Weekend Goat Hunt

This past weekend Gregg and I hiked up into the Kodiak backcountry and brought back some goat meat. Before leaving, I read an article about how animal rights groups are condemning Al Gore for not doing enough to link meat eating with global warming. Farmed meat costs much more (in terms of energy) than say corn and wheat (often used to feed the cows). No where in the article did it mention hunting. It was assumed that meat eaters always consume farm raised meat. This infuriated me.

For instance, here on Kodiak tofu is NOT grown locally - but must be grown and processed in some farm and/or food factory down south (gas powered machinery and possibly fertilizer used), then packaged (plastic made from oil used), and shipped to Alaska (planes and boats use lots of gas and our island home is a long ways from anywhere). On the other hand, my goat is locally produced and once harvested no longer passes gas (I gather livestock flatulance is a form of greenhouse gas). Furthermore, mountain goats are an introduced species on Kodiak and are wreaking havoc with backcountry ecosystems (they overgraze the fragile alpine tundra and are causing massive erosion). Their numbers need to be controlled. At least on Kodiak, it seems like a no brainer that eating mountain goat meat is far more eco-friendly than eating tofu. And I would argue that game meat, harvested locally, is always more eco-friendly than store bought food - anywhere.

That said, the pre-packaged meat products that one buys in a store are not eco-friendly at all. A great deal of energy is used to get that meat produced, packaged and transported to where can buy it. Worst of all, many of the animals in those packages never had a life outside. But what infuriates me about the animal activists attack on Al Gore is that they are not addressing the real problem - people should not be eating processed, non-local food of any kind. People need to 'shop local' whether by growing a garden, shopping at a farmers market, or by hunting and gathering their own food from the country around them.

These thoughts were running through my head as I hiked into the backcountry with Gregg. Good to have something to mull over because we had a long hike. Three hours of bushwacking and climbing to get up to the alpine tundra, and then another 2 hours of hiking in the alpine before we even got to where we could legally hunt a goat. After that it was another two hours of scrambling up mountains and sidehilling across steep scree slopes before we finally got to where we harvested a goat. Then we started home. That evening, by the time we camped with our goat meat in an alpine bowl full of wildflowers, we had climbed about 4000 vertical feet and hiked around 10 rough miles. Hard work for just about 70 pounds of goat meat.

Yesterday, was pretty easy in comparison. We woke up to heavy dew on the wildflowers - good thing we slept under the 'sil' tarp shelter - and a glorious sunrise. We ate our breakfast of red beans and rice with sausage and hiked around 6 miles home. No more climbing, but the last three hours of bushwacking was pretty awful. Back at Gregg's I had a beer - our 30 hour goat hunt was over. Now it is time to process and package our eco-friendly meat. Afterall, since we practically hiked from the front door of Gregg's house the carbon footprint of my locally harvested goat is zero. Even the veggies we get from our organic produce coop aren't that eco-friendly!

In the top photo Gregg nears camp on the way home after a hard day of hunting. In the next photo I am contemplating the climb down into a valley with a heavy load of goat meat on my back. In the bottom two photos Gregg and I enjoy our camp in the wild flower meadow at dawn. In the bottom photo, behind Gregg, you can see the mountain we climbed over on the way to the goats. Patrick