I was a “hook and bullet” environmentalist.

 A full adherent to the philosophy that by paying to hunt and fish I was providing money and economic incentives to those agencies that bought and preserved habitat—and thus thwarted those who would turn every wood and meadow into something else, displacing and killing the creatures who lived there. My own killing, I believed, was “sustainable use” of the wild. Or so the game and fish agencies told me. 

I never hunted for trophies or “sport” or anything I didn’t eat. And I hunted only creatures in places where those same game and fish agencies told me my prey was in excess of “management target” populations. I, and my hunting companions, tried to avoid the “unnecessary suffering” of the creatures we pursued. We strove for “clean kills” and passed on risky shots. We adhered to Teddy Roosevelt’s notions of “fair chase.” 

Though I was not so blind as not to notice, like Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, that a rifle did offer some undeniably unfair advantages.

Yet I persisted. And, as my colleagues and I struggled to stop grazing by domestic cattle on public lands, grazing which destroyed wildlife habitat and spurred government programs to kill predators, I felt better about myself. I knew none of my money was going to support the livestock industry. My meat came from the natural world I was trying to preserve. But—though I didn’t know it then—I was burning the village to save it.

It was the wisdom of my children that pulled me around and reminded me what I had forgotten and overlooked in my philosophy. Each in their own way; my two sons cried at the “game processing” butcher because the elk, hanging on hooks, gutted and with their hides removed, were “naked” and missing their heads. They remarked, “Dad, this is really sad,” as they examined the beautiful tail feathers of a bunch of pheasants I was preparing to cook. And I was reminded of my own examination of the feathers of the flicker who had hit my brother’s window, the body my grandmother’s kisses could not restore to life. Still, I thought, they were just too young to understand. 

It was my daughter who broke me. I had taken her to Rocky Mountain National Park to see the elk bugling in the fall. We spotted a herd from the jeep. She knew I hunted elk and tried to feed them to her by hiding them in spaghetti sauce and sausages. As I pulled her out of her car seat to get a better look at the herd, she said, simply and defiantly, “Daddy, if you are going to hurt the elks, I am not getting out of this car.” 

I tried to explain that I wasn’t going to hurt them today, that I really loved the elk, that I spent my days and nights and weekends filing all sorts of lawsuits to protect elk and the wildlands they needed to survive. She began to cry and asked, “Daddy, why? Why do you hate the elks?” 

By then in my legal career, I had advised countless law students, struggling over what do with their lives and their powerful new degrees, to follow a guide I had used: “Try to explain your job to a child and see if they understand.” It was a simple test to determine if you were being true to the ideals that had led you to law school. It was my own test. And I was failing it. 

I stopped hunting. 

By my own standard, it followed that I should stop eating meat. But for a time, I made exceptions. I ate meat when friends cooked and I didn’t want to give insult. Finally, when some friends dragged me to a famous barbeque shack in Kansas City, surrounded by a gluttonous orgy of meat eating, I became physically sick looking at the flesh of unknown type and origin on my plate. I stopped eating meat completely. 

Dairy products and eggs continued to be part of my diet—largely because I was an uncreative, lazy cook. I could have used the vegan cookbook, Dining With Friends, Lee co-authored with Priscilla Feral, but I hadn’t met them yet. 

I did know some vegans, friends I had represented in environmental lawsuits. They were delightful, caring, thoughtful, people. They invited me to their tables. I began to read books they recommended. We talked about ethics, health, the “carbon footprint” of meat-eating and the effects of animal agribusiness on the environment, the free-living wildlife that we loved and the endangered species that we fought to save with legal protection. Their vegan lifestyle made sense to me and I joined them. 

-Jay Tutchton, General Counsel, WildEarth Guardians. From the foreword to On Their Own Terms: Bringing Animal-Rights Philosophy Down to Earth (2010) by Lee Hall.