The Killer in Me

I regret some things in my early life and want to reconcile as I reflect on my current life. I acted in my early days in a way that I would never contemplate today. I was a bounty hunter and I cannot undo my now regretted sins.

As a child, I learned to fish and hunt on our family farm. I caught fish, and sometimes we ate them. I hunted squirrels and rabbits and killed a couple. Neither one was good to eat, and I really didn’t enjoy shooting a gun. My admission is, however, that I killed dozens of gophers as a farm kid in the 1950s and got paid for those efforts.

Pocket gophers were a nuisance on our farm. They dug mounds to make their tunnels and then badgers went after them and dug even bigger holes to catch them. If gophers were gone, the badgers would not be a problem.

The county where I lived put a bounty on gophers. Turning in pairs of the front feet strung on a wire was worth $.25 a pair. My dad made trapping more lucrative by giving me another $.25 for each pair of feet.

Spring and early summer was the trapping season. Dad taught me how to find the gopher hole by noting the way the dirt mounded and then digging a hole. I hid a small jaw trap at the trail intersection designed to catch the gophers’ front feet. I checked the traps every 24 hours early in the morning. If a gopher was caught, it was usually still alive. I killed it with a concussive blow from my shovel to its head. I cut off the front feet and buried the dead gopher back in the hole.

After three summers of trapping, I extirpated most gophers and moved on to other less violent interests. In graduate school, however, I read Aldo Leopold’s book, A Sand County Almanac. He describes shooting a wolf:

“We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes – something known only to her and to the mountain.”

Leopold never killed a wolf again. I think about the dying light in those gophers’ eyes and know today I could not consciously kill another living mammal.

I am not opposed to ethical hunting when the playing ground is level between humans and animals. Hunting and fishing for food have importance for people.

Today, however, I live my life in reverence for animals of all kinds. I offer grace to the domestic animals that nourish my body. I respect the circle of life in the outdoors. If the ecological balance gets uneven, I believe science can be useful to manage land and animals. For me, however, my killing days are over.