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Jeffrey S. Barkin is a practicing psychiatric physician, a past-president of the Maine Medical Association, and co-host of “A Healthy Conversation,” a weekly radio show on WGAN in Portland.
He was 14, quiet, and sturdy. His voice hadn’t cracked yet, but his hands trembled slightly as he recounted the buck. “It dropped right there,” he said. “One shot. It didn’t suffer.”
His father had taken him into the woods at dawn, just as his own father had before him. A rite of passage. A lesson in patience, responsibility, and, yes, death. The boy didn’t tell the story with glee. He wasn’t boasting. If anything, he looked a little haunted. “I said thank you to it,” he added.
In my line of work, I hear stories that don’t always make the papers. And when the question comes up — Is it cruel to hunt deer? — the answer isn’t a position. It’s a prism. It depends on where you stand, what you value, and what you see when you look through the scope. Some see meat. Others see murder. And somewhere in between lies an old truth: We are part of nature, not separate from it.
Here in Maine, that truth is woven into tradition. According to the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, hunters harvested more than 42,000 deer in 2024, the second-highest total in state history. With a statewide deer population now estimated at over 320,000, and few natural predators in much of the state, hunting is more than sport. It’s a way to manage an overpopulation crisis that would otherwise lead to starvation, Lyme disease, and car accidents. But hunting isn’t just about ecology. It’s about economy too.
Maine’s hunting industry generates more than $350 million annually, according to Hunting Works for Maine, supporting jobs for guides, retailers, and seasonal workers. The economic ripple touches everything from local diners to conservation programs funded by license fees. In rural towns, hunting season isn’t just tradition. It’s stability. It keeps freezers full and communities afloat. Still, that’s not the whole picture.
Ask someone who bottle-fed a fawn at a wildlife rehab center. Ask a hiker who wakes early to watch deer graze through morning mist. Ask a child whose backyard friend didn’t come back. For them, the crack of a rifle isn’t heritage. It’s heartbreak. So, is it cruel?
Cruelty, I believe, lives in intention. It thrives in indifference, in taking life casually or carelessly. Most ethical hunters in Maine feel none of that. They train. They wait. They shoot to kill quickly. They carry the animal out of the woods with a quiet blend of reverence and sorrow.
If anything, that kind of hunting may be less cruel than the industrial food system that packages meat in plastic and distances us from the lives it took. Most animals raised for commercial consumption live short, confined, stressful lives, slaughtered behind closed doors, far from the eyes of the eater. It’s possible they suffer more, and are honored less, than a deer taken swiftly in a cold clearing by someone who says thank you.
There is no curtain between life and death in the woods. Just pine needles. Steam rising from warm fur. A young boy with his hand still shaking. And a truth: Life and death are closer than we like to admit.
As a psychiatrist, I wonder what that moment does to a child’s heart. I’ve seen hunting forge empathy, humility, and a sense of sacred responsibility. I’ve also seen numbness. Sometimes trauma. Like many rites of passage, it matters how it’s done. It matters why.
I’ve spoken with children who cried after their first hunt, not because they regretted the act, but because the reality of taking life was heavier than they imagined. That’s not a flaw in their upbringing. That’s a sign the experience meant something. That they were awake to the stakes.
We should keep asking hard questions about animal welfare, about how we eat, about the emotional toll of normalizing death. But we should also ask whether the alternative — detachment, indifference, and abstraction — carries its own moral cost.
Maybe the better question isn’t “Is it cruel to hunt deer?” but “How do we live in a world where death is necessary and still act with decency and care?” When that boy said thank you to the deer, he wasn’t just being polite. He was answering that question. And I think that matters.
