The fourth installment of the series Lessons with the Non-human: an auto/ethnography of Entanglements, titled "The Genesis of an Ethics of Receiving Life," was published in the April 2026 issue of Sekai (Iwanami Shoten). This article reflects on the experience, during my second time observing a deer hunt, of being visited by the thought that "I must hunt myself, and be granted the life of the deer," examining it through María Puig de la Bellacasa's concept of nonnormative ethical genesis (ethopoiesis). Taking as its threads ecological knowledge about the problem of deer damage, the words of S, a farm owner, who wished for "a device that would let hunters feel the pain of the deer they shoot," and the customs of "receiving" in the matagi culture of Akita as recounted by the artist and hunter Aoi Nagasawa, it argues that to be granted an animal's life is to take part in that other's death while housing its way of living within oneself, and it explores a mode of ethics in which a caring curiosity reaches beyond the individual toward the interconnections of the ecosystem.
