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The Sacred Hunt with Dr. 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: What is “The Sacred Hunt” concept and video? Most people generally don’t associate the word, sacred, with the word hunting. So, how did you develop the concept of the sacred hunt?
Eaton: In North America, we have a hunting tradition that we call recreational hunting. We’ve tried to identify hunting as a sport, but actually hunting’s not. Hunting is an instinct – a part of our biological program - that’s born into every human being. Playing basketball isn’t an instinct but rather is a sport you learn. Hunting is something that males in our culture do spontaneously or instinctively. Most boys start dealing with weapons at the ages of 4 to 5 years. Usually by the ages of 6-9 years, even though the idea may shock you, these boys want to go out, kill something and don’t even know why or how they’ve done it. We may have a recreational tradition of hunting today, but we no longer have a hunting culture.
For instance, if you were to interview people on the street in New York City, Minneapolis, Minnesota, or Memphis, Tennessee, and asked how do Native Americans feel about hunting, most folks would say something like, “Native Americans respect animals. They have reverence for wildlife. They have a spiritual connection with wildlife.” These beliefs are widely held by white people in North America about the native redman. However, if you asked those same 10 people, how recreational hunters felt about the animals they hunted, the kind of responses they would give you would be blank faces, especially if the people you were interviewing had no hunting background. This kind of survey actually was done by Bob Norton, a retired psychologist from the University of Wisconsin at Lacrosse. In other words, there is this understanding due to movies, TV shows, magazine articles and historical books about the high regard that indigenous people of the United States hold hunting. However, there is no understanding on the part of the non-hunting community about how recreational hunters feel as those hunters relate to nature.
 But we have learned that recreational hunters intuitively hold almost-identical values to those held by Native Americans. Recreational hunters consider wild animals and nature as sacred, just like Native Americans did and still do, even though recreational hunters don’t talk about their feelings. In the survey I’ve done of 2500 hunters so far, from Alberta, Canada, to Tennessee, the three words that 99.8% of all the hunters I’ve interviewed have used to describe their feelings for the animals they hunt are respect, reverence and admiration. In other words, the recreational hunters feel the same way toward the animals they hunt as Native Americans always have felt.
This information about the attitudes of hunters won’t surprise hunters. However, what will surprise and upset recreational hunters is that the non-hunting community doesn’t understand that you have these feelings in common with Native Americans and hunters all across the world. These beliefs and these feelings have throughout time been a part of all that is known as hunting. The value system that comes out of this experience is what we call, “the hunt,” regardless of your cultural background. And, the hunt is powerful in shaping your perception and value system
I did a survey of men and women over the age of 50 across the globe and asked them the question, “What was the life event that most opened your heart and caused compassion in you?” They could pick from a number of responses, including the death of a loved one, the death of a beloved pet, the times they became parents, instances of teaching young people and/or taking the life of an animal for food. They also could write in on the survey what they considered their life-changing moments. The number-one response from women, as you would guess, was becoming a parent (having a baby). The top choice for men was taking the life of an animal for food. If you think about these answers, they make perfect sense. Women bring life into the world, and men take life to support life. So, what I’m suggesting here is that the most-powerful initiatory experience for women around the world is having their babies. The experiences that most connect men to the earth, the earth’s creatures, other humans and the divine are the taking of the life of an animal.
 Men have a behavior that is instinctive to the hunt but that flowers into something more profound than that in the same way that sex evolves into love. Sex meets you on a path that has a big surprise for you in that you ultimately fall in love. Then when you fall in love, you share that heart-to-heart experience, as an initiation to your own immortality. You’re willing to die for the person you love, because that connection is so strong in you. Now you’ve transcended your ego. Sex isn’t just about the physical but also is about a spiritual love that becomes more important than the sex itself.
The same type of thing happens in hunting. The instinct to hunt drives you out into the woods. The instinct to hunt will result in the death of an animal, however, when you take an animal’s life, there’s an opening of your heart that marries you to nature and carries you to a more-spiritual level with animals and nature that forever changes your life. You’ll never be the same again. That’s the reason I say that the hunt is a sacred undertaking.
 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.
Next Week: “More about the Sacred Hunt with Randall Eaton”
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