By Sam Wasserman (Colby College)
When I heard that Vehi and Steven, the professional hunter of Sesfontein Conservancy, were going out on a hunt to shoot a springbok, I was excited. I myself had never hunted before, nor had I even eaten such freshly harvested meat. Moreover, sustainable hunting within conservancies of Namibia is both an essential part of their culture and an integral aspect in the success of conservancies of which we had been learning about. It was an opportunity to go way outside my normal comfort zone and step inside the perspective of a completely different lifestyle.
The truck rumbled up to our campsite and Ricky, a local game guard assisting us with our work in Sesfontein, yelled to me to come give him a hand. An anxious eagerness ran through my body and I quickly jogged from my tent to where he was standing. We walked over to the truck and lying in the bed was a bloody, decapitated male springbok sprawled awkwardly in the corner. Ricky unlatched the back of the truck, grabbed its front legs, and signaled to me to help him get the springbok onto the ground. I admired both Ricky and his co-worker, Pienaar, and I didn’t want to seem weak or trepid in front of them, so without hesitation I wrapped my fingers around the hind legs of the limp springbok and gently lifted it down to the ground.
I was not expecting to be affected by the idea or sight of the dead animal; I considered myself pretty cemented in my philosophy that sustainable hunting is a critical part of conservation and survival. The image of the gory carcass did not shake me, but when my hands clutched the fur, still warm and velvet soft, an uneasy shiver traveled from my arms through my shoulders and seeped into my neck. Pienaar and Ricky got their knives out and began cutting slits in the hind leg knee joints. I stood there watching, completely captivated by their comfort and fluidity with the blade. Ricky then looked up at me and asked me if I wanted to try. My sister, a vegetarian, had always challenged me against my carnivorous eating habits. Her thoughts were that if I couldn’t stomach the preparation and handling of my own meat, from life until it entered my mouth, then I had no business mindlessly consuming it, and quite frankly I agreed with her. Although I didn’t pull the trigger, this was my opportunity to prove to myself, and to my sister, that I was in fact capable of getting “hands-on” with my own food.
I rushed over to where Ricky was standing and received the knife from his blood soaked hands. I crouched down next to the body, not knowing what the hell I was doing. Nonetheless, still determined to maintain the appearance of confidence, I attempted to slit the skin down the inner thigh towards the groin. Immediately, Ricky saw I was absolutely clueless and chuckled briefly before verbally guiding me through the process. I decided to relinquish my machismo attitude that obviously wasn’t working and accept the fact that I was completely lost.
Together, with Ricky and Pienaar as my wise teachers and me as their ingenuous, humbled student, we separated the skin from the meat all the way up the stomach to the front legs. I found myself submersed in both culture and sinew. My hands were coated in a sticky mix of blood, fur, and guts, but it did not bother me. The experience of being taught by these two local men, as they had once taught their sons, heavily outweighed the gore of the situation. For the next ten minutes, we pulled, cut, yanked, hacked, and laughed until we were left looking at nothing but a skeleton of lean muscle. We left it their hanging from a tree for a short period of time before we went back and carried it over to the kitchen area. He and Vehi carved some of the meat into hardy sized chunks that were thrown into a potjkie, a cast-iron pot, and placed over the fire to cook.
The meat was tough but delicious. That night we all ate fresh springbok until the only thing we were capable of doing was sleeping. I crawled into my warm sleeping bag, belly still bloated, and contemplated the moral complexities associated with hunting. While I will still eat meat when I return home, I came to the conclusion that sustainable hunting in which the meat is not wasted is infinitely more ethical than the numb consumption of farmed meat from unknown origins.