These are the White Mountains, on the border between Maine and New Hampshire.
Where we live we are surrounded by thousands of acres of wilderness,
thousands of stars in the night sky,
and thousands of black bears.
I’ll start out by saying I’ve been vegan. I’ve been a member of PETA, I’ve been a vegetarian,
I’ve spent money supporting anti-hunting campaigns before I understood this world.
For anyone who has come here to interpret my work as supportive of animal cruelty, I’d invite you to read on.
I moved to Andover, Maine in 2019 which sits nestled firmly in middle-of-nowhere territory between several ski resort villages and a few mill towns of the Androscoggin River valley. We are closer to the Canadian border than we are to the nearest city, and the butchering job I began when I moved to the area was an hour and twenty minutes one-way. And on that one-way, there weren’t even any traffic lights the entire time. It may seem like the land that time forgot, but ironically, it made history for the space age.
AT&T erected the then-famous Telstar Satellite Receiver on a mountaintop in Andover in 1961, when Andover boasted a population of 762 (humans), to receive AT&T’s first satellite transmission to earth. With all of the ensuing hoopla, the town’s popularity surged and we are now at roughly 780 citizens as of the 2020 census.
I suspect the ratio of bears to people would shock all of you in civilization, and perhaps even those of us out in the hollers. Because that’s the thing about bears- the old saying was that it was very hard to spot a bear even when you’re in their country. You could spend days in the woods and never see one. But you should be certain, all the while, that more than one bear had seen you.
Not the case anymore.
It seems like the internet can’t get enough humorous home videos of bears breaking into places we feel they shouldn’t be. We can chuckle while we watch a bear play a living room piano, steal someone’s taco off a picnic table, appear on the dance floor of an outdoor wedding, break into a van to eat trail mix in the front seat; the content is unparalleled for those in need of a laugh.
The bears have very different opinions on where they ought to roam… in fact they have increasingly raccoon-like opinions of where the wild things end and where their buffet begins. And there are problems when a 400-pound bear begins to take up habits typically associated with varmints:
a possum on your back porch can scare your cat and ruin your screen door, a bear on your back porch can kill your cat and ruin your porch.
Fortunately for New Englanders, black bears are not particularly aggressive when it comes to attacking humans. But the “particularly” might carry an adjacent asterisk, because bears seem to be growing comfortable in ways that carry greater risks- to humans and pets, to bears and their young. The fear of humans so-frequently attributed to the species seems to be rubbing off in some areas. A neighbor of mine fired several rounds of bullets into the air to deter a large boar, standing on his hind legs within feet of their back door.
The neighbor hoped the shots might scare him back to the woods, but the temptation of bird seed was apparently too potent and he headed back into the house and locked the doors, the bear standing erect and championing the man’s smaller frame. Luckily my neighbor doesn’t have a dog, but if he did we can quickly surmise the result of that hypothetical exchange. A 64-year-old woman in Porter, Maine punched a bear right in the nose to get him to stop attacking her dog. She suffered a bear bite, but luckily the bear retreated to the woods and the woman and the dog were safe.
It is brutally sad that land which was once safe for all fauna to roam has now been pillaged, torn to unrecognizable shreds of chemically-poisoned lawn and gridded with concrete arteries that choke out and oxbow clusters of nature.
And yet, wildlife persists.
It adapts, it evolves, it surprises us. And bears seem to be doing the same, increasing steadily in population as they expand their comfort zones to include more dumpsters and family barbecues than ever before.
And populations grow and grow, and winter comes. And it is brutal, and hibernation relies on a maximum calorie harvest in the fall to make it through, particularly for sows and cubs. When bear populations increase, available resources decrease as a result.
Aggressive behavior, weakness, starvation and sickness result. We have created a world where simply allowing certain animal populations to grow unchecked results in the devastation of their well-being… the ebb and flow which would naturally balance their numbers doesn’t exist any more. Humans need to husband these wild species in order to help their populations prosper in a world that is increasingly man-made.
I encourage anyone unfamiliar with the work of Steve Rinella (host of the “MeatEater” show on Netflix, and podcast by the same name) to read, watch or listen to any of his thorough and thoughtful content. He has been instrumental in preserving the tenets of the Conservationist movement and educating the masses about the strongly forged bond between hunting and conservation. He is no stranger to the difficult emotions around the act of taking life.
I have looked to him for philosophical and moral guidance at times that I couldn’t move beyond sadness at what I saw. He replies, time and again, that in order to be in Right Relationship with the animals we need to think at the level of population. He uses different words, but his message is a tonic that I take with me every day that I work with any animal, and especially with bears.
Perhaps some hunters may be so wisened by time and jaded by what they’ve endured that they feel no sadness for the animal they have harvested. But in my five years of working with and alongside hunters, I don’t think I’ve met one who was incapable of feeling empathy for the animal. In the event that an animal is injured but not confirmed dead, the fascinating enterprise of tracking, often with dogs, takes center stage and can go on for days in lieu of rest, sleep, meals and so on.
An unsuccessful track and an unresolved hunt can lead a hunter to tears- not only that they return home without their bounty but at the notion that they have caused undue suffering. This is not the image that the mainstream attributes to hunters.
Each hunter has their reason for being in the woods and for engaging in the type of hunting that they choose. Each type of animal hunt is different, the seasons are each different, the necessary behaviors and tactics and materials are different. Somewhere, each hunter has an equation of how to balance their empathy with everything else that hunting entails and what they’re aiming to gain from the experience.
I’ve never seen meat go to waste, but in addition to harvesting meat there are other reasons that some hunters love to hunt- alone time in nature, time with loved ones in nature, the preservation and refinement of firearm skills, the protection of pets and livestock, the thrill of the chase or the stalk… skills which kept our species alive for hundreds of thousands of years, and are vital for some thread of humans to pass down to the next generation.
I’ve seen hunters who hardly flinch during the whole process, and still two of my dearest hunter friends regularly go out to their stand but can’t bring themselves to pull the trigger. We each bring our own history to the animals. But in addition to all of the personal reasons for hunting, or not hunting, there are broader reasons for hunting as each state hires biologists and ecologists to create population control plans for their region.
For those who oppose hunting, I suspect they would more ardently oppose broad extermination campaigns which would be required to keep the animal populations they so dearly love healthy, to prevent them from succumbing to illness. It is a brutal type of compassion to understand that in order to serve the many, we must kill some. And the most ethical, socially rewarding and nutritionally sound way of doing to do this is to encourage hunting, an activity that serves humans and animals alike.
Hunters have an appreciation for all the things that are necessary for wildlife to survive, and therefore are the best conservators of the natural world.
In a very real sense, hunters are mankind's best and last stand against the loss of the natural world as we know. Hunters are men and women of honor, who live by a code of ethics that assures that the contest between hunter and quarry is a fair one that no animal is wasted.
Richard Parsons
Hunting for bears, in particular.
When I first moved to Maine in 2016 I chuckled at the “stupidity” of the “Jelly Donut Controversy:”
All manner of activists were protesting the notion of baiting bears (with jelly donuts, with icing, with chocolatey trail mix, you name it.) Of course anyone with a conscience could tell that this would be shooting fish in a barrel… not the kind of ethical Fair Chase hunting we envision when we remember grandpa heading out in his wool flannel around Thanksgiving. I probably donated $5 or signed some petition at the time because it was so clear to me that this baiting was an ethical breach of the highest degree.
Over the next three years later I suffered a health scare that challenged my experience of the world and led me to approach everything I thought I knew for certain with fresh eyes and an interest in more context, more information, more material truth.
I began perceiving a visceral difference between knowledge and understanding. A difference between our pride in all of our informed rightness, and the litmus test that time and adversity project onto a series of assumptions we hold, revealing whether or not we know less than we had previously believed.
The more I learned about hunting, for reasons explained in the “Our Story” section, the more I learned about human history, and the more I learned about myself. So I aimed to put myself around hunting and hunters as much as possible, to learn why things made so much sense to them that seemed so unethical to me… bear baiting, for instance.
I became a camp cook and offered those services in exchange for the opportunity to be around hunting. I didn’t know too many hunter friends so the alternative would have been to engage in one of the very expensive hunting instructional excursions in either the traditional hunting community or one of the elite “ReWilding” communities where you can spend thousands of dollars to go to the woods and learn things that our ancestors knew for hundreds of thousands of years and that we have forgotten in the last fifty.
Educational hunting retreats weren’t an option for my budget, so camp cook was off to the races. I learned very quickly that bear are unique in their olfactory discretion, and that is nearly impossible to sneak up on a bear. For this capacity to remain invisible they are nicknamed The Ghost of the Woods. There are certainly expert stalkers who manage to hunt without bait, but this is an outlier skill far from normative. Enticing bears with irresistible bait is one of two ways to improve the odds, the second being hunting with a pack of hounds: the hounds chase the bear and “tree” it and then the hunter dispatches the bear with a shotgun.
I have a lot to learn about hunting with dogs, and I know some hunting hounds whose joie de vivre can only be attributed to the fact that their time on earth is mired with activities to which they possess some jubilant genetic birthright. I’m still not comfortable with it, largely because I can’t find comfort in incurring that level of stress to an animal.
The same goes for trapping; I’ve attended trappers’ events and attempted to learn more about the history of it, but I can’t abide the overall process of immobilizing an animal for an amount of time before killing it, leading me to be more comfortable with quick-kill water-set traps but not particularly comfortable with the traps used for land mammals. I will continue to challenge my beliefs and assumptions about this area of bear hunting and trapping, but thus far I’m not sold. Baiting, however, offers the bears the thing that we all say we want- to go quickly, and doing what we love.
Bait is put out a month before bear hunting season opens. Most bait is sweet but there are some folks who bait with fish and No, Thank You. So the bears and their expert sniffers develop a habit of checking bait sites in the late afternoon, early evening, dusk, when their already ghost-like ability to silently appear and disappear is made evermore ethereal by quickly changing light.
When all goes well, a hunter is hidden in a blind, takes a perfect shot, and the bear receives his final blow with his nose deep in a barrel of chocolate-covered peanuts. Naturally there are variations on a theme and some kills are quicker than others, but the reduction of suffering is an important tenet in the decision-making process for every hunter.
At this point surely the equation still reminds us of the fish-in-a-barrel meme. But interestingly, even with hundreds and thousands of dollars worth of sticky sweet lure, Maine bear hunters’ success rate is around 20% on average. Meaning that 80% of the time, bears are smart enough to avoid the set-up, using their expert noses, hunches we can’t explain, a sense of knowing we can’t begin to understand.
In 2022 the Maine bear population was around 36,000. Ecologists argue that the healthiest population size for black bears in Maine would be 23,000. Amateur math confirms that the amount of bear tags doled out (13,600) would correspond well with efforts toward the desired population reduction.
In 2022, 3883 Maine bear were harvested, in one of the top harvests in Maine history, with an impressive 28% success rate. This was an abnormal year with favorable numbers for hunters, and not every year is so lucky. Any way you run the numbers, as the surplus 13,000+ bears keep populating, the need for population control should begin to demonstrate that Mainers need to preserve this sacred pastime for the health and safety of all species involved.
Where I come in.
After my camp cook year I was hungry for real work with real animals, dead or alive. It was the big COVID year and I wanted something to feel real and material and forward-moving after so many months were spent in vein trying to make sense of a newly synthesized version of reality. I signed up to work at a nearby game processor in the White Mountains who had an ad out for a butcher.
I had been working at a butcher in another area of the state and was somewhat frustrated that I wasn’t being given the opportunity to learn much about breaking down a whole cow or pig. This opportunity would surely help my cutting skills, I thought. When I arrived, the interview turned out to be for a skinner. I had no clue what that would entail, but this remote outfitter took a chance on me and I showed up the first day to a pile of 8 black bears and a filleting knife, and haven’t looked back since.
I have cried and I have danced with the bears. I work alone, in a cooler, with the animals, a winch, a few knives and a sawzall. My years of working as an aesthetician or a massage therapist couldn’t be father in the rear view and yet, I hold the animals paw and I feel a connection not unlike my work with clients on a table. I stretch their arms and their legs, and instead of offering a physical release to a client in pain, perhaps I can hold my knife and my breath in a way which allows reverence and honor to pass through me into the animal as I pass through the blade through his flesh, slowly beginning to invite him into his next iteration.
Perhaps some of you feel as I do about life after death, and can imagine how I feel truly blessed to offer encouragement and freedom to these animals as I begin to remove the skin from the body.
I don’t feel that our culture sufficiently respects the alchemy involved in butchering, in transforming a piece of sacrificial material which would otherwise be destined for decay, and artfully preserving the sense of vitality within it for as long as possible.
I am no proper butcher, and I’m no expert skinner. I have skun (yes, this is the word we use…. yes, this is Northern Appalachia) hundreds and hundreds of animals and at a certain point I suspect my knife-work stopped improving and my tricks or habits stopped developing and I just stuck with what got the job done effectively. But now that the skinning skills have become unconscious, the rest of me is free to develop a relationship with what I consider to be the soul of the bear.
I don’t remember the first moment I decided to make products from their fat. I know it was late September 2020, and my boss- a seasoned butcher with inherited cutting skills permeating his family tree- mentioned that bear fat was prized for hand cream. I had known this about animal fat instinctively (I was grounded as a kid for putting butter on my legs when I didn’t have any lotion… turns out this career has been haunting me ever since), but I have no recollection of a conscious leap from that conversation into my crock pot. What I do recall was that within the next 72 hours, BearFaced was born and I was simply a vessel for this medicine to return to people who have forgotten this ancient and sacred part of their own history.
Archeological records provide us with examples of bears who roamed every continent with the exceptions of Antartica and Australia. Nearly all of us from palest Scandinavians to darkest Somalians come from people who lived amongst bears of one kind or another at one time or another. In more recent Northern European and Eastern European history, bear fat (and other parts of the bear) are still dutifully regarded as medicine. There are many tribal peoples in North America who prize bear medicine and who consider bear fat or bear grease to be one of the most healing remedies they employ in their toolkits, bundles and ceremonies.
As I began to understand the liquid gold which was buried beneath my knife, my life took on a renewed meaning and a deeper commitment to the veritas of this work.
In later years I have begun exploring hide tanning and taxidermy work to continually seek deeper ways to revere every aspect of the animals that I can. But that’s another story for another time.
Legal Information about working with bear fat:
Since 2021 I have been a licensed Hide Dealer with the state of Maine. This means that I am legally obligated to report every animal I process into bear tallow to the state. Licenses and practices like this deter poaching- and although poaching is very rare in our region, I am a proponent of any policies which protect wildlife.
BearFaced Skincare is a “finished wildlife product” which is a category of goods which are legally sold in the state of Maine.
“Black Bears… the feral hogs of the North.”
-Gas Station Hearsay