THE IMAGE IS familiar: A hunter crouches beside a dead deer or elk, grinning into the camera. What do we make of this picture?
    We all see the hunter’s smile. We all see the beautiful animal. And we all recognize some connection between the two. From there, though, interpretations can diverge wildly.
    Critics of hunting are apt to see mindless brutality. The hunter has killed, and now gloats over a carcass. Veteran hunters are apt to see celebration. Through skill, effort, and luck, the hunter has succeeded and is justifiably proud.
    Perhaps the chasm is too wide to be bridged. Yet, I hope we can pause to reflect on our own perceptions.
    In my 20s, as a vegan, I was repulsed by the pleasure that hunters apparently took in killing. Two decades later, as a hunter, I understand that people enjoy hunting for reasons that have nothing to do with killing. I also understand that hunters experience a wide variety of emotions.
    “I feel very excited, but I always feel sad,” one deer hunter told me. “It’s a mixture of awe and sadness.” Such an emotional jumble may sound contradictory. But each feeling was about something different: excitement at her success and the intensity of the hunt, sadness at the deer’s death, awe at mortality and the beauty of the animal.
    For those who deplore hunting, it’s tempting to dismiss such distinctions. When we are certain an act is evil, explanations sound like subterfuge. Hunters can blather all they want. They still grin at us hideously from beside dead animals.
    For those who hunt, as I do, it’s tempting to dismiss such hostility. When we are certain we have been misjudged, criticisms sound like nonsense. Antihunters can blather all they want. They condemn us without making any real effort to understand what we do or why.
    As hunters, though, we share a basic belief with our critics: There is moral meaning in how one feels about killing.
    Among the deer hunters I know, all say that killing should not be treated lightly. “It’s powerful,” one instructor told me. “You’ve taken an animal’s life. It needs to be done with respect.”
    In 2007, Field & Stream columnist Bill Heavey slammed a hunter who described his sadistic longing to taunt a dying deer with a touchdown-style dance. Everyone I know agreed.
    That glee is what many critics see in pictures of hunters grinning, and even more readily in videos of hunters high-fiving after a kill.
    Such images are symbols. You and I can look at the same photograph without perceiving the same meanings. If you are the hunter, the image will probably seem positive. But not necessarily.
    When the writer Michael Pollan saw a picture of himself with the wild pig he had killed, he said he felt ashamed — not of the killing, but of his grin. Such images “are a jolting dispatch from the deep interior of an experience that does not easily travel across the borders of modern life.”
    Living along those borders, as I do these days, I am still sometimes jarred by such pictures. Yet a photo tells me little about a hunter’s feelings, let alone his morals. A friend once sent me a picture of himself crouching beside a dead deer. The image did not tell me how many years of persistence led to the killing of this first buck. It did not tell me how my friend felt, kneeling on land his grandparents had worked. It did not tell me how grateful he was for the luck, the instant kill, and the venison for his family.
    His e-mail told me, and I understood his smile. He was saying grace.

Tovar Cerulli is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News. He is the author of The Mindful Carnivore: A Vegetarian’s Hunt for Sustenance.