That question has been very intelligently addressed in Ted Kerasote 's book called Bloodties. He makes a big a point in his introduction to the book that as long as we hunt locally (so that we don 't burn fossil fuel getting to our quarry) and as long as we eat the victim, we do infinitely less harm to the overall environment than we do by eating ordinary supermarket vegetables. After all, the vegetables are grown by an energy-hungry agribusiness whose pesticides decimate the ecosystem and whose combines fatally batter hundreds of small animals (insects, toads, snakes, ground-nesting birds, mice, voles, woodchucks, striped squirrels, weasels, skunks, foxes) in the course of each harvest. But venison is in dramatic contrast to the vegetables resulting from that harvest, as well as to feed-dependent pork, beef, mutton, chicken and turkey. Unlike agricultural produce, venison requires no pesticide or fossil-fuel to grow, and results in the loss of just one life: the deer 's.9 Why don 't we all see this? Because to many of us, the little animals in the crops are vermin and the deer are Bambi, yet as Kerasote points out, life is precious to all creatures. This point that he makes shows us how deep this animal harm goes, people who are vegans probably do not think this deep. The land cleared for their food was once a home to animals. That same land is annually inhabited by other animals and every year they get killed or chased away by machinery. Kerasote hunts, probably very well. As a hunter he sounds more like an Inuit or a Bushman (or more like a wolf or a mountain lion, to name two other hunters of the deer) than like the camouflage-clad, beer-sodden macho types with automatic weapons who infest the woods each fall. And because he 's a hunter, Kerasote 's descriptions of hunts are realistic…