All Forms of Life Are Sacred.

[Jackpine Radical]

40. I have killed animals--deer, game birds, fish--

in order to feed people.

I don't think I have ever killed anything without giving thanks to it and feeling regret.

A momentary digression--

My family learned how to survive in the pine barrens of northern Wisconsin after immigrating here in 1910. Their homestead was next to an Ojibwe Indian reservation, and their teachers were the Indian kids with whom they associated. They got certain perspectives from the Indians, and passed those perspectives on to me.

The Indians assume that animals have spirits or souls. But not all animals are the same. A bear, for example, is its own person, with one soul per bear. When one kills a bear, one explains the reason and makes peace with the soul of the individual bear.

Deer, on the other hand, all partake of an "over-soul," the Deer Spirit. When one takes a deer, one makes amends with the over-soul of all deer.

I think this dichotomy arises from their observations of the animals in question. Bears are very individualistic in their habits and dispositions. Each of them seems to be animated by an individual spirit that is quite different from the spirit inhabiting every other bear.

Deer, on the other hand, are quite predictable, given constraints of age, sex and season. It doesn't take more than one soul to account for the behavior of the species, at least in the wild.

From an informational perspective, one might say that each bear carries with it a unique package of traits, while every deer is pretty much a copy of every other deer (given those variations in age, sex & season). To kill a bear or a human is to destroy something unique, whereas to kill a deer is pretty much to destroy one instance of a creature that has many replications, so much less unique information is lost than when a bear dies.