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More about the Sacred Hunt with Randall Eaton
 Editor’s Note: Dr. Randall Eaton of Cincinnati, Ohio, is a lecturer, a TV producer, an outdoor writer and an evolutionary psychologist. Eaton has produced some of the most-popular videos – “The Sacred Hunt” and “The Sacred Hunt II: Rite of Passage” - in the outdoor world today and has written 13 books, including “From Boys to Men of Heart: Hunting as a Rite of Passage.”
Question: Randall, why do you think the hunt is a spiritual experience?
Eaton: Hunting awakens us spiritually and gives us spiritual empowerment. There are only a few paths that we can walk in life that really develop us into better people, open our hearts, get us beyond our egos and connect us so that we begin to accept responsibility for something more than our own immediate needs. One of those paths is falling in love, which usually leads to having children and protecting, serving and providing for those children and looking after the community of which those children are a part. The hunt does the same thing, except that the hunt marries you to nature and invokes in you the responsibility to care for and look after the community of nature.
In a survey, I interviewed hunters, both men and women. The question I asked was, “What do you do after you take the life of an animal?” Eighty-two percent of the hunters told me they thanked the animals and/or thanked the creator. How many white hunters in
 North America ever were taught to do that by a hunting mentor, a hunting-ed instructor, an uncle, a grandfather, a dad, etc.? I never was taught that myself, but I’ve always done it. Once you experience the taking of the life of an animal, that experience becomes a sacred thing. You’ll also have an awakened sense of the responsibility you have and the fact that you need to control your power.
Yet another interesting fact I’ve learned from interviewing hunters with 20 years or more experience hunting everywhere is that they’ve let animals go and not taken them, although the animal has been the size and the type of animal they’ve wanted to take. They even may have had a clear shot. The animals were everything they’d hoped to find on that day. But they let the animals go. When I asked them to give me explanations for why they didn’t squeeze their triggers, I received a wide variety of answers. But the bottom line to all the answers was, “I just didn’t feel right taking that animal.” That act of letting an animal go, although it was the exact animal that hunter had hoped to take, was an emotion that came from a different level than sports do. If a batter in the last half of the ninth inning realizes that the bases are loaded, and his team is one run down, sees a perfect pitch coming toward him that he knows is a home run ball, he doesn’t let the ball go. A sport is about winning. So why then does the hunter let the perfect animal he’s spent his time and money to try and take go without squeezing the trigger when he knows he can make the shot?
 I think the hunter doesn’t shoot because in the event we know as, the hunt, the hunter listens to a higher master than his ego. I’ve named this master the heart or the spirit of the hunt. If we only can live from the heart – not just when we hunt and when we fall in love – we’ll live in a different world that she lives today. That’s the reason the hunt – just like falling in love – is so important to an individual’s spiritual and emotional development. That’s also why a hunter can live on a higher spiritual plane than people will who are living in fear or with a victim complex, who aren’t connected to a higher power, and who aren’t taking responsibility for the world in which they live, as those who participate in the sacred hunt do. The thing we call the hunt teaches us humility and that we’re a part of something greater than ourselves. It teaches us compassion, courage, fortitude and patience and gives us inner peace.
As I’ve researched the sacred hunt, I’ve learned that most hunters who have spent years afield hunting rank inner peace as one of the virtues they’ve gained from years of hunting. If you research every spiritual tradition on earth, you’ll find that the foundation stone of that religion or spiritual enlightenment is inner peace. Inner peace has spiritual power that allows the hunter to think with his heart and not with his ego. We usually associate this virtue with elders in a culture. The elders in a culture usually mentor young people and help them find inner peace and spiritual enlightenment. If we lose recreational hunting as a part of our culture, we’ll have lost a very-rich part of our culture and one of our paths to inner peace and spiritual enlightenment. That’s why I say the hunt is sacred, and those who participate in the hunt have a far-deeper and richer enlightenment about the natural world and the world they live in than those who don’t.
 For more information about “The Sacred Hunt,” go to www.sacred-hunt.com or www.randalleaton.com, or simply type in sacred hunt on a Google search and find it that way.
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