“If you properly respect what you are after, and shoot it cleanly and on the animal’s terrain, if you imprison in your mind all the wonder of the day from sky to smell to breeze to flowers–then you have not merely killed an animal. You have lent immortality to a beast you have killed because you loved him and wanted him forever so that you could always capture the day.”

–David Ruark, “The Horn of the Hunter”

There is something truly profound in the act of killing an animal for a noble human purpose, whether it is to provide meat, to test a medicine, or even, as legendary outdoor writer David Ruark noted, to lend immortality to a single day of your life.  I know this to be true, because my bow and my gun provide more than half of my family’s annual meat consumption.

The interesting question is: why does this profundity exist? Is the feeling entirely subjective–a mere emotive response to blood or a mild onset of the aversion to killing other humans hard-wired into our physiology?  Or is it the result of an objective truth about the universe that can be realized only in that moment?

If the latter, what is the nature of that truth?  Whatever the specifics, it must broadly have something to do with the uniqueness of the act.  Causing death can only be profound if there is something special about life.   And if there is something special about all life, even animal life, we humans can only be justified in taking those lives to fill our stomachs or clothe our backs if there is something even more special about our lives.  Not just more special–but so much more that our material needs take precedence over the very lives of other animals.

The feeling of reverence that a hunter knows just after the shot therefore suggests one of two conclusions:  either we, alone of all animals, are imbued with such an aversion to killing our own species that it affects our emotions when we kill others; or that life is objectively such a morally valuable thing that some part of us shudders at even its justified destruction.  Either way, the only logical conclusion that can be reached is that there is something unique, mysterious, and majestic about human life.