Moral Ambivalence of Hunting and Killing

Moral Ambivalence of Hunting and Killing describes the unresolved conflict between Ben Givens’s skill and attraction to hunting and his recurring unease at taking the lives of birds. The tension reaches from childhood lessons with his father to the chukar hunt he undertakes amid grief and a plan to die. Hunting offers Ben a practiced, absorbing way to inhabit the land, but each shot also brings the question of what it means to kill—and whether that act belongs in the life he has lived.

Inherited Lessons and Early Doubt

Ben’s first hunting lessons came from his father, Wright Givens, who took him out at eight to shoot mourning doves near the apple orchards. The instruction was practical: his father showed him how to lead a bird and swing the gun smoothly, without discussing the moral difficulty of hunting. Ben’s mother, Lenora Givens, made the counterargument explicit. She accepted that killing for food was necessary but regarded taking small birds for pleasure as wrong in the eyes of God.

Ben killed three doves on that first outing. The family’s response did not resolve the disagreement. He ate the small amount of meat with regret; his mother watched in silence, then came over to touch his cheek before returning to the sink to wash the pan. The gesture holds affection beside disapproval, without turning either into a final judgment. Hunting thus enters Ben’s memory both as a learned skill and as an act shadowed by a moral reservation he cannot simply inherit away.

As a teenager, he sometimes passed on the first chukar that flushed. Part of the practice was tactical: a lone bird could act as a sentry, and the covey might rise beyond shooting range. But Ben also valued the pause itself, standing still while the bird flew away. The hesitation was not merely a hunting technique. It gave form to an older unease about the point at which attention, skill, and opportunity become a decision to kill.

Hunting After War and Loss

After the war, Ben stopped hunting and fishing; killing had become inseparable from wartime experience, and he wanted no part of it in those pastimes. The later return to hunting therefore marks a reversal rather than an uncomplicated recovery of childhood interests. After Rachel Givens died, he left his work as a surgeon and found himself with too much unoccupied time. Over the following nineteen months, shooting birds became a substitute life, and he resumed several forms of hunting he had once known: pursuing small birds in canyons and sage country, hunting geese from blinds, and taking mallards along sloughs.

The return does not erase the earlier conflict. When Ben and his dogs locate chukars, he again experiences the pause before the birds rise as a moment of hesitation. He remembers having felt doubt even as a boy, and recognizes that the unease has persisted through different phases of his life: before the war, in the years when he abstained from killing, and now, after grief has drawn him back to it. The hunt can occupy his time, but it cannot make the moral question disappear.

The Chukar Hunt and the Cost of Skill

During the hunt, Ben first lets a lone chukar fly rather than shooting at it. After the dogs locate another covey, however, the birds rise together and he shoots. He is astonished by how well he performs, especially with sight affected by an injury, and feels that the success is somehow unfair to the birds. This reaction turns expertise against itself: the skill his father taught him and the fluency of his practiced movement do not make the result feel earned or morally settled.

One chukar is wounded and escapes into cover. Ben works Tristan toward it; when the bird tries to flee, Tristan catches it gently. Ben watches, feeling sullied by what has happened. Rex brings in another bird, and Ben praises both dogs without effusiveness. These moments make the hunt more than a sequence of shots: the dogs’ work completes what Ben has set in motion, while his discomfort persists through the recovery of the birds.

Ben continues downhill, missing once and then shooting more birds. He examines one closely, attending to its markings and plumage, and recognizes that it is still warm from life. The attention he gives the bird’s particularity sits uneasily beside the act that has ended its life. His ability to see it as more than a target does not undo the killing; instead, close observation makes the contradiction harder to ignore.

The Hunt Against Ben’s Chosen Ending

Ben is hunting on a day when he expects, according to his plan, not to remain alive by its end. The setting and activity initially give shape to that plan, but the hunt gradually exposes its inadequacy. He cannot understand choosing to die alone in the dry country after killing small birds simply as an act of stoicism; neither the shooting nor the land seems sufficient to make that ending meaningful. His judgment extends beyond the hunt: taking his own life also conflicts with what he understands of himself and the world.

That comparison links the two forms of killing without making them identical. Ben sees the hunt and suicide as actions at odds with his identity as a doctor, husband, and father. The birds’ deaths do not redeem his plan, and the plan does not make the hunt a fitting final act. Instead, the unease he has carried since childhood becomes part of a broader recognition that neither killing animals nor ending his own life can reconcile him with the life he has lived.

A Family Pattern, Not a Resolution

The novel also sets Ben’s hunting against an earlier household practice. After Lenora Givens’s burial, Wright Givens spends long hours hunting with his Black Labs, returning with quail, chukars, and grouse. He prepares the birds for supper, where they are eaten with fried potatoes; the shotgun rests by the door and the dogs settle near his father’s boots. During that July, Wright hunts repeatedly. The account presents hunting as an established domestic routine as well as a source of moral tension, but does not say that the routine settles Ben’s doubts.

Across these episodes, the same activity changes meaning without becoming morally simple. It is a father’s practical instruction, a child’s uneasy first kill, an abandoned pursuit after war, a replacement for work and companionship after bereavement, and an inadequate companion to a planned death. Ben’s continued hesitation is the thread connecting them. The novel treats his ambivalence not as a verdict that hunting is either wholly acceptable or wholly condemnable, but as a conflict his experience repeatedly brings into view and never allows skill, habit, or grief to resolve.