Hunting for the absent referent: hunters and the meat–animal association

According to sociologist Carol Adams’s ‘absent referent’ theory of modern meat-eating, the consumption of meat is predicated on its dissociation from animals in the context of an advanced division of labour in the meat production sector. This paper considers Adams’s model of animal-dissociated meat-eating in relation to hunting. On the face of it, the hunter who eats the meat of animals he has hunted himself is unlikely to dissociate that meat from animals. Hence the currency of the idea of what might be called the trophic honesty of hunters: that, in contrast to the ‘hypocritical’ modern meat-consumer (the ‘supermarket carnivore’), the hunter openly recognizes and acknowledges that the meat he eats comes from animals (those he has hunted) and therefore practices a form of meat-eating in which the animal referent is present rather than absent. This paper argues instead that such hunting is better thought of as involving complex dissociation. This complex dissociationist perspective holds that animal presence or absence should be understood in terms of knowledge of the individual animal. Insofar as hunting involves a direct encounter with the animal, the hunter would appear to satisfy this requirement. The hunter tracks, pursues and kills individual animals. However, this view of hunter meat-eating is open to challenge on the grounds that, while the hunter does have direct experience of the hunted animal, his actual association with the animal tends to be extremely limited because the nature of the hunt does not allow the kind of extended human–animal contact that would qualify as a relationship. It is argued that, as far as the idea of trophic honesty is concerned, those people who eat the meat of animals they have raised themselves would have a much stronger claim than hunters.