Steven Rinella > Quotes

“Maybe stalking the woods is as vital to the human condition as playing music or putting words to paper. Maybe hunting has as much of a claim on our civilized selves as anything else. After all, the earliest forms of representational art reflect hunters and prey. While the arts were making us spiritually viable, hunting did the heavy lifting of not only keeping us alive, but inspiring us. To abhor hunting is to hate the place from which you came, which is akin to hating yourself in some distant, abstract way.”
― Steven Rinella, Meat Eater: Adventures from the Life of an American Hunter

“At once [the buffalo] is a symbol of the tenacity of wilderness and the destruction of wilderness; it's a symbol of Native American culture and the death of Native American culture; it's a symbol of the strength and vitality of America and the pettiness and greed of America; it represents a frontier both forgotten and remembered; it stands for freedom and captivity, extinction and salvation.”
― Steven Rinella, American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon

“My own reasoning was certainly complicated, so much so that I can’t fully explain it. At some level, I’m sure I viewed the act of releasing fish as a form of contrition. There was definitely a connection in my mind—or reverse connection, as it were—between killing upward of a thousand furbearing mammals for money and then spending money in order to let other creatures live. And while one might argue that you can do a better job of letting things live by not catching them in the first place, you can’t actively let them live until you’ve had a chance to kill them.”
― Steven Rinella, Meat Eater: Adventures from the Life of an American Hunter

“To sit in a tree and watch the coming of dawn is a strange thing. As soon as you can see the ground with any detail it seems that you’re twice as high as you thought you were. Tree stumps go through brief periods when they look like people. The root wads of overturned trees look like bears. You can’t tell whether the trail you’re sitting along passes through a large meadow you should have noticed earlier or just a slight opening in the trees that you wouldn’t have noticed earlier. But as the light comes up enough to make out the individual leaves on the ground, you realize that you’re only as high as you thought you were. The stumps go back to being stumps, the root wads back to root wads. The trail begins to look like how you remembered it.”
― Steven Rinella, Meat Eater: Adventures from the Life of an American Hunter

“I used to be endlessly troubled by meat-eating people who were uneasy with hunters and hunting. ... How can someone suggest that paying for the slaughter of animals is more justifiable than taking the responsibility for one's food into one's own hands? ... Civilization is a mechanism that allows us to avoid the necessary but ugly aspects of life; most of us do not euthanize our own pets, we don't unplug the life support on our own ailing grandparents, we don't repair our own cars, and we don't process our own raw sewage. Instead, the delegations of our less-pleasant responsibilities is so widespread that taking these things on is almost like trying to swim upriver. It's easier not to do them, and those who insist on doing so are bound to look a little odd.”
― Steven Rinella, American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon

“There's a fine line between being practical and being a candyass, which is a word that my father used to describe someone whom he considered to be the opposite of tough. ... Because I'm very afraid of becoming a candyass, I'll sometimes do things that I know to be impractical just so I don't have to worry about being a candyass.”
― Steven Rinella, American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon

“Maybe stalking the woods is as vital to the human condition as playing music or putting words to paper. Maybe hunting has as much of a claim on our civilized selves as anything else. After all, the earliest forms of representational art reflect hunters and prey. While the arts were making us sprititually viable, hunting did the heavy lifting of not only keeping up alive, but inspiring us. To abhor hunting is to hate the place from which you came, which is akin to hating yourself in some distant, abstract way.”
― Steven Rinella, Meat Eater: Adventures from the Life of an American Hunter

“The remainder of the lion... was still in my freezer that spring when I happened to turn up at the Rock Creek Lodge. This bar... is regionally famous for its annual Testicle Festival, a liquor-filled carnival where ranchers, hippies, loggers, bikers, and college kids get together in September in order to get drunk, shed clothes, dance, and occasionally fight... But on this day the Testicle Festival was still a half year away, and the bar was mostly empty except for a plastic bag of hamburger buns and an electric roasting pan that was filled with chipped meat and a tangy barbecue sauce. I was well into my third sandwich... when the owner of the place came out and asked how I liked the cougar meat. ...When I left the bar, the man called after me to announce a slogan that he'd just thought of: "Rock Creek Lodge: Balls in the fall, pussy in the spring!”
― Steven Rinella, Meat Eater: Adventures from the Life of an American Hunter

“On the most basic level, agriculture leads to more food; more food leads to more people; more people leads to professional specialization; professional specialization leads to invention; invention leads to the development of greater weapons; the development of greater weapons leads to conquest. What this meant, over the centuries, is that agricultural people basically kicked the shit out of hunters.”
― Steven Rinella, Meat Eater: Adventures from the Life of an American Hunter

“Driving around the West, I was like an illiterate man staring into a book; he doesn’t understand what exactly he’s seeing, but he damn sure knows it’s important”
― Steven Rinella, Meat Eater: Adventures from the Life of an American Hunter

“Indians only needed so many implements and decorations. If a tribe drove three hundred buffalo over a cliff, they wouldn’t feel obligated to make twenty-four hundred buffalo-hoof spoons and six hundred buffalo-horn charcoal carriers. Rather, they might just take the meat and hides from the best-looking female buffalo, those that weren’t too smashed up or buried under other buffalo. That might be all they touched. After all, their time and energy had value, just as ours does.”
― Steven Rinella, American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon

“When I was done plucking the birds, the blood and the scattering of white feathers gave my campsite the appearance of a pillow fight gone horribly wrong.”
― Steven Rinella, Meat Eater: Adventures from the Life of an American Hunter

“One August day a few years back, my friend Dan Bogan and I spent a whole day up on a hill that was shaped like a woman's chest. We were hiding in the cleavage, out of sight.”
― Steven Rinella, Meat Eater: Adventures from the Life of an American Hunter

“true hunter recognizes that experiences are the ultimate hunting trophies; he takes pride in walking the ancient and noble pathway that was laid down by his forebearers; and even when he returns from a hunt cold, wet, and empty-handed, he does so with a full heart.”
― Steven Rinella, The Complete Guide to Hunting, Butchering, and Cooking Wild Game: Volume 1: Big Game

“[LSSU] was the kind of school where students had a lot of pride. Not the raucous strain of sports pride... And not academic pride... It was more of a geographical pride. Kids were proud to live in that tough wilderness setting, and the best way to prove your mettle was through achievements in the wild.”
― Steven Rinella, Meat Eater: Adventures from the Life of an American Hunter

“The Dilligas is perhaps the ugliest boat I've ever been on... Dilligas is an acronym: Do I Look Like I Give A Shit.”
― Steven Rinella, The Scavenger's Guide to Haute Cuisine

“Every schoolboy knows that the Indians used every part of the buffalo, which is true. But they did not use every part of every buffalo.”
― Steven Rinella, American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon

“Growing up, I considered [my dad] to be an exemplar of fidelity. For instance, he didn't believe in removing his wedding ring, no matter what. Whenever he washed his hands, he would thoroughly scrub his right hand, then align his two ring fingers tip to tip, slide the ring from his left ring finger to his right, then scrub his left hand.”
― Steven Rinella, The Scavenger's Guide to Haute Cuisine

“When I’m not hunting, I always think that I like hunting because it puts you into risky situations that make you feel especially alive. But when I am hunting, I’m tempted to dislike hunting for the exact same reasons.”
― Steven Rinella, Meat Eater: Adventures from the Life of an American Hunter

“While I was heading into the woods in order to put fur coats into stores, they were heading into the woods to put food on their plates. It was an utterly simple equation. For them, the value of an animal was fixed. It did not change according to markets and trends. A 110-pound deer provided about thirty thousand calories of energy and five thousand grams of protein. Of course, that deer has a potent spiritual significance as well, but that potency was supported by the universal usefulness of its flesh. We need to eat to survive. We need to kill to eat.”
― Steven Rinella, Meat Eater: Adventures from the Life of an American Hunter

“hide-hunting outfit might travel with”
― Steven Rinella, American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon

“Fear prevents engagement; lack of engagement builds into a habit of avoidance; and pretty soon it’s just your family stuck inside four walls, where perhaps the biggest obstacle of all—technology—abounds.”
― Steven Rinella, Outdoor Kids in an Inside World: Getting Your Family Out of the House and Radically Engaged with Nature

“pile”
― Steven Rinella, Outdoor Kids in an Inside World: Getting Your Family Out of the House and Radically Engaged with Nature

“Indians in Kentucky used a 225-mile path between Big Bone Lick and Maysville that they called, simply, “the Buffalo Path.”
― Steven Rinella, American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon

“our kids need to understand that they are not above, outside, or apart from their physical environment—they are completely intertwined with it, and it with them.”
― Steven Rinella, Outdoor Kids in an Inside World: Getting Your Family Out of the House and Radically Engaged with Nature

“took them everywhere, even to drive-in movies. While their favorite foods were marshmallows, Mountain Dew, and venison jerky, they were also big fans of live seafood. We used to fill a kiddie pool with a few inches of water and then populate it with crayfish and chubs that we netted from our lake. Watching the raccoons chase around their dinner in the water was better entertainment than anything you’d find on TV. But the problem with raccoon ownership is that the animals begin to go wild and crazy when they’re around seven months old. Critter got so territorial and aggressive that he’d attack you whenever you brought him a marshmallow. He somehow mistook the gesture of offering the treat as an attempt to steal it. He got to be so dangerous to be around that I had to drive him way back into the woods to release him into the wild. Some weeks later a buddy of mine pulled up in his truck and said he found my raccoon. When he opened the door, out rushed a raccoon that was certainly not Critter. The animal ran across the driveway, bit my dad on the leg, and then scurried up a tree. We then had to get a .22 and kill the raccoon in order to check it for rabies. Critter was never seen again, and we came to blame his maleness for his bad attitude. That’s why we got both a male and a female the second time”
― Steven Rinella, Meat Eater: Adventures from the Life of an American Hunter

“opportunities.”
― Steven Rinella, Outdoor Kids in an Inside World: Getting Your Family Out of the House and Radically Engaged with Nature

“In the first half of the twentieth century, the conservationist Aldo Leopold had already warned of two “spiritual dangers” that come from not owning a farm: “One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.”
― Steven Rinella, Outdoor Kids in an Inside World: Getting Your Family Out of the House and Radically Engaged with Nature

“The whining and fighting during that two-hour car ride to the lake may make you want to bag the whole trip. No matter what, though, stick with it. I have faith that you’ll eventually find, or reconnect with, the addictive qualities of nature.”
― Steven Rinella, Outdoor Kids in an Inside World: Getting Your Family Out of the House and Radically Engaged with Nature

“arcane.”
― Steven Rinella, The Complete Guide to Hunting, Butchering, and Cooking Wild Game: Volume 1: Big Game