I live among elk and have learned to respect them. One moonlit night during the dead of last
winter, I looked out my bedroom window to see about twenty of them grazing a plot of grass the
size of a living room. Just that small patch among acres of other species of native prairie grass.
Why that species and only that species of grass that night in the worst of winter when the threat
to their survival was the greatest? What magic nutrient did this species alone contain? What does
a wild animal know that we don't? I think we need this knowledge.
Food is politics. That being the case, I voted twice in 2002. The day after Election Day, in a truly
dismal mood, I climbed the mountain behind my house and found a small herd of elk grazing
native grasses in the morning sunlight. My respect for these creatures over the years has become
great enough that on that morning I did not hesitate but went straight to my job, which was to rack
a shell and drop one cow elk, my household's annual protein supply. I voted with my weapon of
choice--an act not all that uncommon in this world, largely, I think, as a result of the way we grow
food. I can see why it is catching on. Such a vote has a certain satisfying heft and finality about it.
My particular bit of violence, though, is more satisfying, I think, than the rest of the globe's
ordinary political mayhem. I used a rifle to opt out of an insane system. I killed, but then so did
you when you bought that package of burger, even when you bought that package of tofu burger.
I killed, then the rest of those elk went on, as did the grasses, the birds, the trees, the coyotes,
mountain lions, and bugs, the fundamental productivity of an intact natural system, all of it went
on.
Richard Manning
