Wild Boar Hunting In Hawaii

The primary reason that I hunt is to supply my friends and family with meat that was raised in the wild and slaughtered and butchered with reverence and respect. Beyond that, there are many secondary motivations that bring me into the wild.

I do it for reasons of cultural continuity and to understand human history; I do it to carry on an intimate, visceral relationship with the out-of-doors; and I do it for the pure excitement of doing dangerous things in beautiful places.

These secondary reasons tend to be much more subtle and nuanced than the simple idea of food, though I recently had an experience while hunting wild boar in Hawaii that forced me to find a way to articulate the realities of what it means to be a human hunter.

It is gritty footage, though I think it will be illuminating for anyone who's ever wondered about their own relationship to the animals they eat. Or, perhaps more importantly, about their own relationship to the bygone human generations that had to literally wrestle their sustenance from the wild.

Warning: video contains graphic imagery

Steven Rinella is the host of the new Travel Channel series, "The Wild Within"