The Incredible Edible Animal Hierarchy
Hunting changed the gastronomical game — literally and metaphorically — for Nicole.
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The meat looked normal, recognizable, and familiar. I could have said it was pork; anyone would believe it. Low and slow this sinewy cut goes, I thought to myself, as I dropped a thick square of yellow butter onto a hot pan. Moments later, the salted meat hissed, spat, and bubbled in the golden liquid.
I browned each exposed surface and peeled husks from a pile of tomatillos, rinsing the stickiness off under warm water then chopping them into small juicy cubes. I pulled the shoulder from the pan, using the remaining butter and juices to soften onions and garlic. Cumin, oregano, fresh chopped sage, jalapeño, poblanos, a bit of cloves, some lime zest, a splash of apple cider vinegar, and chicken broth bathed the meat. I grabbed the heavy red lid and marveled at the pale green contrast for a second before I covered and scooted the chili verde into an oven set low, at 275 degrees.
The next day, I arrived at the potluck. Wild game of all sorts laid on tables, carefully cooked, displayed, and labeled. I plugged in the crockpot, flipped it to warm, then set out tortillas, sour cream, cilantro, and hand-shredded extra sharp cheddar cheese.
In my loopy and girlish handwriting I wrote on an index card with black sharpie: Mountain Lion Chile Verde. I taped it to the edge of the table, marveled at the strangeness for a second, then grabbed an ice cold domestic from the cooler.
When I first began hunting there were animals I thought I’d never eat and never hunt. Internal taboos against eating anything that remotely resembled my own indoor predators or stuffed animals of my youth — my dog, my cat, my teddy bears — felt wildly wild.
People eat mountain lions? Why? Did people eat coyotes or wolves? Why kill them if you weren’t going to eat them? The hunting crowd I fell into in Montana answered that question irrefutably and with another question of equal import: why not eat them if you had killed them?
This particular crowd’s ethics around edibility inspired in me a curious bravery rather than a tabooed cowardice. The more I experienced the wide array of edible animals, the more I saw how boring, staid, and rote our industrial meat system has become, among deeper and more unforgivable injustices.
I also began to see animals — all animals — differently. When I pulled into the barn after a hunt, I watched my horse walk towards me, step by step. There’s her shoulder, and if I knew how to take one off of a deer, I now knew how to separate one from the body of my horse. There are her tarsal bones, her ribs below a layer of alfalfa-fueled fat. I imagined her spine running through her neck, much lower than I’d imagined as a child. She too would have caul fat around her gut, a beating, well-muscled heart from all the miles we’d ridden together. I ran my hands over her haunches like I had a million times, and beneath them I felt the weight of a life and the eventual promise of death.
I’d worn the grief of the deaths of many horses over a lifetime of fanaticism, watched as the hauler came to winch them onto the trailer and off to some hole in the ground, often at the local dump, where carcass after carcass fell on top of one another. After a lifetime of beloved utility, their death transferred only a profound amount of caloric waste.
Elsewhere in the world, these animals’ bodies are not wasted in landfills, amidst Starbucks cups and microplastics. Entire economies and gastronomies are built on the consumption of our equine friends. Other cultures eschew eating cattle. And still others rest on species that never made it into the mainstream Western food culture.
So it strikes me, this moment of seeing my horse — or any horse — not just as the spiritual and physical partner that I’ve loved for a lifetime, but also as a source of well-tended nutrients that will likely be wasted in death.
If I purported to love deer while being able to pursue and eat them, how could I look at the immense waste of this animal I’d cared for, doted on, trained, and loved with anything other than a sense of duty to a purposeful afterlife? Is the dump an appropriate place to end her existence? Or is it a waste of hundreds of pounds of healthy meat fueled mostly by an outdated and less-than-useful cultural and socioeconomic taboo?
Tabooed meat originates in a variety of histories, be they religious, medical, health-related, or socioeconomic. The first known taboo regarding horse meat stretches back to the Kassite period, around 1500 B.C., stemming from the expense of maintaining the horse, its mystical and spiritual qualities, and the close ties of Equus to royalty in that era.1
War also played a part in defining the horse as a warrior, cementing its role in the Western world above mere livestock. The expense, the time spent training, and the prestige of the cavalry era lifted equines to a different place in society. In sociology, we call this structural functionalism. The horse now had a specific role and function within military structure, and protecting its muscle meant protecting its life, its human partner’s efficacy, and — at scale — its country.
Modern taboos are just as nebulous and wrapped in histories too numerous to point in a single direction. Though ancient wars originally altered the horse’s identity as livestock, world wars in the 20th century put horse meat back on the menu in deeply afflicted European countries, including France and Germany. Meat was in short supply; motored technology began replacing the horse, and the excess of out-of-work equines filled the caloric gap. Patriotic thrift opened up tastebuds, shuttered a classist turning up of the nose, and created space for utility in a troubled moment. In their inevitable deaths, the bodies of horses fueled the lives of many in an era where fuel was limited.
Beyond horses, the narrow meat-eating ways of modern American society evolved out of classism, a distaste for what many immigrants viewed as “Old World cuisine”, and — are we not surprised — racism. Soon after the Civil War, whole-animal eating — including heads and offal — became redefined as the manna of freed slaves, effectively altering the way mainstream culture chooses to eat meat even today.
Strangely, I can also pinpoint the tastebuds of some friends here in the wild game mecca of Montana to that of their multi-generational homesteading families. Any meat eaten in excess at some point in family history can affect the tastebuds of future generations. One friend purported to dislike mule deer, another pronghorn. When pushing obnoxiously for details, clarity exposed that — at one point or another — family members were so deeply relegated to one sort of meat over time that it became emblematic of a moment of poverty. Once beef became affordable, the lack of wild game was not an indication of separation from landscape, but of the upward mobility of the middle class in the 20th century.
The history of beef is just as alluring and interesting as the history of horse meat. Dare I digress to a point of no return, I’ll just say that its association as the ultimate Western meal holds deep attachments to land ownership, wealth, and the colonization of the American frontier. All that said, I’ll never turn down a ribeye, I love a grilled burger, and I dream of Texas brisket.
Beef aside, my own internal gastronomic taboos lead me not to a place of disgust, but of curiosity. There are foods I severely dislike — plain mayonnaise, red onions — but I’ve learned to step over any instincts to turn up my nose at something I’ve never tried. Once I dug my heels into wanting to do the death of a wild animal justice, my barriers of what I wouldn’t eat dissolved entirely.
The most unforgettable wild game meal I’ve eaten wasn’t the highly coveted elk meat so popular in today’s podcastlands or some off-the-wall rare animal like bighorn sheep or rattlesnake. It was a simple-yet-complex biscuits and gravy, made by my dear friend Laura, on the final morning of our deer camp in 2018. Huddled in the large canvas wall tent were 18 hungry women, back from a frigid morning of hunting in November weather.
The golden biscuits, tender and flaky, pulled from smooth cast iron in perfectly warmed bulbs. The gravy simmered in a large dutch oven on top of the wood stove, and it was white, peppery, and herbaceous. Browned bits of sausage floated in the thick sauce. Laura ladled clouds over the biscuits, and we piled into camp chairs that were nearly on top of one another.
“Normally, in biscuits, you use cold butter or regular lard, right?” she said as she pulled another biscuit from the pan. “But I substituted rendered black bear fat for the butter, and we made the breakfast sausage from this bear as well.”
Silence fell over the tent as she told the story of the black bear on our plates. Her husband Kevin killed the bear with his bow while on an elk hunt. He climbed over a ridge, and it was head down and grazing not 30 yards from him. The shot was clean, the death also clean, and he and his hunting partner packed the large boar off the mountain. It was his first big game animal with a bow, an achievement hunters often work towards for years. Laura and Kevin rendered down chunks of fat into a beautiful golden oil that then cooled into a snowy white shelf-stable lard.
Bears are fat-dependent in hibernatory winter, and fall is certainly the time to catch bears prepared for their sleeping season. In the high alpine summers of Montana, bears are mostly vegetarian. They live off tender grasses, huckleberries, thimbleberries, snowberries, and service berries among any other delicious and nutritious plant available. A good berry crop is the boon of bear life; you can’t find a thicket of berries without some sign close by. Most often, it’s pile after pile of bear crap so chock full of digested berries that it looks like a Lara Bar. You could scrape it up, take it home, plant it, and expect your own crop of bear crap berries in the spring.
Hunters jockey back and forth about the quality of the fat on the bears they eat, saying it has much to do with what the bear is eating that time of year. A bear living off blueberries might build lovely fat deposits with a lavender-colored fruity quality, whereas a bear that eats dead and dying salmon might have fat deposits that are not so becoming. This isn’t something I have personally experienced, and so I take them at their word.
I do know that, if you are careful in separating fat from meat, the meat itself is not affected by diet, always edible, and safe when cooked to an internal temperature of 160 degrees.2
Much like reptilian chickens, mammalian predators require a bit of attention.
A decade of communications work in the sporting media world proffered a strange benefit; I’ve tasted a lot of wild game. I had the good fortune of working on a wild game television show for nearly three years, and the education in animal edibility proved swift and unrelenting.
Deer, of course. Elk. Moose. I’d eaten these before. But then the real hits began to sing. Black bear. Caribou. Pronghorn. Squirrel. Bighorn sheep, mountain goats, feral goats. Stranger creatures like musk ox, aoudad, oryx, and axis deer. Halibut, salmon, lingcod. Catfish, walleye, perch. Duck, pheasant, grouse. Birds of all sorts, but the most memorable bird? Sandhill crane, the ribeye of the sky.
One coworker brought in beaver stew for lunch, and we all tried it while failing to maintain some semblance of false maturity in a rodent-fueled that’s what she said kind of moment. Venison of any and all sorts was more normal than beef or chicken at our lunch hours. I spotted the chunk of mountain lion frozen and labeled in our community freezer, and I snatched it up before someone else got to it. No one went without meat in that job, and it was the same in other hunting-adjacent offices I worked in. The sharing economy among hunters is strong, especially when excess is available.
I already loved cooking, but the availability of wild game took the passion somewhere closer to meticulous obsession. When a piece of meat feels special, storied, or rare, I’m behooved to do it justice. Putting food on the table becomes an act with precise and artful intention, rather than a chore to simply fuel bodies.
When sharing it with others, I make sure to tell the story. Beyond the animals I’ve killed, I know the narratives of the animals that are shared with me. That is part of the social exchange. Here’s a backstrap from my first archery elk, here’s a pheasant shot over my dog in North Dakota, a burger made from an invasive mountain goat killed in a rare national park cull, a shoulder from a pronghorn doe who made a living in eastern Montana. Stories and nourishment become inseparable when hunting is at the core of the edible effort. You simply don’t get one without the other.
This lifestyle changed other eating habits of mine, as well. The more I treasured the meat on my plate, the quantity of meat I ate shrank. I didn’t want to burn through my supply of wild game, and buying meat at the grocery store quickly lost its expensive appeal.
A sort of conversion happened, and the pinnacle of that conversion lived in the bag of venison I brought in for the community freezer — a few choice cuts of my first deer, killed in 2016, my second year as a licensed, bonafide, completely obsessed hunter. I was now a sharer of stories and meat. I was now a killer.
It’s never what you think it’s going to be.
Killing is hard, and it gets easier, then it gets harder, and the pattern repeats. The more you hunt, the more mistakes are liable to happen, the more likely it is that equipment will malfunction. You will get injured, you will push your limits beyond discomfort, you will find yourself learning at the rate of 3,300 feet per second, and it can feel like a very long second.
You learn through impacts, misses, losses, and the tough, tough, tough, tough desire to survive that is written into the marrow of every animal you pursue. You learn about macro ecosystems, micro ecosystems, and the indelible mark of human management on places you once would have described as wild. Now, you are wild, a part of this place, a sacred being, as sacred as all the others that call this landscape home. You can easily become soil here; you must watch your step.
As careful as you are, you learn that you’re never as quiet, as scentless, as crafty as you think, and then somehow it all comes together, and you learn that you can be more grateful for death than you ever thought possible. Grateful for blood, sinew, fascia, for hearts, muscle, and bone. For a pack so heavy you’ll hurt for a few days after, for the tedious process of saran wrap, freezer wrap, and marking each muscle appropriately so you cook it appropriately and share the correct story. You do your best not to let an ounce of this sacrifice go to waste. When a venison French roast you so carefully butchered accidentally rots in a cooler, you tear up with frustration at the loss of your planned Christmas dinner.
No, it’s never what you think it’s going to be. You suffer, too. It’s the tradeoff we’re meant to have with the animals we eat, that suffering moment, that deer in the crosshairs. You know to keep the crosshairs on the deer after you take the first shot, rack another round, and prepare for bullet two if needed. This is who you are now. A person who can kill, shoot through pink lungs, shoot again if needed, and still live with yourself.
You trade the soft and doughy word harvest for kill whenever possible, being careful with certain types of people who may never understand this new way of being. But you don’t want to soften the blow. Choosing to hunt animals, kill them, process and butcher them with your own hands is not a soft choice to make. You didn’t harvest that deer; you killed him. You watched the moments of surprise, of struggle before stillness; you watched an eye full of life go filmy and blue. The cornucopia is not a basket full of squashes, corn cobs, and vegetables. Instead, it’s a cavernous backpack filled with muscle and bone.
It will be too heavy just to pick up and put on, and you’ll be alone for many kills. You will have to lie face up on top of the pack, pull the straps over your shoulders, roll over, press up into a kneeling position, and use a trekking pole to help you stand up under the weight of a mature mule deer buck. It’s miles back to the truck, and the night is black, moonless, and hinting at coming snow. Get going, sis.
The rabbit hole is endless once the edible hierarchy of animals begins to shift both your palate and plate toward new frontiers. As a hunter, the hierarchy flattens as you dig deeper into the culture of camouflaged humans who are adamant about eating what they kill.
One such human fiercely committed to this ethic is my friend and fellow public land advocate Randy Newberg. At the Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Rendezvous in 2021, I assembled a birria taco, slow-cooked for hours on a Burch Barrel wood-fired stove. The meat pulled from the haunch in beautifully smoked strips, like a perfect pot roast after hours in the oven. Cotija cheese and pico de gallo topped it, and I sat with old friends as we ate a legally tagged Montana gray wolf that Newberg came across while hunting whitetail deer.
I ate the meat on its own before eating it under the flavorful accoutrement of the taco. I wanted to take it in, without distraction, without artifice. I equate it to being the dark meat of red meat. Like the dark meat of chicken, a different sort of complexity lives in the meat itself. There’s a slight metallic taste that isn’t unpleasant, and a lingering deepness sticks to the tongue. Randy’s initial attempt to cook the wolf with his crew had been unsuccessful, but our mutual friend Corey Piersol sussed out the kinks and successfully delivered a more-than-edible, dare I say delicious, meal.
There are a lot of mysteries hidden in what we eat. We live in a time where sarcophagy is the most prominent way we interact with meat at scale. Anthropologist Noelie Vialles3 describes sarcophagy as the consumption of meat as unrecognizable to a particular animal. Think of mountain lion posing as pork, or venison steak that, on surface, mimics the appearance of beef. This is the shrink-and-pink experience of purchasing meat in a grocery store; this is the culturally normative abdication of looking our food in the eye.
Sarcophagy not only hides the individual on our plate; it also sometimes hides its true identity. Before 1906, the unregulated meat industry survived on subterfuge. Horse became beef, butchers and knackers made under-the-table deals, and mislabeling meant one thing could easily be another, and another, and another. Mislabeling still happens today, at scale, in the less-than-easily-regulated fish industry. If eating meat is on the table, mysteries beyond what you think you’ve eaten certainly prevail. There’s a don’t ask, don’t tell quality to this, and digging deeper into it is not for the faint of heart.
The opposite — and perhaps the antidote — to sarcophagy is zoophagy. This means what we eat resembles, in some way, what the animal once was. Think of a whole pig roasted at a luau, or a whole fish delivered on a platter. The shock of these moments is one that is fueled by a lack of intimacy and a profound separation from the food on our tables.
Zoophagy can also be preempted by stories, by getting close to the sources of our intake, and looking at the process of how a ribeye or a pork loin or a rack of lamb makes its way to the table. There is willful blindness, baseless taboos that coat pragmatic options, and industrial cloaks that make our tables far less interesting and far more harmful at scale than they should be.
I respect people who step out of sarcophagy when it comes to industrial meat practices, but I feel quizzical about those who believe in life being more sacred than death. When I hunt, the dichotomy between the two shrinks. They become one and the same. And I am tasked with the ethical responsibility to see an animal as both an individual and an integral member of a species. I also see that animal’s compatriots as equally important, as flat hierarchical members of both macro- and micro-ecosystems.
It feels infinitely expansive to look at the world this way, and it also feels infinitely subversive. I’m sure some people will read this in shock, horror, with a concrete and abject dismissal. If there is one thing I can definitively assert, it’s that passion about what we eat or do not eat is actually far more important than apathy. I welcome dissidents.
I’ll tell you this. When I began hunting, I couldn’t imagine killing a black bear. They’ve appeared to me over many years as a sort of spiritual partner in wildness. I’ve had close encounters that ended with laughter and joy rather than fear and danger. Bears are cute, fluffy, curious, and playful. They also offer more resources than your average whitetail deer in death.
In order to legally fulfill your wanton waste duties as a hunter here in Montana4, you must take out the thick and beautiful hide, all four quarters, the loin and backstraps of every black bear killed, and the skull for scientific purposes. Leave any of these items behind, and you cross the line from a legal kill to illegal poaching. Unlike cervids, you must check your bear in with Montana’s fish and game department within 48 hours of filling your tag. You’re required to submit two premolar teeth for aging. In many regions, you must also bring the hide and skull in for inspection. Certain units (hunting boundaries) are tightly regulated and are closed once a certain number of black bears are culled.
Laura’s biscuits and gravy made an impact because they were emblematic of what I hadn’t considered in my initial internal taboo against hunting bears. Though now I save deer tallow for multiple uses, I’d discarded it prior. The thought of getting more utility out of a bear than a deer struck me. Cuteness aside, I liked eating bear, I appreciated the multiple uses a hide offers, and I began to flatten my understanding of bear versus deer in any ecosystem. Both had an equal and deserving place at a species level to their shared habitat. Who was I to say one was more important than the other, in any context?
The land has no discriminations or taboos when it comes to the adage of eat or be eaten. In fact, it doesn’t ascribe at all to our desire to place competition in its coffers. If it could rewrite the adage, it would be eat and be eaten. Live and consume what’s offered in times of plenty. And for that matter, in times of scarcity — food, oxygen, carbon dioxide, water — you’re welcome to become nutrient-dense soil that once again feeds the cycle.
My beating heart now holds atomic histories of wild game from landscapes I’ve never touched and never seen, some I likely never will see. Daily, I eat vegetables, fruits, sugars, and caloric mysteries from unknown global origins. I’ve eaten cattle, pigs, and chickens that are owed some level of societal apology. I’ve eaten other domestic animals that ranchers and farmers handed to me in love equal or greater than that of the hunters I’m lucky to know.
And yet, I can tell you the story of a mule deer buck, the first animal taken by my best friend’s daughter in her early teens. She decided to become a fifth-generation Montana hunter after attending our deer camp as a surly and silly 12-year-old in 2018. I still remember the story of Kevin’s black bear seven years later, the fact that it was his first big game animal taken with a bow, and the pride that resonated from that wall tent meal. I can point to the ruffed grouse tail that represents my Boykin Spaniel’s first retrieval, and I remember the scent rising from the pan, filled with fresh thyme, butter, salt, and the faint smell of pine, my little brown dog at my feet, waiting his largess from the effort.
The first time I ate mountain lion, the power of the story swirled around me in a hurricanic fashion. It made the morsel perhaps the most powerful, confusing, and storied singular bite I’d ever eat.
A wildlife biologist named Bart George handed me a small cube of sarcophagal grilled meat — pork white, browned — on the end of a single toothpick. The very lion George handed to me had attacked him; he had the scars to prove it. Prior to attacking George, the same lion attacked his dog. All three escaped that particular moment with lives intact. A few weeks later, George collared the same lion for a scientific study. Then, shortly after the lion was collared, it killed five goats and a government hunter was called in to track and dispatch it. Finally, the collar was returned to the state for scientific research, and the lion ended up in George’s freezer.5
The meta of the moment never quite came together for me. It was one violence, followed by another violence, and another, ultimately ending in nourishment from the death of one predator, in the presence of other predators. It is one thing to eat a predator. It’s another thing to eat a predator alongside a person who was nearly a victim of that predator, who is now holding out the meat of his attacker toward you.
“This is the same lion that attacked you?” I ask, though I know it’s the same lion. It feels unbelievable and yet I do believe it, because it happened.
I receive a flippant nod and a shrugged smile as George pops another cube of meat into his mouth, spatula in hand as he turns back towards the grill.
When researching the taboo of horsemeat, I turned to a scholarly essay, written by Susanna Forrest, called “Horsemeat is Certainly Delicious.” Forrest’s exceptional dive into the issue was the only publicly accessible one I could find. Much of what I learned about taboos stems from Forrest’s fabulous work. I learned so much. Thanks, Susanna.
145-160 degrees Fahrenheit is the threshold that kills the trichinosis parasite, formerly an issue in much of the pork historically consumed, and still an issue in wild populations of omnivorous mammals. Personally, I aim for 160 to assure safety.
Noelie Viallas book “Animal to Edible” was originally published in French, and it explores the abbatoirs (horse butchers) of southwest France, and these words were featured in Forrest’s previously cited work.
Due to the high prevalence of trichinosis in bear meat, wanton waste regulations vary state by state.
Listen to the entirety of George’s story on Episode 57 of the MeatEater podcast.
Nicole Qualtieri is the Editor-in-Chief of The Westrn. She’s written for Outside Magazine, USA Today, GearJunkie, MeatEater, Modern Huntsman, Backcountry Journal, Impact Journal, and many others. A lifelong horsewoman and DIY outdoorswoman, Nicole lives on the outskirts of Anaconda, MT with a full pack of happy critters.
The Westrn is a collective of three professional journalists focused on unearthing great outdoor narratives. In addition to two long reads per month, we’re publishing our first quarterly newspaper on April 1, 2025. Purchasing an annual subscription through Substack means you’ll receive four issues of the paper in addition to our digital work. Get 20% off before March 20 here, or pre-order a single issue for only $8 here.
Terrific writing. In my experience, a taboo is but one culture removed. I can vividly remember the anguished look on my soldiers’ faces in Korea when they realized the caged dogs weren’t destined to be household pets. As you note, taboos migrate — the Republic of Korea passed a law in 2024 that will ban the breeding and sale of dogs for consumption by 2027. Perhaps Nietzsche was on to something: “If you crush a cockroach, you’re a hero. If you crush a beautiful butterfly, you’re a villain. Morals have aesthetic criteria.” Perhaps recipes do, too.
Very good piece. I wanted to eat a mountain lion this year but by the time i bought my tag the season's quota had been reached in my territory.
I totally agree with you on the tragedy of a dead horse going to waste. I am happy to live in a place where when i must shoot one of our Clydesdales or they die otherwise they are left out there for the wild beasts. I drag them off to a rise we can view from the kitchen window. We've had eight eagles on a horse at one time. Grizzlies come at night. I don't feel good about a horse dying, but i feel better about it this way than i would the way many are mandated to dispose of bodies. Some visuals you may enjoy here:
https://theatavist.substack.com/p/death-of-a-horse