‘An Environmentalist With a Gun’: Inside Steven Rinella’s Hunting Empire – The New York Times

The Great Read
With “MeatEater” on Netflix and a growing roster of podcasts, he is teaching a new kind of hunter about how killing animals can be part of loving nature.
Steven Rinella describes himself as “an environmentalist with a gun.”Credit…Natalie Ivis for The New York Times
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By Malia Wollan
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There’s an episode of ‘‘MeatEater,’’ the hunting reality show on Netflix, in which the New York Mets first baseman Pete Alonso shoots a mule deer. After he watches it stumble, then fall dead on the ground — this is in the San Juan Mountains of Southern Colorado — he puts his head in his hand. “I think my grandpa is really proud,” he says, his voice shaky with adrenaline and emotion; his grandfather, who died a few years earlier, took him hunting and fishing as a boy. Then he turns to Steven Rinella, the lanky 47-year-old star of the show. “Thank you, Steve,” he says.
“It’s very emotional stuff, man,” Rinella replies.
While butchering the deer, Rinella carves out chunks of white fat from behind the animal’s eyeballs. “Put a little smidge of that in your mouth,” Rinella says. Alonso, looking a little nervous, does. “You getting it?” Rinella asks. “Raw dough?”
The final third of the 30-minute show, like most episodes, is devoted to preparing and eating meat. Rinella changes out of his camouflage and takes on the role of wild-game chef. “Venison makes such a refreshing, invigorating meal,” he says in voice-over narration as he and Alonso grind up the deer’s right front shoulder before they grill burgers that they devour on camera.
Rinella is arguably the country’s most famous hunter. The final episodes of his show’s 10th season will become available on Netflix in early February. (The first six seasons ran on the Sportsman Channel, a fishing-and-hunting cable channel.) He’s the founder of a rapidly growing lifestyle brand, also called MeatEater, whose tagline is “your link to the food chain”; in addition to its ever-expanding roster of hunting, fishing and culinary podcasts and YouTube shows, his company sells clothing and equipment and serves as a clearinghouse for all manner of advice, tutorials, videos and posts, ranging from a recipe for olive-stuffed venison roast to stories with titles like “Mother Punches Mountain Lion to Save Son” and “The Best Hunting Boots for Every Season” and “Should Hunters Be Concerned About Deer With Covid-19?” Rinella is the author of six books and has a contract with Penguin Random House to write five more, including a parenting book forthcoming in May. In three years, MeatEater has grown to 120 employees from 10, and its revenue has more than tripled.
To be a hunting celebrity in America in 2022 is to sit at the center of a particularly messy tangle, where any number of controversies are constantly snarled together: over guns, meat, animal rights and trophy-hunting; over the urban-rural divide, the use of public lands, the very way we think about wild animals and wild places in this country. For years, Rinella has talked, written about and modeled hunting in ways that connect with all kinds of people — and not just hunters, who make up about 4 percent of Americans and tend to be more politically conservative. You won’t see him grinning over dead elephants. He eats what he kills, which makes the whole enterprise more, well, palatable to a lot more people, especially those among the 95 percent of the population who eat meat. In surveys, more than 70 percent of Americans say they approve of regulated hunting; the percentage is even higher when getting food is the explicit goal. “One of the best things that Steve and MeatEater have done is to introduce people to hunting through food,” Land Tawney, the president and chief executive of a national nonprofit called Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, told me. “It’s not just about killing things and high-fiving.”
The focus on cooking has allowed Rinella to build something of an apolitical island, a place where a Republican duck hunter might share interests with a liberal Chez Panisse-trained chef in Berkeley (I know one who watches the show with her kids). But as his profile has risen, so, too, has the intensity of the pervasive culture-war polemics that make such a refuge increasingly rare, and possibly untenable. After the Chernin Group, an investment firm named after its founder Peter Chernin, a Hollywood producer and the former president of News Corporation, first invested in MeatEater in 2018, the conservative website The Federalist published an article titled “Anti-Gun Democrat’s Purchase of ‘MeatEater’ Could Pose Big Problems for Hunter-Focused Company.” (The Chernin Group now owns a majority stake in the company.) More recently, Donald Trump Jr. and several of his hunting buddies started a publishing platform and podcasting business called Field Ethos, whose website and Instagram account have taken aim at MeatEater. One post, for example, lumps MeatEater among hunting and conservation organizations that are “OK with shotguns for hunting and bolt-action rifles as long as they don’t hold too many rounds, but they aren’t cool with anything that goes against the D.N.C.’s official position.” For Field Ethos, food is explicitly not hunting’s main goal. Its chief operating officer is quoted on a website called HuntingLife.com as saying, “At our core we are about embracing toxic masculinity and rejecting the woke, P.C. culture.”
Such antagonisms aside, though, it’s a fortuitous time to be selling the hunter lifestyle. Until very recently, the percentage of the population that hunts has been in a decades-long free fall, prompting headlines like this one from the BBC in 2019: “Are U.S. Hunters Becoming an Endangered Species?” Then the pandemic hit, communal indoor activities shut down and Americans poured into the outdoors — crowding national parks, reserving campsites, hitting the road in R.V.s and camper vans. People bought and borrowed guns, bows and fishing poles and set out, while socially distanced, into waters and wilderness. Sales of fishing licenses spiked. Nationally, the number of people getting hunting licenses started climbing, too, particularly for new hunters. California had 43,000 first-time hunters in 2020. When I called the Michigan Department of Natural Resources to ask about hunting participation in 2020, the guy I talked to whistled and said, “What a whirlwind.” Data suggest that the demographic of these new hunters and anglers is younger, more urban, more female and possibly less white — a notable shift, considering that 97 percent of hunters in the U.S. are white, and 90 percent are men. Rinella’s efforts to speak to the broad spectrum of outdoors people can at times seem acrobatic; guests on his podcast have included the Fox News host Tucker Carlson as well as the founder of Patagonia, Yvon Chouinard, and Rue Mapp, the chief executive of Outdoor Afro, a nonprofit that connects the Black community with nature and conservation. Maybe we are all on Rinella’s island, fishing and hunting and cooking over the campfire together. Maybe, even as we disagree about so much, we can find some shred of mutuality out in the wild.
My family might be considered a part of this wave of newcomers. When the shutdowns first began, my husband and I started fishing with our two sons, then 3 and 6. Things got serious fast. We found a motorboat to rent and, whenever we could, ditched our cramped urban home for the open waters of San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean beyond. Instead of children’s shows, the boys started asking to watch “catch and cook” videos — a phrase that brings up some 130,000 results on YouTube. The narrative arc of these videos is timeless, the stuff of cave paintings, really: Protagonists go out seeking fish, they catch fish, they eat fish.
We stumbled into a few episodes of “MeatEater,” too, and watched, without the kids, surprised to see hunting programming with Anthony Bourdainian qualities. (It turns out the show’s first producer and cinematographer also shot and produced Bourdain’s shows.) If Rinella didn’t create the hunt-kill-eat video genre, “MeatEater” has certainly had a very big hand in popularizing it. On YouTube, the boys and I navigated past the weirder stuff — videos of bikini-clad women suggestively reeling in grouper in Florida, say — and found a few content creators we all liked, including Kimi Werner, who features footage of her free-dive spearfishing off the coast of Hawaii, after which she prepares delicious-looking fish dishes with her toddler. (Werner has since signed up with MeatEater to contribute videos and posts to its website and social media platforms.) At bedtime, the boys would cuddle up in their pajamas to listen to readings about fish behavior from a bulky guidebook called “Certainly More Than You Want to Know About the Fishes of the Pacific Coast: A Postmodern Experience,” written by Milton S. Love, an impressively quirky marine biologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
We caught and ate some sea creatures, including massive, pancake-like slabs of halibut pulled up from the bottom of the bay; a few grouchy Dungeness crabs; some bulgy-eyed rockfish; and one exquisitely teal-colored lingcod. But most of the time we caught nothing — and just reveled in the trying. We chatted up old men in bait shops for tips. We contemplated how we might lure in these elusive, scaly beings. It all felt something like having a crush. Anthropologists who study hunters and anglers write about this experience as a kind of interspecies empathy, in which the hunter takes on the “double perspective” of both predator and prey. I could see this in my older son, Oscar; there was little doubt he wanted to catch fish, but it’s possible, especially in those early months of the pandemic, that what he wanted more was to be a fish.
When I showed up at MeatEater’s headquarters in Bozeman, Mont., in late October, I wasn’t sure whether my family’s recent forays as active predators — rather than, say, grocery-store meat procurers — conferred upon me a sort of insider status. But fishing felt like one thing, and hunting with guns felt like quite another. At first, the offices looked like those of any Silicon Valley start-up: the familiar open floor plans, clusters of standing desks, ergonomic office chairs, lots of fleece-wearing young white men with facial hair. Then I noticed the animals: a black bear skin draped over the railing on the central stairway with head and claws intact; an imposingly shaggy buffalo pelt nearby; a taxidermied jack-rabbit head (with some tacked-on antlers, to make a “jackalope”) mounted to the wall. Everywhere I looked there were vaguely intimidating skulls and other bones that I couldn’t begin to recognize.
The recording studio on the ground floor was packed with a cross-talking assemblage of guests, a producer and a sound engineer; they were getting ready to record an episode of the “MeatEater” podcast, a weekly chat show that typically runs two-plus hours and receives 2.5 million downloads a month, mostly from major metropolitan centers like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Denver and Minneapolis. Rinella was describing a recent experience on the road. “We ended up in a tiki bar in Nashville talking to the waitress about opossums,” he said. This waitress had apparently found a baby opossum, fed and raised it and was now posting photos of it on social media. Someone asked Rinella about his own pet raccoons — growing up, he and his brothers had three, all rescued from chimneys or attics. “It’s actually illegal to keep a raccoon,” Rinella claimed before the group. (The rules on this are complicated and vary by state.) “It’s the property of the state; it’s wildlife.” One of the on-air guests, a photographer, jumped in: “I had a pet crow that acted like a dog.”
The podcast producer interrupted to remind everyone to silence their cellphones, and the engineer pressed a button to begin recording. Rinella started by introducing his guests. “You can go watch Tracy on Netflix hunting turkeys,” he said, waving at Tracy Crane, the company’s chief marketing officer, who spent most of her career as a marketing executive at J. Crew in New York City and, later, at Beautycounter in Los Angeles. “And crying,” she added. In my hotel room the night before, I watched the “MeatEater” episode from Season 8 in which Rinella takes Crane hunting for the first time. She has never shot a gun before; he shows her how. When she finally kills a turkey on camera, she weeps. Now, three years later, nearly all the meat she eats is wild game, mostly killed by her and her husband. Rinella can have this proselytizing effect on people; among his other notable hunting converts are the comedian and podcaster Joe Rogan, who also learned to shoot and hunt on a “MeatEater” episode.
The podcast conversation pinballed wildly. They discussed that time Rinella ate parasite-infected bear meat and got toxoplasmosis; whether animals can get PTSD; hearing loss from gunshots; the music of Gordon Lightfoot; boat-ramp etiquette; a man who swallowed a live, spiky fish to impress his children. “All right, Clay, this is my favorite news article to come out in six months,” Rinella said, turning to Clay Newcomb, one of the company’s recent breakout stars, who dove into a story about how ancient footprints found in New Mexico led scientists to conclude that humans were present in the area earlier than previously thought, dating back some 23,000 years to the Ice Age. Archaeology fascinates Rinella: For him, these ancient people with their arrows and clubs and leather shoes prove that hunting is integral to who we are as a species. “That Ötzi dude they found in the Italian Alps had some sweet boots made out of three different kinds of hides,” Rinella said. Newcomb had flown to Bozeman from Arkansas to talk about archaeology on the podcast because he was making a three-part series on the topic for his own MeatEater podcast, “Bear Grease.” When Newcomb was hired in 2020, he was the owner, editor and publisher of Bear Hunting magazine, a glossy print publication with about 6,000 subscribers. The first episode of “Bear Grease” debuted in April. The podcast now gets more than 600,000 downloads per month. It turns out a lot of people want to hear stories from a guy who cooks his meals in rendered bear fat, calls himself a hillbilly and can rattle off a recipe for bear-grease beard oil.
It’s hard to know where all the pent-up desire for man-versus-nature tales comes from, but this particular narrative impulse is clearly wedged deep in our national psyche. The American literary canon is full of men with weapons and creatures pursued — Herman Melville’s whale, William Faulkner’s bear. Even now, when so few hunt, we watch television shows like the Discovery Channel’s “Naked and Afraid,” featuring nude hungry people desperately trying to snare animals and catch fish with their hands. Our politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike, go out to be photographed in camouflage, rifle in hand, snatching at a bit of that all-American hunter mythology.
We’ve been at this story so long, it’s hard to tell what is authentic and what is pageantry. In 1831, when the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville set out on his nine-month tour of the United States that would produce the seminal study of American political life “Democracy in America,” he wrote in a surprised tone in his journal about the rise of the hunter and storyteller Davy Crockett, who served Tennessee as a member of Congress: “Two years ago the inhabitants of the district of which Memphis is the capital sent to the House of Representatives an individual who has had no education, can read with difficulty, has no property, no fixed residence, but passes his life hunting, selling his game to live, and dwelling continuously in the woods.”
The interest in these Hunter Man stories can seem like posturing, like frontier nostalgia or prepper fantasies — and there’s some of that — but it is also true that the ability to hunt and trap and forage for food is a profound part of the identity of this place and its people. During her confirmation hearing, Deb Haaland, the first Indigenous Secretary of the Interior, who is also a hunter, was questioned repeatedly about hunting opportunities on public lands. “I’m a Pueblo woman,” she answered. “We’ve been hunting wild game for centuries.”
Hunting and fishing stories are Rinella’s way of sending out a kind of plea. “I want my work to inspire people to think about the things that they love, to learn about the things that they love and to find it in them to advocate on behalf of the things that they love,” he told me. For Rinella, that thing is the outdoors; he describes himself as “an environmentalist with a gun.” In practical terms, this mostly means raising money for organizations working to protect habitats for fish and game species and urging his followers to get involved in conservation efforts, as he did in a recent Instagram post encouraging people to contact the U.S. Forest Service and tell it to reinstate the so-called roadless rule that restricts road-building and industrial activity in Tongass National Forest in southeast Alaska, which was exempted from the rule by the Trump administration in 2020. He sits on the board of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, a nonprofit that lobbies policymakers to put more money toward restoring wetlands, defending the Clean Water Act and halting the sale of public land. The opportunity for an angler to catch a trout, or a hunter to shoot an elk, is predicated on preserving the ecosystems that sustain those creatures. It took European settlers in this country hundreds of years to figure that out; it took Rinella a while, too.
In the early 1990s at Rinella’s high school in rural western Michigan, he and his friends started a club they called HATE, an acronym for Hunters Against Teenage Environmentalists. They made T-shirts with HATE emblazoned across the chest and threw a raucous wild-game-and-beer party they called a “HATE Bash.” In Rinella’s teenage mind, anyone who wanted to save the environment was anti-hunting, and he, in turn, was vehemently anti-them. His love for his family and friends was inseparable from his love of hunting, whether he was reeling in bluegill from the nearby pond with his two older brothers, trapping muskrats and beavers in icy lakes with friends or shooting squirrels out of oak trees with his dad.
“I still have that HATE shirt in my closet to remind me,” Rinella told me. We were sitting in his backyard at the home he shares with his wife, Katie, and their three young children in an upscale neighborhood in Bozeman. The leaves on the aspen tree out front had gone riotously golden, and the branches were festooned with dozens of antlers and animal bones strung up like Christmas-tree ornaments. Rinella is away from home a lot, following the hunting seasons like some kind of migratory superpredator, often with cinematographers in tow. In November, he hunted black-tailed deer and caught shrimp in Alaska and then white-tailed deer in Nebraska; in December, he shot ducks in Louisiana. January means hunting Coues deer in Mexico; February, the piglike javelina in Arizona; March, Osceola turkeys and cobia fishing in Florida; April, wild turkeys in Mexico, Wisconsin and Michigan; May, black bears back in Montana. Summer means bowfishing and spearfishing in Florida and Louisiana; fall means moose in Alaska and elk in Colorado. His fans are constantly stopping him in airports.
After graduating from high school, Rinella was set on becoming a commercial fur trapper, selling muskrat, beaver, mink, fox and raccoon pelts to be made into fur coats and hats. But things didn’t go as planned. Fur prices were falling. He supplemented his meager earnings by cutting and selling firewood and picking up graveyard shifts at a nearby green-bean-processing plant. Later, he’d get an M.F.A. in creative-nonfiction writing at the University of Montana and realize that his experiences as a scrappy, working-class kid who wanted nothing more than to be outside gave him a unique voice as a storyteller, on the page and eventually on the screen. But in those years after high school, he was still a fledgling fur trapper going into debt. One day one of his older brothers — both of them lifelong hunters who were by then studying wildlife biology in college — gave him a dog-eared paperback copy of Aldo Leopold’s “A Sand County Almanac.” “That was the beginning of my conservation awakening,” Rinella told me.
Most people read Leopold as belonging to the pantheon of American environmental writers, with the likes of Henry David Thoreau, Rachel Carson and John Muir. Rinella reads Leopold as a fellow hunter. Leopold, his wife and his children all hunted, often with bows, and he derived many insights about the natural world and humans’ place in it from hunting. “A Sand County Almanac” was published in 1949 and has since sold more than two million copies and been translated into 14 languages. In one of the book’s essays, “Thinking Like a Mountain,” Leopold describes shooting a wolf and her pups in Arizona’s Apache National Forest when he was a 22-year-old forest ranger, a standard practice at a time when the government was busy trying to eradicate wolves and other predators. Leopold watched the wolf’s eyes go dead. “I was young then and full of trigger-itch,” he writes. “I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf, nor the mountain agreed with such a view.” Watching the wolf die certainly didn’t stop Leopold from hunting. And reading about it didn’t stop Rinella from hunting, either, but it did force him to grapple with America’s ignoble past when it came to the slaughter of its wild animals. “I had no idea that we’d killed all the deer, and the turkeys and the ducks and then brought them back,” he told me. “Without knowing all that, I never thought to apply any kind of reverence toward wildlife; it was just there.”
When European settlers arrived in the New World, they quickly set about killing animals with a similarly prodigal mind-set. They hunted for food, fur, hides and, in the case of buffalo, as part of a genocidal strategy to starve Indigenous inhabitants and claim the land. Before white people landed, some 50 million bison roamed North America; by 1889, there were just 1,000 left.
The precolonial population of white-tailed deer crashed from an estimated 62 million animals to as few as 300,000. The Canada goose disappeared almost entirely. Wealthy hunters noticed the decline in species they were keen to hunt and, in the interest of maintaining free-roaming prey, set about trying to protect these animals and their landscapes. In 1887, more than a decade before Theodore Roosevelt became president, he founded the Boone & Crockett Club, America’s first conservation organization. Membership was restricted to 100 men who had each shot at least three different megafaunas from a list that included bear, bison, caribou, cougar and moose. These elite sportsmen were instrumental in passing the nation’s first wildlife-protection laws, starting with the Lacey Act of 1900, which made the interstate trafficking of illegally harvested wildlife a federal crime.
As president, Roosevelt went on to designate 230 million acres as public land, creating 150 national forests, 51 bird sanctuaries and five national parks, in no small part because of his love of hunting. In 1937, Franklin D. Roosevelt, influenced by the earlier conservation work of his cousin, whom he admired, signed the Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Act, also known as the Pittman-Robertson Act, a federal tax on guns and ammunition. A similar federal tax was later placed on fishing equipment. For more than 80 years, that money has made up the bulk of states’ conservation budgets, supplemented by sales of hunting and fishing licenses. Spend any amount of time among hunters, or even state wildlife biologists, and you’ll inevitably hear the claim that “hunting is conservation.”
Tony Wasley, president of the Association of Fish & Wildlife Agencies and director of the Nevada Department of Wildlife, explained to me what that actually means. “We have to take care of 895 commonly occurring species in Nevada based on funding that comes from people’s desire to recreationally pursue 8 percent of those species,” he said. His email signature: “Support Nevada’s Wildlife … Buy a Hunting and Fishing License.”
The pandemic has been a boon to conservation funding. Over the past two years, Americans have gone on an unprecedented gun-and-ammunition buying spree, spurred by some combination of a global pandemic, months of Black Lives Matter protests, a contested presidential election and a mob-led assault on the U.S. Capitol. The federal government is on track later this month to send state fish-and-wildlife agencies the largest distribution of gun-and-ammunition excise taxes ever. (The states divvied up $1 billion last year in taxes collected from the sale of firearms and archery and fishing equipment.)
But a system that requires more people to buy more guns and ammunition to save monarch butterflies or tricolor blackbirds isn’t a system designed to address 21st-century problems. The conservation model paid for by hunters and anglers and gun buyers has successfully brought back once-scarce game species like white-tailed deer and wild turkeys, but it is woefully inadequate to protect the birds, mammals, fish, reptiles, amphibians and insects facing the twin threats of habitat loss and climate change. Congress is currently considering a bill called the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act that would drastically change conservation funding by sending an additional $1.4 billion a year to state and tribal wildlife-habitat conservation programs to shore up the 12,000 mostly nongame species that states have already identified as being at risk. First introduced in 2017 by Representative Debbie Dingell, a Michigan Democrat, and Representative Jeff Fortenberry, a Nebraska Republican, the bill appears to have broad, bipartisan support.
“If it looks like I’m getting ready to shoot, put your fingers in your ears,” Rinella told me in the middle of a cattle pasture in northwest Nebraska. It was mid-November, and I had come to watch the taping of a future “MeatEater” episode at the peak of the white-tailed deer rut. Rinella, Newcomb the bear hunter, two hunting guides, three cameramen and two producers would be filming more than eight hours a day for six days. The afternoon I arrived, the group split in two: Newcomb went one way, and Rinella went another, carrying the only visible gun, a .30-caliber rifle slung over one shoulder, barrel pointed toward the sky. When he’s talking, Rinella talks a lot. When he’s hunting, he’s remarkably quiet, wordlessly loping over the terrain. Keeping pace beside him that day was a 28-year-old hunting guide named Jordan Budd, her blond hair pulled back into a ponytail. She leads hunting trips on this 7,500-acre stretch of tallgrass prairie where her family raises black Angus cattle. These two, the onscreen talent, wore lavalier microphones hidden under their camouflage. Close behind them trailed two videographers with cameras recording.
The deer-stalking started in the dark every day and went until late morning; after a midday break, the hunters would head out again until after dark. One evening was spent walking quietly on a hill above a creek, periodically hunkering down, trying to disappear into the grass, while staring through binoculars and spotting scopes. Hunters call this technique spot-and-stalk, the goal being to see an animal before it sees you. “How much more legal light?” Rinella whispered. State regulations allow deer hunters to go 30 minutes past sunset but no further, and the sun was already a red smear on the horizon. Rinella took two plastic, knobby disks from his backpack and started clacking them together to simulate the sound of two bucks locking antlers (male deer can be lured in by the promise of a fight). Budd pulled her iPhone from her pocket, screen aglow with a text from Newcomb’s group, which had set up about a mile south of us: “Got one,” it read.
By the time Rinella’s group reached the dead deer, the sky had gone dark enough to see the first stars. An inner circle of hunters flanked by cameramen stood around the buck, which was lying on its side in the back of a pickup truck. “He’s thin, man,” Rinella said, running his hand down the buck’s rib cage the way you’d pet a sleeping dog. Illuminated by the headlights of two pickup trucks, the hunters pulled the deer’s body down into the dirt and deftly slit open its underbelly from anus to sternum. After slicing through the muscle, Newcomb tugged the innards out, extracting the heart, a fistful of maroon-colored flesh ragged on one side where the bullet went through.
“You want to keep the heart, Steve?” Newcomb asked.
“Yeah,” Rinella said, as if the answer should be obvious; he would eat it.
A producer tucked the heart into a Ziploc bag. They heaved the carcass back into the truck bed, and everyone piled into the cab and drove away, leaving behind a gleaming gut pile for the coyotes.
The next day, Newcomb, Budd and the team’s “wilderness production assistant” drove the buck into Rushville, Neb., the nearest town, where it was checked in by a state employee at an ad hoc office at the Pump & Pantry, a gas station crowded with men in camouflage, some in baseball caps stitched with “Save the Habitat, Save the Hunt.” Back at the ranch, cameras on, the hunters strung the deer up in an ash tree by its hind legs and set about cutting off slabs of meat and vacuum-sealing them in plastic bags to be frozen and carried home on the plane in insulated carry-on bags. Later, the crew would take out the audio equipment and record a “MeatEater” podcast episode from the hunting cabin in which they discussed the hunt, layering one type of storytelling on top of another. Newcomb felt bad that he had shot the deer and Rinella hadn’t; Rinella is the star, the central focus, and the crew is deferential to him in that way people are to celebrities.
“I call the buck Steve’s buck,” Newcomb says on the podcast.
“That’s a good name for it,” Rinella replies.
After three days of predawn mornings trailing the camo-clad, distracted by the monochromatic beauty of the unfamiliar prairie landscape, hoping to see an antlered deer and also relieved when we didn’t, I drove north toward the nearest airport in Rapid City, S.D., thinking about that bloody heart. I don’t want to be a hunter. I’m trying to eat less meat, not more. But for many people, hunting and fishing are a means to that visceral appreciation — let’s call it love — of the natural world that makes a person want to act to protect it. That feeling is big, an expansive common ground that needs to be filled with as many people as can be mustered, whether they get there armed with shotguns or birding binoculars or bright pink, Barbie-branded children’s fishing poles. After all, we, too, are animals reliant on imperiled ecosystems. Save the habitat, save ourselves.
Malia Wollan is a contributing writer and the Tip columnist for the magazine. She is based in Oakland, Calif., and directs several reporting fellowships at the U.C. Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Natalie Ivis is a photographer who focuses on personal narratives as well as human intervention and interaction with nature. She currently lives in New Haven, Conn., where she attends the Yale photography M.F.A. program.

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