politicians is simply a passing-on of what his grandfather, Albert, used to say:

a society disconnected from the land would go insane.

''And that's what we're seeing. The urban society has sort of disconnected from the reality that something has to die so it can eat meat,'' Wood says.

The cost, he says, is a distortion of moral perspective. ''Because animals are farmed and slaughtered on a mass basis, somehow this makes it more moral in people's eyes. In my view, it's less moral. If you have the wherewithal, the ability and the moral fortitude to go out and take your own animal, good luck to you.

''But there is an awful lot of people who say they can't hunt but they're eating a steak or a chicken and not thinking about where it comes from.'' The other central argument here is that farmed animals are marked for slaughter from the moment they are born, whereas animals in the wild are rarely easy to track and kill, and at least have a chance to dodge the hunter. Guns may not make it a level playing field, but the outcome is never assured.

Says Lionel Swift, a retired electrician and publisher who has hunted game for most of his 76 years: ''If the Buddhists are correct and we come back in the next life as another being, I don't want to come back as a sheep or a cow on a farm. Every one of those animals ends up killed. I'd rather be a duck or a deer. I'd want to have a chance.''

This morning's hunt is about three hours long, most of it spent sitting quietly in the shadow of trees. The shooting happens in spurts, with several guns going off at once and then quietness again. One barrage sets a number of horses racing, another causes a herd of cattle to abandon one paddock for another. This is the greater evidence of disturbance.

There are plenty of ducks around, but they are not visible in great numbers. Indeed, according to Department of Sustainability and Environment land managers, ducks were the big winners in the recent floods, which brought an abundance of revived wetland habitat and newly born ponds and lakes to breed in - and to hide in when the going gets tough.

On some of the ponds, mother ducks herd their chicks into reeded spots for cover when the shooting is intense. The RSPCA says that mother ducks tend to abandon their chicks but this doesn't appear to happen today.

The hunt requires patience and a watchful eye. Various duck species fly past quietly, unseen or spied too late for the range of the guns. And they're not easy to hit on the wing. Time and again they seem to anticipate the line of fire and arc away like fighter planes. Now and then, however, a shooter finds his mark and a duck falls heavily to float in the water, all grace gone. But the take isn't spectacular.

Colin Wood finds a good spot behind a large tree stump, islanded in the middle of a long stretch of water. He sits perfectly under a flyover route and manages to bag seven birds, three shy of the day's limit of 10. Hodder bags a small grey teal that needs a second shot to finish it off. It's not pretty, the bird flapping about in shock, but at least the mercy shot comes quickly. Swift comes in empty-handed. The other two men score a couple each.

By mid-morning, the shooters return to camp, each carrying their take in one hand like bowling pins. Most of the men head to their tents for a customary nap. It's a hot day and they already feel weary. The fire is built up, and the ducks are plucked and dressed.

Jeanne Dunn, whose family has farmed this land since the 1860s, has come into camp with her daughter, Marie, to help with the cooking, the dressing of the birds and to socialise. ''It's a tradition,'' says Marie of the camp. ''I used to hunt as a kid but I wasn't a very good shot. I don't mind dressing them. You have to do it straight away before they go off.''

Wood is planning two big casseroles for the evening meal. One from three ducks, half a bottle of Stone's ginger wine, potatoes, carrots, onions, apples and bacon. He concocts a similar stew from a hare he shot some months ago and has brought along from the freezer at home.

As the sleepers rouse, word comes via telephone that a woman protester has been accidentally shot in the face by a 14-year-old hunter at Lake Buloke. The response is muted: the woman was breaking the rules by entering the water, the boy will no doubt be distressed as well, bad news all round. They're happy to have something else to talk about.

Hunters are often portrayed as callous souls who get a kick out of killing. And of course, says Wood, there are ''idiots with firearms who have misbehaved and done horrible things and done a lot of damage to hunting and shooting in general''.

But ask these men about the emotions tied to shooting and killing, and the response is nuanced. Hodder, the shooter with the masters in creative writing, says: ''At first there is a feeling of elation that you have done what you set out to do. And then when you go and pick the animal up, it's inevitably very beautiful and there is a feeling of awe and sadness. It's still warm, even cute. And they just look like they're asleep and I think all the feelings of life and death wash over you … Very primal feelings, hard to articulate. The last stage is you feel really satisfied and looking forward to taking the kill home. Something wonderful to eat, something to share. Even six months later you feel wonderful.''

Swift, the old man of the group, says: ''There are more fundamental emotions that come to play when shooting a big animal like a deer than a dozen rabbits. But having said that, I used to raise pet rabbits as a boy, and at the same time was out hunting wild rabbits.

''I still have trouble when a baby one runs up and looks at me, five or six metres away. The farmers want you to shoot them all, but I must admit I occasionally have not shot them. They are too nice. It's a mixture of emotions.''

Recently, Swift says, a family friend accused him of playing God. ''A horsewoman, sitting her backside on a leather saddle. Eats meat, makes use of dead animals. The height of hypocrisy. The fact is, I don't feel like God.''