Blythe Roberson picked up a rifle and headed on a hunting trip—despite being a practicing vegan for years. Following a breakup with a hunting enthusiast, the comedy writer decided to experience the hunt—including eating her kills—for herself. Roberson chronicled her rollercoaster of a journey in Alta Journal’s “The Vegan Hunter.” She joins Alta Live to share even more about her experience as a vegan trekking from New York City to the wilds of Montana to hunt grouse. Vegans and carnivores alike won’t want to miss this interview with one of Alta Live’s favorite—and funniest—guests.

About the guest:

Blythe Roberson is a comedian, a humor writer, and the author of How to Date Men When You Hate Men and America the Beautiful?: One Woman in a Borrowed Prius on the Road Most Traveled. She has written for Alta Journal, the New Yorker, Cosmopolitan, Kinfolk, Esquire, Vice Magazine, and the NPR quiz show Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! Roberson was raised between Illinois and Wisconsin and currently lives in Brooklyn.

Here are some notable quotes from the event:

  • On how the idea for hunting materialized: “I started getting interested in hunting as a way to be a naturalist. And he [my ex] got me hooked on the show MeatEater, which is just a TV show where this guy, Steven Rinella, goes outside and hunts animals, and he always makes sure he eats the animal. So over the course of a year, I got really interested in how hunting could actually be a way to love nature. It didn’t seem to me that eating hunted meat was cruel in the way that eating factory-farmed meat was. So I was like, ‘OK, you know what? I want to become a hunter.’”
  • On her first shot while hunting: “When I was hunting this grouse—and this is like the third day of my life that I’ve ever shot a gun; I had practiced shooting twice before when I got there, but there’s still not a lot of practice—I clipped it. First, I shot the grass and completely missed it. And Christina, our incredible photographer, later said, ‘Yeah, I have a photo of you shooting the grass the first time. And I almost wondered if you were trying to miss it because you were so off in your aim.’ And I was like, ‘Thanks, Christina, cool. No, I was trying to kill it.’”
  • On the first grouse she killed: “I shot it again, and it still didn’t die. We had to reload the gun because there were only three shells in it, and then I hit it again, and it finally seemed like it was dead, but then it got up and hopped away. And Seth, bless him, was like, ‘Here, let me just get it.’ And so he did. It was just horrible. It made me feel so ashamed and angry at myself that the reason I had come to hunt was to be respectful of nature, because I love animals and I love these places, and I did the thing that I didn’t want to do, which was, I made this poor little bird suffer.”
  • On why she stopped eating meat: “The reason I stopped eating meat was because, as I see it, a lot of the practices used to feed meat to the billions of people on the planet are really cruel to animals and to the world as a whole. Anyone who’s read about factory farming knows how horrific the conditions the animals are living in are. And then the clear-cutting of land to grow the feed for these animals, and the runoff—everything is so horrible. And shipping all this meat across the planet. I feel like there are 12 different things that people claim are like ‘This is the number-one thing you can do to prevent climate change,’ and not eating meat we hear a lot as being one of them.”

Check out these links to some of the topics brought up this week.