Being a carnivore

Next weekend, I'm taking a first step toward eating more meat. When I first started this blog, I explained why I eat fish and not other animals. I've stuck with that for a while now, something like a year and a half.

However, I have had in the back of my mind the last chapter of Michael Pollan's book The Omnivore's Dilemma in which he makes a meal from food he has hunted or gathered. The meat he serves comes from a wild boar he has hunted in Sonoma County, CA.

It seems that the wild boar is considered an invasive species pretty much everywhere it now lives, including Sonoma County. That gives hunting wild pigs an environmentally righteous tinge. The hunter can feel he or she is part of an environmental solution, a clean-up task, if you will.

The California Department of Fish and Game actually has a Wild Pig Management Program, including special hunts, hunter education, and "pig take reports." From the pig take reports of past years, you can see the "method of take" for every county in the state. By far, the most common method of "taking" a wild pig is with a rifle.

And that leads to my next step: a field trip to Target Master West, a shooting range in Milpitis. I have to find out if I can shoot a rifle! I am going with a few friends from work, who have been to Target Master several times before. This is just the first step, I know, but it definitely feels like a moment.

Target Master's tagline is "Serving the Shooting Community for Over 25 Years." The thought that I might be joining "the shooting community" has given me pause, I  must say. I find myself imagining wearing some kind of sign on my back saying "only hunting for food not sport."

At the bottom of this is a real curiosity on my part as to whether or not I have it in me to be a pig hunter. I'm going to start finding that out.