Habitat tagged posts

By Tovar Cerulli

Originally published on TheAtlantic.com and reposted here with permission from the author.

Fourteen years ago, I stood in the snow, struggling to digest what I had heard. A group of us, gathered to learn about monitoring and protecting wildlife habitat, had just discovered that our instructor—Sue Morse, founder of Keeping Track—was a deer hunter. I found the news disturbing. How could she work to safeguard the homes of animals she described as “neighbors” and then turn around and shoot one of them? I found it inconceivable that someone could be both an environmentalist and a hunter, a caretaker and a killer.

Today, I, too, am both. I understand that caring for animals and their ecosystems is not incompatible with participating in those systems as a predator...