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Living Wild and Domestic: The Education of a Hunter-Gardener
Living Wild and Domestic The Education of a HunterGardener Author:Robert Kimber In this thoughtful, provocative book on the human and animal conditions, Robert Kimber confronts head on the moral dilemmas all of us face in our fractured relationship with the natural world. How can we justify killing wild animals for food, much less for sport, when we are inundated by food supplied by industrialized agriculture? How can we ju... more »stify feeding and coddling our millions of cats and dogs at the same time we are destroying the habitats and lives of wild creatures all over the globe? Underlying all of Kimber's reflections is a search for a moral vision. What is our proper place in the creation, and how can we make our lives consistent with that vision? If what we eat and how we acquire our food define us, then the more we grow ourselves and the more we take from the world around us by hunting, fishing, and foraging for edible plants, the better citizens of the natural world we become, and the better caretakers of it. But central as this ethical component is to Kimber's thinking, he never slips into holier-than-thou moralizing or tries to absolve himself of his own sins, past or present. He remains vulnerable, culpable, and wryly self-deprecating as we follow his transformation from a boy worm-fisherman into an arrogant, teenage dry-fly purist; witness his vengeful murder of the raccoons raiding his henhouse; and hear his confession of dithering love for his black mutt, Lucy, even as he rails against the excesses of breeding "companion animals." Kimber's voice is often eloquent, often funny, sometimes trenchant, but always engaging as he pleads his case for a world where the wild can have a far more central place in our domestic lives than it does now. (5 1/2 x 8 3/4, 224 pages)« less