Nature writer Caras takes on the hunting fraternity, and although he attempts to take into consideration both the hunting and anti-hunting camps, he cannot contain the impulse to boot some hunting myths into a cocked red hat. Caras leads off with some deceptively dispassionate observations which are casually second-hand but couched in rather amusing terms. Men have fun killing (a brief bow to Lancaster and Washburn, Ardrey, Lorenz) and we are born slayers; we have the ""ultimate gadget,"" the gun (if we hunted with eggbeaters, hunting would die out). There is the social bond of the hunt and lastly the personal ""masculine"" image. (""There are all kinds of things he can act mysterious about."") Caras feels that eventually, with the current growth of hunting preserves (where domesticated animals are shot assembly line fashion) perhaps some of the hunting myth will be destroyed. He hopes for gun regulation and some self-scrutiny on the part of hunters. (How, he asks, at one point, can an animal ""die magnificently?"") Caras is a tough, unsentimental fighter in the cause of preservation and the de-glamourization of killing animals. He has a following.