Eat What You Kill: New Zealand's Pig Hunters
• Photo by Jamie Bowering
Could you look your food in the eye before eating it? Melissa Howard takes to the New Zealand bush to explore ethical consumption, pig hunting and the bond between hunter and dog.
The 46-kilogram feral boar’s tusks gouged into Daniel Murray’s torso, leaving thick wounds that gushed with blood. The 29-year-old crawled under a log to protect himself and, after circling him for half an hour, the boar disappeared into the bush.
Murray shows us the hoodie he was wearing that day. It is shredded shoulder-to-hem from the boar’s tusks.
“You must have been recuperating for weeks,” I say.
“Nah,” he replies. “I went back the next day to try and get him.”
Four weeks later, Murray and 35-year-old Jason Howard – both gritty, self-proclaimed “waka Māori” hunters – are sure the tracks we are following today are from the huge boar that attacked Murray.
It’s a cold winter’s afternoon on a privately owned bush block in Whakamarama, on New Zealand’s North Island, and we’re hunting feral pigs for meat. The size of the tusk-gouged pits left by the pig are so big, Murray says, that “all of us could lay in one”. Along for the hunt is Howard’s son, 10-year-old Ryder, who has been hunting with his dad since he was six.
It is what Murray calls “magic hour”, the time before sundown when animals are active, and we haul onto the back of the truck, our icy fingers wedged into the bars around the tray to hold on. The sky is heavy and mottled grey, like a dull bruise. The air is icy, and I’m anxious about the hunt.
“When you catch the pig, you feel like you got a trophy, pretty much,” Ryder says.
How will it feel, I ask myself, to play an active part in death? Pigs are one of my favourite animals. But, as a meat eater, I have been indirectly responsible for the death of many animals. To me, this hunt is a moral necessity. If I choose to eat meat, I want to face the consequences of that choice.
I’m not alone. A Hunters Tale, a 2017 report from the New Zealand Mountain Safety Council, shows that the number of women engaging in wild meat hunting is increasing, with many women saying they are drawn to the idea of providing food for their families. So too are devotees of the eat-what-you-kill movement. After friends told Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg that, despite loving pork, “they really didn’t want to think about the fact that the pig used to be alive”, Zuckerberg decided this approach was “irresponsible”. In 2011, he announced: “the only meat I’m eating is from animals I’ve killed myself.” Comedian Joe Rogan is on the same page, tweeting in 2014: “I only hunt things I eat and my goal is to personally ethically harvest all the meat I eat at home … I know that some people have a problem with that, but … if you wear leather and eat meat hating hunters for getting their own food is insanely hypocritical and just another sign of the … convenient detachment people have regarding the food they consume.”
And me? I comfort myself with buying organic and free-range meat, believing that at least those animals were happy when alive. I conveniently compartmentalise the death part. But when chase comes to blood, will I have the fortitude?
In preparation, I watched videos of pig hunts on YouTube. I am surprised by their slowness, the lack of frantic activity. The pigs stop fighting before the hunters slit their throats. My stepfather explains that these pigs are exhausted from running for their lives. For this reason, the RSPCA does not support hunting with dogs, as “chased pigs will experience fear, panic and distress”.
Murray and Howard, like most hunters in New Zealand, use dogs. But because their usual dogs are out of action, Elvis, a friend’s mixed-breed related to one of Murray’s, has come along. He’s wearing a tracking collar that allows the men to see where he is, and how he is moving, on a device that looks like a walkie-talkie. Right now he’s on the front bonnet of the truck, scanning the bush, his tongue hanging out in excitement. While Murray says hunting is a “bond between the mates that you hunt with”, he adds that “it’s a more powerful, strong, defined bond between you and your dogs”. It can take three years of daily training to produce a good hunting dog, but the bond is real.
“If you’re in a shit mood, the dog will be in a shit mood,” says Murray. “The bond you have between you and your dog is a life for a life.”
“Shit, yeah,” agrees Howard. “They’ll die for you.”
“So you gotta return the favour and get in there and back them up as well.”
• Photo by Jamie Bowering
• Photo by Jamie Bowering
We edge slowly up the gravel road, snaking between the thick bush on each side. The gorse flowers, an invasive prickly weed woven through the NZ bush, are bright yellow against the scrub, the air thick with their sweet odour. The two men are silent, scanning the landscape. Murray stops the car every few minutes to scan through the scope of the rifle he keeps for deer. “It’s not loaded,” he shows me. “We only load it when we see the animal.”
We drive until thick mud clogs the wheels, then climb out the truck quietly so we don’t frighten the pigs – or deer.
“Is a deer okay if we can’t find a pig?” Howard asked earlier in the week, while we were planning the hunt. I rang my editor in Australia. “It’s a bit Bambi,” she worried.
“A deer is definitely cuter,” I agreed. But, we concurred, it would be best if something died. Just not you or the photographer or the hunters, she stressed. Safety first. “I’ve never seen those feral pigs up close,” she’d written earlier. “But I imagine they’re not too friendly.”
No, they’re not, and feral pigs aren’t cute like the two pet pigs I had as a child. They’re not pink, or sweet, or round. Descended from pigs brought to New Zealand in the late 18th century, they resemble muscular, dirty wolves, with long pointed snouts, dense compact bodies, straight tails and dark, wiry coats.
They’re also pretty delicious. Earlier that week, Howard cooked some wild bacon for me, from pigs his brother had caught and butchered. After cutting up the pig, explained Howard, you cure it in brine. “Then when it’s cured you cut it into pieces and you smoke it for three-and-a-half hours.” Like greens from the garden that somehow taste more green, the wild pork tasted, to this infamously picky writer, well, more bacony. “Jase, this is delicious,” I enthused. "You could make hundreds of thousands at farmers’ markets in Melbourne with this.”
“Nah,” he said, “It’s about sustainable living. We’re keeping it. We’re eating it.”
Like Rogan and Zuckerberg, many hunters never buy meat – they only eat what they can catch. “That was me growing up,” says Howard, who first went hunting with his dad when he was four. Murray was four, too, and started hunting by himself, in bare feet, at seven.
“My old man taught me to never shoot something unless I was gonna eat it,” says Murray. “We only take what we need.”
Later, Murray and Howard would hit the road together. “[We’d] take the old man’s dogs, chuck ’em in the truck, wag school or work, fly over the hill and hunt for the day,” says Murray. Once, they caught seven pigs in one day.
“Everyone gets to have a feed then,” adds Howard.
Murray butchers the pigs himself and gives the meat away to families in need through a local charity. “We’ve caught so many animals that the buzz of catching them is still there, but it isn’t as great as the buzz I get from catching and giving [the meat] to someone who appreciates it,” says Murray. "You give someone a whole pig and there’s $1,000 of food for free.”
“Nah,” he said, “It’s about sustainable living. We’re keeping it. We’re eating it.”
• Photo by Jasmine Fisher
“It’s a koha (gift) to us from Mother Nature.”
We traipse through the bush, silently. The light rain is peaceful but a source of irritation for the men, as it makes it hard for Elvis to catch a boar’s scent from the markings. Beyond our footfalls it’s silent: the type of silence you can’t get in the crackling aliveness of the Australian wilderness. We’re listening for sounds of a pig – or, really, any mammal. In the New Zealand bush every mammal – as every Kiwi kid looking over their shoulder when playing will tell you – is feral. There are no natives here. No cute koalas or charming quokkas. Just matted sheep, slinking ferrets, tusked porkers and swollen grey possums that decimate fragile ecosystems.
I can see the appeal in hunting – it’s like a hike in nature, with the added thrill of a quest. It’s meditative; there is no room to focus on other things. Though mischievous Ryder is fixated on trying to put gorse prickles in his dad’s gumboot. Murray is fixated on the dog, and on the device tracking him.
“Circles mean it’s a pig,” he says, pointing at the monitor. When the dogs smell a pig, they tear off and keep it restrained until the men arrive with knives and ‘stick’ the pig.
Murray says that, out of respect for the animal, “most pig hunters won’t shoot a pig”. It seems unfair, he explains – an advantage. The RSPCA disagrees. While stating that they do not support hunting at all, they add that they prefer hunters “use an appropriate firearm to kill pigs humanely with an accurate head shot”.
In 2014, two hunters in New Zealand were charged with animal cruelty after a video was posted online of dogs biting a small pig for two minutes. The case was thrown out. "Pig hunting is not ideal for the faint-hearted nor people of the animal rights movement,” said Judge Barbara Morris. But in May 2015, the laws changed. Now, hunters training dogs to “hold a pig” can receive 12 months in jail or NZ$50,000 in fines if a pig suffers “unnecessary distress”.
But what is “unnecessary” distress? Death is distressing. And death – even if we don’t like to think about it – is involved every time we eat meat. When we buy our meat we are removed from the violence we have indirectly perpetrated in order to eat it. Pig hunters believe industrial meat production – a pig raised in a cage, gassed and processed – to be far crueller. Murray and I agree: we’d rather be a wild pig then a caged one. “One of the key components of ethical hunting,” states Victoria’s Game Management Authority, "is the concept of 'fair chase'”. This, they add, “means giving the game a reasonable chance to evade the hunter”. Murray agrees. “If the pig gets away, he’s earnt his day. A pig in a cage, it’s got no say.”
He continues: “We’ve been out there, we’ve slogged our ass off for 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 hours, 2, 3, 4, 5 days in a row.” When they catch the pig at last: “It’s a koha (gift) to us from Mother Nature.”
Taking the feral pigs out of the bush is also a koha to Mother Nature. All New Zealand’s feral animals create havoc, but “no other species systematically roots up the soil like pigs do”, states the country’s National Pest Control Agencies (NPCA). Feral pigs can plough up areas quickly, “wipe out” species of plants and trees and destroy fragile wetlands. New Zealand’s ground-bird eggs are eaten, their nests destroyed. The endangered kiwi are “adversely affected”. While various pest control experiments have been trialled – such as the controversial poison 1080 – the New Zealand Government, which encourages hunting, states that daytime hunting is still the most common form of pig control. “Of these methods, hunting with dogs is by far the most popular and is much more effective than hunting without dogs.”
• Photo by Jasmine Fisher
Like New Zealand, in Australia feral pigs are considered a “serious environmental and agricultural pest” by the Department of the Environment and Energy. While the government considers aerial shooting and poisoning the most effective control strategies, ground hunting is also acknowledged as providing some help in the short-term reduction of local populations. A 2014 survey estimated there were 300,000 recreational hunters in Australia. Last year, Queensland hunters caught more than 500 feral pigs at the King and Queen CQ Big Boar competition in Jambin, south of Rockhampton.
Back in New Zealand, there’s just one pig on our minds, and, finally, as the sky is darkening, it happens: Elvis senses it, and tears off into the bush. “See how he is moving in circles? He’s closing in on the pig,” explains Murray. “When he needs us, he’ll give one bark.” We all peer tensely at the monitor. The adrenaline makes me shiver. Hunting, I imagine, must enliven an ancient part of us. I am ready to run, ready for whatever happens in there.
But, wait – something is wrong. The circles on the monitor are decreasing; Elvis is slowing down. He starts to return. The boar got away. We watch Elvis loping back on the monitor, all of us carefully guarding our disappointment. But the sag in atmosphere is palpable. We walk further, but the energy has gone, and Elvis’s race through the bush, the boys say, would have scared anything away.
It quickly gets dark, and very cold. Ryder needs to get home to bed. Howard bundles him up and leaves. Murray decides to push on. Staying up all night hunting is normal to him. Sometimes, he explains, he’ll drive around all night, stay up for days on end to get a pig. We decide to give it one last crack, but we’ve made too much noise. The dark bush is silent. My fortitude remains untested – until next year, when I plan to go again.
“That’s the reality of pig hunting,” says my sister, a longtime pig-hunt widow. “You sometimes get one, sometimes you don’t.”
That’s what meat eating was like when we were hunter-gatherers: sometimes you ate, sometimes you didn’t. Now? We nip up to the shops and grab a plastic tray of chilled pink mush, divorced from the realities of the life – or lives – that ended for us to eat it.
Four weeks later, I speak to the boys. They haven’t caught the boar yet. “That’s why I haven’t chucked my hoodie out,” Murray says. “When I catch this bastard, him and my hoodie are going on the wall together.”
