Intelligent ‘Hunting’ leaps into the fray

A killer speaks gleefully. He’s pumped, juiced, still feeling the rush. “As soon as he passed that tree,” he boasts, “bang, I let him have it.”

The prey, in wooded rural New York, is a deer, fatally shot in the lungs, his head destined for the bushwhacker’s wall.

“Nothing’s better than this, baby,” says this earnest trophy hunter in a documentary airing at 8 tonight on the National Geographic Channel. “This is what it’s all about, right here. Life is good.”

If you’re not the deer.

The debate over hunting in the U.S. is “as dense and complex as the forest itself,” reporter Jay Schadler notes in this superb new film produced by Robert Campos and Donna LoCicero. Unlike most discussions of this heated topic, density and complexity are exactly what “Hunting in America” is about. The life-and-death tangle of emotions and ambiguities tied to hunting is explored with rare intelligence here, in part because of Schadler’s acute perceptiveness and sensitivity and the hour’s avoidance of shrillness.

Compare that with the indulgent, self-serving burlesque of Steve Irwin, the Aussie who has become a poster clown for animal conservation while titling himself the Crocodile Hunter and professing to love the wild creatures he exploits for the camera. Animal Planet viewers got a heavier dose of him than usual during the cable channel’s just-ended annual “Croc Week.” And it wasn’t pretty.

If Irwin’s TV vamping and avowed affection for animals are in conflict, so are the emotions of some of the hunters shown tonight.

Schadler says 13 million Americans hunt. It’s boggling to hear some of them express love and respect here for that which they destroy. Surely the greater gift is life, not death.

How to explain, also, the paradox of Bob Vitro, a hunter and taxidermist who kills animals that he wants to memorialize by stuffing them. Think of it, ending an animal’s life with the intent of making it appear life-like as a wall decoration. “We’re creating a real piece of art is what we’re doing,” he says.

Is there really as much beauty in death as in life? Schadler spots a photo of Vitro posing with a dead leopard across his shoulders like a huge shawl. Schadler: “As you look at that animal now in that picture, is it as beautiful dead as it was alive?” Vitro: “To me, it is.” Go figure.

Just as another hunter tells Schadler he gets a bigger thrill from shooting an animal with a gun than with a camera, a seasoned female hunter speaks of “connecting with the outdoors in a way that you can’t get when you take a hike in the woods.”

And here, connecting in a Wisconsin field, is first-time hunter Tara Short, age 23, about to get her first kill. Up flies a pheasant from almost directly in front of her. Down it goes when she blows it away.

She equates this with Native Americans historically hunting for food: “They respect that animal. Thank you for giving up your life. Thank you for giving me the experience of catching you. Thank you for giving me the experience of being out here in the outdoors. Thank you for keeping me alive because you are ultimately how I live. I have to eat you.”

Of course, with thank-yous like these, who needs enemies?

And surely the whoops of joy from Tara’s female’s comrades when her shot hits home indicate this is not about food sustenance. “She bagged a bird,” one shouts euphorically.

Well, not quite bagged it, for it’s still alive and twitching as she holds it in her hands. “It is beautiful, and that’s what I came out here to do,” Tara says. Yet obviously shaken, she adds: “Why can’t it die faster?”

Another woman comforts her, hoping to ease her pain.

Her pain?

There is one point of view missing here, says Schadler. “The animal’s.”

So he’s off to the University of Colorado to meet researcher Marc Bekoff, who believes animals experience fear. And he’s off to see former trophy hunter Steve Hindi, now a prominent hunting foe who is sure animals suffer.

When Schadler asks for proof, Hindi can offer only his observations: “They cry. The way they struggle to live ... when they’re dragging themselves by their front legs, pulling themselves by their front legs on the ground.”

Unmentioned here are the worst of the worst, canned hunts -- opposed by most sports hunters -- in which caged animals are placed before shooters so they can blast them at point- blank range and claim a kill.

As Tara Short notes wisely, hunting opposition rings hollow when protesters have no compunction (which is sometimes the case) about wearing animals killed for their skins, or eating those treated horrifically, out of sight and out of mind, in slaughterhouses. In fact, the litany of grief imposed on animals by humans is virtually endless.

Although Steve Irwin is among the more benign offenders, it’s still hard reconciling his self-proclaimed role as wildlife protector (based at the Australia Zoo in Queensland) with his television behavior as a daredevil buffoon who uses animals as props.

Neither dense nor complex, he’s just out there.

“Steve Irwin takes the greatest risk of his life!” shouted the Animal Planet promo one evening last week. And there he was, crawling on a rock toward a crocodile in western Australia, while his wife, Teri, and their 4-year-old daughter watched. From about 10 feet, Irwin and the croc stared at each other, both bodies still, both mouths open, TV at its finest.

Next he was underwater at sea, hand-feeding a block of fish to frenzied reef sharks with scary music in the background, saying in a voice-over how nervous he was, because “make a mistake and your hand’s gonna come off.” If only his tongue came off. “This is not anything I would recommend, hand-feeding ‘em like that,” he told viewers who were thinking of hand-feeding sharks.

“Up next,” he announced, “a sea full of snakes.” One of which he pursued and, puckering up, tried to kiss on the mouth. “Whatever you see me doing with these sea snakes, never do,” he warned viewers who were contemplating kissing sea snakes.

Then he was back with the crocs, dragging a young 6-footer onto a mud bank and wrestling it in the muck, a demonstration of love and respect that the croc didn’t appear to understand. Irwin’s voice-over: “Oh, he’s bit me! That’s it! I’ve been bitten! How’s that for pushin’ it for the limit? How’s that for takin’ it beyond all boundaries?”

Once again, he had shown disbelievers that crocs don’t enjoy being taunted and tormented. Just in case some viewers were planning to do it.

All of this was a drum roll leading to the show’s terrifying conclusion. “Coming up we risk our lives to demonstrate a famous crocodile fatality,” Irwin announced. To show viewers at home what not to do, Irwin jumped into the water where he said a 24-year-old American tourist had been attacked and dragged under by a croc years ago. “Never do this!” he ordered viewers. To emphasize that point, Teri joined him the water and the scary music crescendoed.

“That was the greatest risk I’ve ever let my wife take, but with good reason,” he said later. That reason: He’s doing it all for us and for the creatures in the wild. What a risk. What a hero. What a benevolent champion of animals.

What a croc.

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be contacted at howard.rosenberg@latimes.

com.