A Vegetarian Turned Deer Hunter in Deutschland

Animal agriculture is one of the biggest contributors to global climate emissions. But what about hunting? Does shooting and eating wild game skirt the complicated ethics and emissions connected with eating factory farmed animals?

In this episode, a vegetarian-turned-hunter brings two reporters into a German forest in search of sustainable meat. Not only is it an interesting conversation from a climate perspective, it’s also a fascinating glimpse into the differences between hunting culture in the United States and Germany.

This story comes from our friends at On The Green Fence, a podcast about environmental issues. It’s produced by Deutsche Welle and hosted by Neil King and Gabriel Borrud. This episode was part of their season on the ethics and sustainability of eating meat, which recently won a 2021 Lovie Award for Best Limited Series.

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Featuring: Alena Steinbach

Courtesy of The Biodiversity Heritage Library: biodiversitylibrary.org/page/55827093

Alena’s boyfriend Max processing a buck in Germany

Links

For more on the “meat paradox” that Neil and Gabriel mention in this episode, check out our previous episode The Meat Matrix.

Credits

On The Green Fence is hosted by Neil King and Gabe Borrud. Their executive producer is Vanessa Fischer. Their sound engineer is Jürgen Kuhn and they’re produced by Natalie Muller.

The Outside/In team is Justine Paradis, Taylor Quimby, Felix Poon and Jessica Hunt

Executive Producer: Rebecca Lavoie

Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder

If you’ve got a question for the Outside/In[box] hotline, give us a call! We’re always looking for rabbit holes to dive down into. Leave us a voicemail at: 1-844-GO-OTTER (844-466-8837). Don’t forget to leave a number so we can call you back.

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Audio Transcript

Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.

Justine Paradis: This is outside in. I'm Justine Paradis

Taylor Quimby: and I'm Taylor Quimby.

Justine Paradis: So there's this thing that happens to me every so often. You know, when you come across something that makes you realize like where you're from. Meaning for me, like a product of the United States and culturally, for better and for worse, I am American.

Taylor Quimby: Just You, though not me.

Justine Paradis: You know you exist. Context-less history. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Taylor Quimby: I'm from New Hampshire.

Justine Paradis: History-less. Yeah, that's you.

Taylor Quimby: Mm hmm.

Justine Paradis: I mean, obviously, being American can mean a lot of things, and you can be a product of more than one culture, but I think back to this time I was lucky enough to go to France when I was a kid with my family, and there was this one time that we visited this elementary school and I remember telling the principal he asked the girl, What's your, you know, day like at school? And I told him that we get 20 minutes for lunch. And when I tell you the look of horror he gave me,

Taylor Quimby: I'm still mortified about that. That's ridiculous.

Justine Paradis: It's too short. But he he was, you know, a French man and he was like, he put his hand on his stomach, like he was experiencing indigestion and just was like,

Taylor Quimby: Oh, too fast.

Justine Paradis: But you know, I'm not the only one who thinks about this, about how where you live shapes what you think of as normal.

Youtuber: If you're an American currently living abroad, what is one time that made you realize that America really messed you up? I'll go first.

Justine Paradis: So this is one of those TikTok videos, you know where people respond to a question? Someone asks, You know this video that I'm talking about on TikTok?

Taylor Quimby: I do. I only watch TikToks on Twitter, but I do know the format.

Justine Paradis: Very millennial of You. So a bunch of people posted response videos for this one, and someone put all the answers up in a compilation on YouTube like one of the answers talked about the Pledge of Allegiance.

Youtuber: You guys didn't have to swear loyalty to your country before you started school.

Taylor Quimby: Yeah.

Justine Paradis: But for whatever reason, this response really got me.

Youtuber: So I started my new job in the Netherlands, and I was going through the company policy the first week, and I got to the section about leave and I was reading about sick leave and I turned to my coworker and I was like, I don't understand like, how many sick days do we get a year? And she's like, What are you talking about? Like how many? How many? That doesn't say she's like, It's just if you're sick, you're out. I'm like, I understand. She's like, It's unlimited. It's just if you're sick, you take a sick day.

Justine Paradis: So I'm sure that there are nice things about being American to realize, but we're not going to cover any of those today. But Taylor, I think the reason I brought this up is because when you first came across the story that is today's show, you had this experience. This was one of those things that made you realize, Oh, wow, this is my cultural context.

Taylor Quimby: Yeah, yeah. Today, we're featuring an episode of a podcast called On the Green Fence. The name is this play, you know, of the idea of being on the fence about something. The show explores complex, often divisive environmental issues from multiple angles. That's how they describe themselves. Yeah, it's produced in Germany, and this episode came as a part of series that they did on Meet. It's about locally hunted game, and I just thought it was so interesting when I was listening because I think this episode would sound totally and utterly different. If it had been made in America like we would like, we wouldn't even ask some of the questions that you'll hear asked. Because I don't know, because the culture and fabric of hunting and guns is just is a completely different thing here.

Justine Paradis: Without further ado, let's hear it. Presenting Hunting for a Sustainable Meat by the podcast On the Green Fence.

Neil King: Welcome back to DW's Environment podcast on the Green Fence with me, Neil King, let me get bored. Yeah, and we continue our series on meat and this episode, I have to say I actually was looking forward to all along because we had a very, very exciting and suspenseful experience with a huntress in the forest, right? Because we were looking at alternatives to get out of the meat paradox and one of them for me personally, maybe not so much for Gabe, but personally, for me, I thought hunting is a very sustainable way to get your meat. The animals are free, they're not caged. There's theoretically a chance that they can escape. So ethically, I think it's, you know, you can justify it way better than industrial meat. But there's also the fact that this meat, you know, you don't need animal fodder and animal feed for it. So all the transport is gone. You don't have to farm to feed the animals. So the the environmental footprint is also way, way lower.

Gabriel Borrud: I'm totally with you there, Neal. There are good parts to it. You're still killing an animal is is something that we're going to have to think about. Certainly for me, it's it's one reason why I'm a bit skeptical of of how great hunting is. I grew up in rural Wisconsin, where if you didn't hunt and you were a boy, you didn't go out with dad. It was like, you're missing a rite of passage. Everyone hunted and my parents or my dad didn't, and I always viewed them as being as a very brutal, almost carnal. Hmm. The shooting of an animal and then the celebration of it putting the antlers up on the wall. You know you're not a man until you shut, until you've shot a buck. That I was turned me off, so I will be kind of the devil's advocate here.

Neil King: Well, I think it's also it's got a completely different standing. Hunting has then in the US, right? It's also it's much smaller, it's far more needed.

Gabriel Borrud: Here in Germany you mean.

Neil King: Oh, yeah. Yeah, I mean, about 390000 people who have a hunting license, it's all very bureaucratic. Also in Germany, you can't just go out and shoot an animal. There's a lot more to it, which we'll also find out from Aleena. And but in terms of the meat that you actually get out of it, it is very popular. In Germany, 60 percent of Germans eat game at least once a year. But yeah, we have to look into the pros and cons. And also, this is still very niche. Is it really scalable? Does it work for the mass market? But I think it can definitely be part of the solution, but we'll find this.

Gabriel Borrud: This is your personal solution or would be would be one of them? Well, it's something for a way out of the meat paradox.

Neil King: Yeah, well, it's something I would look into. I don't know enough about it yet. We have to talk to a leader about just that. But yeah, I think this could be part of the solution.

Gabriel Borrud: Definitely. Ok, well, then let's get our boots on. We don't have guns, so Alena is the only one with a gun.

Neil King: We're not allowed to have a gun. This is not the US.

Gabriel Borrud: Come on. All right. Let's let's go hunting, Neil. What do you

Neil King: Think? Yeah, let's just. Where are we going to go? We're going to go to a high seat. Just picture this now in the Feltes about that's in southwestern Germany, deep inside the forest. We drove there with our with our van and barely got up the hill, and we walked into the forest for a bit until we were really in a very isolated spot, a high seat three people fit into. And it's getting dark, right? And we're waiting essentially for animal to cross our path here that Alina can take them out. And just as you understand, we have to whisper so that we don't scare the animals away, something that Gabe wasn't very good at. But we had to do it. So you're going have to bear with us half this episode,

Gabriel Borrud: Let's start whispering right now, Neal.

Neil King: Yeah, half this episode is going to be whispered. But don't worry, the second half we talk normally again.

Gabriel Borrud: Ok, have fun listening.

Alena Steinbach: We need to turn off the mobile phone.

Gabriel Borrud: Ok, so now we're we're in the high seat now. What do we do?

Alena Steinbach: We are waiting. Not something for you, right, Gabrielle?

Neil King: Yeah, he needs a bit of practice. All those night vision binoculars.

Alena Steinbach: No, that's like normal binoculars. It's on. You can also measure the distances with it, right? How far is the deer? So how far you can shoot? Yeah.

Gabriel Borrud: How far can you shoot?

Alena Steinbach: Well, I shot in England on a shooting range from 1000 meters.

Neil King: That's like a sniper, right? With the army.

Alena Steinbach: It's quite cool for training, but the furthest shot was 180 meters. But with a new technique and stuff like that in the scopes, you can easily shoot up to 400. But for me, it's it makes none has nothing to do with hunting because I want to have a relationship with a deer. I don't want to snipe somewhere. Maybe I hit it. Or maybe not.

Neil King: So, but how do you have a relationship with a deer from a high seat?

Alena Steinbach: I think if a deer is like 400 meters away and you try to shoot it and you miss it, it's like, OK, well, I missed it. There's no nothing happened, so I won't look after it. But if you shoot something that maybe 50 meters or something, you have a closer relationship to it because it no such a big distance between you and the deer.

Gabriel Borrud: If a wild boar or a deer came running through here, how can you have a relationship with it? You're going to shoot it.That seems like a pretty horrible relationship for the for the wild boar.

Alena Steinbach: It's not that kind of friendship or relationship, but if it's closer, maybe like on the hundred meters or something. I have a relationship to the to the animal because I can see everything. I can see how it acts.

Gabriel Borrud: Are you already thinking about the meat when you're here hunting?

Alena Steinbach: No, I'm just.

Gabriel Borrud: Is it more of a game? Is it more of a sport, a game or no?

Alena Steinbach: Right now it's like enjoying the silence.

Neil King: But that silence You disrupted them with a shot, right?

Alena Steinbach: Yeah, sure.

Neil King: How does that feel.

Alena Steinbach: When that moment I'm not thinking about the silence. I'm just concentrating on what I'm doing because I know that I'm taking alive and I'm very concentrated on that.

Neil King: You are 30 years old and you got your hunting license 12 years ago, right?

Alena Steinbach: Yeah.

Neil King: Why did you decide to go hunting? I mean, you were very young when you got your hunting license right now.

Alena Steinbach: Yeah. My father is Sandor. My grandpa used to be one. And for me, it was quite normal to go hunting when I was a child and to see it dead in the life animals. And but I became a vegetarian with 14. Yeah. So you were a vegetarian? Yeah, because I didn't like the way the animals were treated like this multi. I don't factory farm factory farming.

Gabriel Borrud: Wait a minute. Hold on. You were a vegetarian when you became a hunter.

Alena Steinbach: I was a vegetarian, [unintelligible].

Neil King: What's yours? I wasn't sure whether it was this.

Alena Steinbach: Max already shot something.

Gabriel Borrud: Wait, your boyfriend do something right now? Shot something.

Alena Steinbach: He shot a red deer. It's like the biggest animal we have in Germany. And you showed them a male one. Young male one. Spiesel means spider. Spiker is down.

Gabriel Borrud: Is that your code language?

Alena Steinbach: That's the hunting thing, which we have.

Neil King: But coming back to you just said that you were a vegetarian or don't became vegetarian as a 14 year old because you were disgusted by factory farming. Can you take us through the process? But how do you go from that mindset to becoming a hunter?

Alena Steinbach: It went well, like three years, and then I recognized that I missed eating meat, so I was eating meat secretly. Well, it was snacking on me. Yes, yes. What kind of meat does mirror what's in the fridge? And so but then I said to myself, OK, you can't just eat meat at night. Lonely.

Neil King: Oh, you went. You went that night to the fridge.

Alena Steinbach: I could make like a pregnant woman who maybe.

Neil King: Craving every night for meat at the fridge.

Alena Steinbach: I said to myself, I need to find a way to can to eat meat. But for me, a takeaway or in a correct way because maybe it's not strange, but I really, really love animals. I really love them. But I also want to eat meat. I think it's just a question. If you want to eat meat, yes or no. And if you want to eat meat, you need to find your best way to get your meat. In my best way is to shoot a deer, which lives in the forest completely free, without fence, without medical goods, without humans.

Gabriel Borrud: Isn't it a brutal thing to shoot a peaceful deer or Wild boar out here with a huge rifle?

Alena Steinbach: With a huge rifle? I think my rifle is not that huge, but I know what you mean. Yeah, it could be brutal. It could be cruel about what's what. How can I do it if I want to eat meat?

Gabriel Borrud: So what you're saying is that you are OK with your conscience here.

Alena Steinbach: Yes, I'm absolutely OK. It's no problem if you if you kill animals for eating, but you need to handle them with respect and they need to live with respect and like they want to. And yeah,

Neil King: I think you'd find some animal rights activists would say that killing an animal is showing the animal absolutely no respect. That is the worst thing you can do to an animal. How do you come to that?

Alena Steinbach: Yeah. I just want to be respected from the people who are meeting meat for what I'm doing. If you're not eating meat and I can absolutely understand that they can't understand me. But I also know a lot of people eating meat and and and still what I am judging. They can judge me for what I'm doing. Yeah.

Gabriel Borrud: Have you ever felt bad for an animal that you've killed?

Alena Steinbach: No. Not bad for that animal. Maybe because I'm a human and not a machine. Of course, there are some shots in your life which are not immediately deadly. So the deer runs two or 300 meters and then dies. Therefore, I feel bad, but not for especially there.

Neil King: Is there for you a personal reason also for doing this in terms of the environment, does that matter to you at all? Are you environmentally minded person?

Alena Steinbach: Well, I studied Green Business Management. My bachelor thesis was about venison is a sustainable, renewable alternative to factory meat.

Alena Steinbach: Neil, why don't we let Alena concentrate for a little bit? Take a break. You are listening to On the Green Fence DW's Environment podcast. We are in a high seat right now waiting for deer or wild boar to come knocking by and if they do well, is going to shoot them.

Justine Paradis: This is outside in. I'm Justine Paradise, and today we are featuring an episode of On the Green Fence, a podcast about environmental issues. Often the complex and thorny ones, and this time its hunting is wild game a sustainable meat. Let's return to the conversation, which is taking place in a forest in Germany. The hosts, Neil and Gabe, are sitting and trying to be very quiet, whispering in a tree as they tag along on a deer hunt.

Gabriel Borrud: If you're a young man and you don't hunt at least where I come from and Beaver Dam in Wisconsin, you aren't part of the group. My I was raised by my dad's a pacifist, doesn't own a gun, has never shot a gun, probably. And I never went hunting because when you go hunting, you always go with your dad. And I feel as though I missed like a really important rite of passage for that. For the for my friends, they all went out and came back with antlers. They got a buck. And I, I think I never liked people who hunted, and I think there was a bit of jealousy going on there because I wasn't part of the group and I resented them maybe a little bit because of that. It made me think of hunters as, like I said before, brutal, cruel.

Neil King: Trophy hunters.

Gabriel Borrud: It seemed like they were doing it as a kind of game for themselves to make their egos start to length, to make themselves feel.

Alena Steinbach: Of course, there are people like you are talking about, and there are a lot of people like you. We try not hunting the way I am hunting, but you will find it in every kind of group.

Neil King: But do you think hunting is elitist in Germany? Because it's not easy, is it? You have to invest some money. It takes quite a bit of.

Alena Steinbach: Well it used to be. But I think maybe 50 years ago, hunter doctor, a lawyer and a pilot, well, I got the same very well seen people, you know? But today it's not.

Neil King: But is it that anything? Because I mean, also getting a gun in Germany isn't easy. Is it a lot of things you have to go through to actually get to where you are right now?

Alena Steinbach: Yeah, Germany always need to have a reason why you need to have a rifle. The reason is because you're policemen or because you are hunting or because you are.

Neil King: But I mean, you can't just go there and say, Right, I'm on now, I can get a gun. You have to get a license and you have to take classes right? And it's a lot of learning. You have to learn a lot about the forest and the animals, right?

Gabriel Borrud: How hard would that be for Neal here to become a hunter? What would he have to go through? What kind of time investment are we talking like? Like, I have a year before he got his license and got his gun.Again, we're talking about Neal here.

Alena Steinbach: So I know if him, I can't see a chance. But but for now

Neil King: let's not start a fight in here. There's a gun in the room.

Gabriel Borrud: What would it take somebody to become a hunter in Germany.

Alena Steinbach: The normal and all the traditional ways around nine months. And but they are like the fast cross crosses now where you can get it in two weeks.

Neil King: Do you think a lot of guys go in for it just to get a gun?

Alena Steinbach: No, I don't think so.

Neil King: It's too much effort for that, isn't it?

Alena Steinbach: Yeah.

Neil King: How often do you come to this particular spot?

Alena Steinbach: Oh, this is just the second time, really?

Gabriel Borrud: Yeah, is that a pick up line Neil?

Neil King: What.

Gabriel Borrud: Do you come here often?

Neil King: No, I was just wondering because we're in this particular spot because the three of us actually fit in here, right? Because normally these ice seats, it's just for two or one.

Alena Steinbach: Yeah, exactly. But it's a good spot. A friend of mine shot a buck here at Roe buck four weeks ago.

Neil King: Do keep track of the number of animals you funded. Have you got any idea how many you have killed and eaten?

Alena Steinbach: Actually, I have no, no, no. There are a lot of hunters. My ex-boyfriend, for example, does. That is like riding every animal he shot. Like,

Neil King: Wait a minute, your ex-boyfriend was on to do?

Alena Steinbach: Sure. I think if you're a woman and you're hunting, you can just live with a hunter. Really? Yeah.

Neil King: Why?

Alena Steinbach: Because I think, like other guys have maybe not the understanding for what I'm doing. If you've ever been outside, like in the morning, when the light and the sun comes up and the grass is wet and everything is inside and then slowly the the birds starting to sing and you're walking around and you see some serious.

Speaker6: It's a feeling you really can't describe.

Gabriel Borrud: Have you ever seen Bambi?

Movie clip: Your mother can't be with you anymore.

Alena Steinbach: Horrible film.

Neil King: Did you just ask about Bambi?

Gabriel Borrud: My daughters cannot watch that movie, it's too sad and it's horrible.

Alena Steinbach: From from Disney to a movie like this, because no hunter would ever show the mother from a cow or from a baby.

Neil King: Do you remember your very first kill?

Alena Steinbach: Yes, of course.

Neil King: Can you describe how you felt?

Alena Steinbach: Well, I went out with my father and there came a Buck Roebuck. I took the shot and You was just lying down and immediately dead. How did you feel after that? I was shaking. It's just like, Oh, the emotions following of you.

Neil King: What were you feeling when you saw it actually dead? Did you touch it? How did it feel?

Alena Steinbach: Well, it was a mix of respect and happiness, not happiness about a yearbook or something, but it was happiness about I did everything right. I did it on my own.

Neil King: And did you eat that animal?

Alena Steinbach: Sure. Yeah.

Neil King: How did that taste? Is it tastes different because you killed it.

Alena Steinbach: It taste different. Not because I killed it. Because I knew where it came from, where I lived. And did it had a good life in there. If you can say this, a good death.Yeah.

Gabriel Borrud: Can we take a bathroom break at any point or is this do we have to stay in here for hours? Oh my God, take a bathroom break.

Neil King: Are you serious?

Gabriel Borrud: What?

Neil King: Don't believe this. Don't chase away all the animals around. We're not going to see any animals. However, You goes for a toilet break.

Alena Steinbach: No, but maybe we have a chance later. Jesus.

Neil King: Have you fallen off like God? Ok, listen, I think Gabe has just about ruined the hunt.. Oh, God is coming again from he's coming up the stairs up.

Alena Steinbach: You can possibly be Hunter, but I can't see a change with Gabe.

Neil King: Yeah, he's very subtle.

Alena Steinbach: Yeah.

Neil King: I don't believe you. You sounded like something like Jack and the Beanstalk going up and down. You were so loud. Come on.

Alena Steinbach: I don't know if the bathroom action was too loud.

Alena Steinbach: Ok, but if you want, we can just go to Max and take care of this spike horn. and look after that. I fought for my bar.

Neil King: For the bar bathrooms. Yeah, let's do that, max. It's just in case our listener, in case we missed it, Max is your boyfriend. He's just shot a deer. Yeah, and it's a heavy one, and he needs help carrying it, right?

Alena Steinbach: Yeah, up.

Gabriel Borrud: Are we giving up? Oh, we're not giving up. We're just having a break, right? Yes. Let's go. Let's go. Wow.

Neil King: Hey, Max.

Max: Hello,

Neil King: You You just shot this deer. It's huge. Yeah. Max strung it up and it's if I put my arm right up, it's still higher than I am. Is it still warm?

Max: Sure, you can see it heating.

Neil King: Just touch it. God, I feel so weird. Still, it's still warm.

Gabriel Borrud: Let me try. It feels like it feels like my old dog when I would pet it. Yeah, yeah.

Neil King: It's opening up the rib cage now, that's what you can hear.

Alena Steinbach: Yeah.

Neil King: It's cutting right down over now. What's this coming out the stomach, the stomach, the big gray mass? Ok, and you can smell it now. There's a very distinct smell in the air. Ok, now you're pulling over both sides. Oh, now it's all coming out.

Gabriel Borrud: Oh man. So within a span of about three minutes, yeah, you've removed the stomach and all the intestines.

Alena Steinbach: Yes. Now we have, like we say, stones in our oh, man hunting language beholden gonads.

Gabriel Borrud: Yeah, and this has to be done immediately.

Alena Steinbach: Yeah, you do it like right after the shot or half an hour later. Why? Because in the moment the animal's dead, the stomach bacteria start to move around the body and go to the meat. So you need to bring it out of the body to take care of the meat.

Neil King: So let's just go. Let's just go into this box because Max is taking out all the intestines, the organs, and he's put it in this box.

Gabriel Borrud: The stomach looks like it's like a stuffed turkey.

Neil King: It does a bit. It does a bit with the

Gabriel Borrud: Plastic bag around it. It's completely white, the stomach.

Speaker7: So this is the long and this is the liver and where we have a knife. You know what? So what was that noise? Well, it's just because there's the whole summer in the stomach. And yes, coming out

Neil King: What there was was a baby deer and

Alena Steinbach: No. Jesus. That's like stomach inside, that's. Disgusting. And this is the disgusting smell here

Gabriel Borrud: When this deer was walking around Max. How long did it stop before you shot?

Max: Yes.

Gabriel Borrud: Was it just

Max: Stop and look to me? And then I have shot and then it's got down.

Gabriel Borrud: And when you saw it, did your own heart start pumping? Yes.

Alena Steinbach: If your heart is not pumping faster when you are hunting, then you should stop hunting because then it's not emotional anymore and you need to be emotional so that you. Yeah, be concentrated, that you have a feeling for the animal. And if you're doing it like maybe a slaughter in a slaughter because you do it like 20 or what, 20, 200 times a day, I think it's normal for them. But killing an animal or a wild animal is never normal for four hunter.

Neil King: Now, so what is the next step, do you leave it here overnight or do you have to put it somewhere cold?

Alena Steinbach: What happens when you put it in the freezer, not the freezer, in the fridge, in the fridge? Yeah, and we cut off the legs because the full body is too big for the fish. Yeah, it's hard. If you see the first time, I can imagine the noise as rule breaking of bones, but there's no feeling inside the body.

Max: There were nine altogether a dose in one book when I shot, the bucket went down immediately and when it was dead, I walked over and sat with it for half an hour.

Gabriel Borrud: Now, you said that you sat in a half hour together with this animal after it was dead?

Max: Yes.

Gabriel Borrud: Why what

Max: Respect in the moment and the emotions and that's come down.

Gabriel Borrud: It's been a couple of hours now and the way in which you just disemboweled it and cut off, it's. Legs, I don't see that emotion, and it's almost like a methodical hit man style. How can you do this?

Max: After about a half hour, We still treat it with very much respect. It slowly starts turning into food. It died an honorable death, and we honor it by eating it. It is changing character from something that's living to food, and now we will process the meat.

Gabriel Borrud: Now it's being loaded onto a wheelbarrow.

Alena Steinbach: It's a lot easier to grab the meat in the supermarket or and see an animal with head and eyes.

Neil King: So we're taking it inside now in the wheelbarrow into is this also I don't know what is this?

Alena Steinbach: Well, this is just the place where we where we can put our. Fritz. It's from the city of You, from the village.

Gabriel Borrud: It is now hanging on a hook in this fridge, how long will it hang like that,

Alena Steinbach: Five, six days?

Neil King: And this was how many kilos approximately,

Alena Steinbach: I think around 70

Neil King: And you'll be able to eat that for.

Alena Steinbach: This could be for four or five months.

Neil King: That sounds as if we're getting into territory where it's sustainable. Not for the mass market, maybe, but if you've got, you know, mass

Alena Steinbach: Markets in my bachelor thesis, I I counted all the the meat or the venison meat we have in Germany in one year. And if we all just eat venison, we have like 30 grams per year per person. So lot.

Gabriel Borrud: So then the solution it's looking at in a world of where meat eating would be sustainable would be for people to reduce their meat consumption. That's the only way

Neil King: Or half of them go vegetarian and the other half go hunting, for

Alena Steinbach: Example. Yes.

Neil King: Well, I was still going after that wild boar. We will Look. I don't want to have my cameras.

Neil King: Are you still game? Do you still want to go or have you changed your mind?

Gabriel Borrud: To be honest, I think I've had enough.

Neil King: Really, you look a little pale, but you're right. Yeah, I'm great. Okay. Ok, so finally, we get to talk about what happened last night. You didn't want to do a debrief last night, Gabe, you just went up to it, right? But now we can. You've slept on it and you can sort of gather your thoughts and give us what you taken away from last night.

Gabriel Borrud: Yeah, it was a long day, and I think I was in a. It was in a state of shock. I was just I was a bit overwhelmed. I had a lot going through my head and I was too tired to to come up with any.

Neil King: But I mean, what were you expecting because you were really ashen faced looking at you? I actually thought you might even be low on sugar.

Gabriel Borrud: Well, no, I was actually really high on sugar because my phone had died and couldn't check my blood sugar. I guess the reason why they kept talking about treating the animal with respect. And I was just looking at this, this deer strung up by its neck. You know, getting all its organs ripped out, cut up. Its bones ripped apart. And then the idea of it, you know, peacefully walking around in the woods with with eight dogs, or imagine if there were some other species that was higher or a predator to us, you're walking around peacefully with with your friends and all of a sudden you're on the ground dying. I don't I wouldn't if that species said they were treating me with respect.

Neil King: So it was just about

Gabriel Borrud: Hard for me to I can't grasp that Term.

Neil King: So it was it was the respect thing that got you.

Gabriel Borrud: It seems like a glaring contradiction. It seems absurd to me.

Neil King: And yet this morning, when we have breakfast, right? Because you've been huffing and sighing ever since you set eyes on that slaughtered deer and you've been in a really bad mood. I mean, quite frankly. But this morning went for breakfast and you said you went to the buffet, said, I'm going vegan. I sat at the table. You came back and you had scrambled eggs on your plate with what was it, ham, ham chunks in it? What happened

Gabriel Borrud: There? I didn't see the bacon at first, but I thought it was just egg, but you ate it. I swallowed it down now.

Neil King: So how does that go together with what you've just described the animal, right? That's like pork, you know, over 58 million pigs slaughtered in Germany on a farm? I mean, the conditions there are just horrendous compared to what we saw last night.

Gabriel Borrud: Well, I think for my pea brain, this is what's going on. I don't understand it. I don't understand the brutal violence. Behind eating meat, and I'm slowly starting to comprehend that, Neil. And it's not easy. The idiot that's that I am eating that. Eggs with. Pork, pig meat. Doesn't get it. That what we saw the night before. Carcass being shredded apart and ripped apart in front of our eyes. That is what eating meat is. If it's done behind closed doors, then it's fine for my stupid brain.

Neil King: So you've had like, is it an awakening moment where you sort of, you know, you're aware now and you're going to change it? Or is it? Are you saying you're going to go back to the brain mode and carry on eating meat the way you have been?

Gabriel Borrud: I don't know right now. I don't know. It's not. It's not clear enough to me yet, but I know that there's there's something bubbling in the chamber.

Neil King: For sure, because for me, it had the exact opposite effect, really, I didn't feel anywhere near as bad as you did. I was it was a bit grotesque, just seeing the carcass. The angle of the neck and everything, it just looked grotesque. Death, I think, is very grotesque. But at the same time, I did have the feeling, yeah, this animal, it was happy right up until it was killed. It was wild. It was free. It had a chance of getting away. It was a far more even playing field than you have in a slaughterhouse where animals are just being herded in and killed en masse.

Gabriel Borrud: It's just the brutal reality. I think that was that was those are the words that came out of my mouth when I was staring at that car. It's just a brutal reality and it's taking a lot. It's just taking a while for me to get that.

Neil King: I think my conclusion is as different from last night, I think it wasn't easy looking at that, but I think I could do it and that. I think I have to be able to do it if I want to eat meat.