“I Don’t Mean to Harm the Animal Because I’m not Sadistic”: Violence, Intimacy, Suffering, and Compassion in US Settler Hunting

Through a net ethnography of the r/Hunting subreddit on the social media website Reddit, I uncover the intricate ways white settler hunters imagine themselves in intimate relationships to human and non-human animals because of the violence they enact on their kills.  For hunters on r/hunting, the moment of violence–euphemized as “harvesting”–is at once the point, and superfluous to it, serving as both the node of intimacy with the harvest animal as well as a necessary evil to be necessarily minimized: true hunting, they argue, is about limiting suffering–anything else is just sadistic killing.  Indeed, this moment of violence, I show, anchors ethical scaffolding as well as religious cosmologies.  Hunting, then–even white settler hunting–is the implicitly intimate moment where violence meets compassion, where life meets life, where humans are honest about the death they bring into the world.