Thirty years after Home on the Range was written, only 500 buffalo remained in the United States. In Kansas — Higley’s home state — deer were gone and antelope practically non-existent. Their habitats largely destroyed by human development, these iconic game animals were hunted out of existence.

In an era where ‘eco-friendly’ is the hip phrase of the day, new hunters and the hunting curious are more frequently asking if hunting is sustainable. Could I take up hunting, they wonder, as an environmentally-conscious means to eat? Is hunting better for the earth than buying meat at the grocery store? Should we all just revert back to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to ‘save the planet’?

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