There are many motivations to hunt. Read the last portion of Michael Pollan's book "The Omnivore's Dilemma." This book describes several different modes of obtaining food: (1) factory food (factory grain farms fed to factory livestock turned into fast good or pre-packaged food); (2) agrarian farming; and (3) hunting-gathering. Pollan, an upper east side New Yorker by birth and a resident of the San Francisco Bay area today, is not your typical hunter. Yet he speaks articulately about the joys and integrated sense of being that are experienced by hunters.
Read Jose Ortega y Gassett's short book "Meditations on Hunting." Gassett was a Spanish philosopher at his peak before the Spanish Civil War.
But now speaking for myself. Hunting makes me one with nature, holistically, in a way no other activity I know of does. I am not merely in the outdoors ? I am part of the outdoors, one of its elements. It feels very natural. I feel as hunters must have felt 5000 years ago, 30000 years ago. We have the same desires and the same problems. We need first to find the animal which we hunt. Naturally, these animals want to survive so they have evolved to be highly sensitive to any disturbances or danger signs and to avoid predators like man. This makes finding the animal difficult. You have to study your animal, you have to ?solve the problem of the animal? ? of finding the animal and getting close to the animal. This is the same problem the stone-age man would have had to solve. It is natural because I want food, and elk meat is very excellent food, rich in protein, and it is a lot of food. When I kill an elk I feel a great fullness of satisfaction. Sure, I can buy as much beef as I want at the store, but there is still a great satisfaction in killing an animal that you are going to eat yourself. Like the stone-age man, I have to care for this dead animal to get it on the table to eat ? and I do all of this myself. I skin it, I cut the elk up into big chunks, I carry this 4 miles back to my truck, I haul it home in coolers, I then cut it up into smaller packages and put it in the freezer. I later thaw the meat out and cook it in various ways myself. Sure, there are some differences in my process from the stone-age routine, extra steps, extra technologies involved, but I DO do all the steps in the stone-age routine.
It is just a different way of being in the outdoors. It feels different. Backpacking seems conventional and very confined by comparison. In backpacking you stay on the trails; in hunting you get off the trails and see the country from viewpoints you'll never see from the trails or right next to the trails. You get well off the trail back into the woods and trees. You go into that steep nasty canyon and walk up it ? which you would avoid in backpacking ? in order to hunt in it. In hunting you are up at 4 AM and walking in the dark at 5 AM to get to your hunting spot. You are sitting in the dark watching the dawn arrive. You are sitting for long periods of time with your gun in your lap, alert for the magical appearance out of nowhere of the hunted animal. You SEE differently under these circumstances. Partly because you have so much time on your hands ? literally hours sitting in the same place looking upon the same scenery ? looking actively. You are listening differently. You are smelling differently, more acutely. At the end of the day, you hunt until 30 minutes after the sun goes down. Then you are finding your way back to camp in the dark ? walking under the stars, but walking in the dark. Yes, you use your flashlight as needed, but most often you don't need it so you turn it off. With your flashlight on you only see a small circle about 8 feet in diameter close to your feet and you are blinded to anything else. At least if you walk with your flashlight off you can see something outside of that pool of light from your flashlight. This too is different. Walking through the woods, off the trails, in the dark. You have to walk differently, more cautiously.
I think any experienced hunter would confirm many of my observations above. I'm sure they would all confirm that they see differently as a result of hunting. Maybe we don't have this vision in our suburban neighborhoods, but the vision comes back when we are in the woods. Likewise with our other senses. This mode of being is very satisfying. You feel more alive.
