Emerson’s fellow Transcendentalist, Henry David Thoreau, prefigured today’s hiker-hunter cultural split. In “Walden” Thoreau considered hunting a necessary but distasteful stage in a man’s development: “No humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature which holds its life by the same tenure that he does.” The same schism played out a half-century later when the naturalist John Muir shared a camp at Yosemite with President Theodore Roosevelt. “When are you going to get beyond the boyishness of killing things?” Muir demanded of the famously avid hunter.

Any human who enjoys a Whopper with cheese kills things too, of course. He just does it indirectly. And therein lies one of the hunter’s greatest lines of defense. Dray, with typical evenhandedness, acknowledges as much. “Most of us reside somewhere along a very broad spectrum of hypocrisy regarding animal lives,” he writes. It’s a private and sometimes quirky thing, this ethical line each of us draws when it comes to hunting. I’ve hunted deer but could not justify going after elk. (I felt I hadn’t earned the right.) My dad hunted ducks with his father long ago but stopped because, he once told me, “I couldn’t see the sense in killing something that was so beautiful.” We both still love aquatic hunting — the pastime also known as sport fishing.

What is O.K. to hunt, when and why? “The Fair Chase” isn’t a book about ethics and philosophy, but Dray does a fine job introducing his readers to the issues in play. “Recreation,” he observes, “appears to be the offensive aspect” for a lot of hunting opponents. In a 2013 survey, 79 percent of Americans said they approve of hunting. Two years later, a separate poll found that 59 percent of adults “think hunting animals for sport” is unacceptable. The difference seemed to be the word “sport.” Say “hunting” and many people think of grandpa stalking deer in October. “Sport hunting” conjures up images of rich white guys getting their jollies killing lions and giraffes. What emerges is a vague yearning for the culturally appropriate. It might be justifiable for members of the Makah tribe to hunt a gray whale, but it’s not O.K. for your white deer-hunter grandpa to shoot a beluga.

“The Fair Chase” can be frustrating at times. Dray’s historical method involves a bit of overlapping and backtracking, and he sometimes seems more interested in the literary description and public presentation of hunting rather than the act itself. Hunting is an emotional, blood-racing activity, and Dray seems happy to leave the intense feelings it provokes to in-the-field writers like Ted Kerasote, Pam Houston, David Petersen and Aldo Leopold. Still, he isn’t afraid to lay out hard truths, including the ways in which the National Rifle Association, once a hunting group, has hijacked an important and honorable pastime for gun-selling ends.

The history of American hunting is a decidedly mixed bag. “America’s love affair with sport hunting,” Dray writes, “led to enhanced appreciation of the great outdoors, and to public acceptance of the need for management of wildlife populations and wilderness; but it also contributed to the wholesale slaughter of birds and animal species,” and fed the myth of the American as heroic conqueror.

As Thoreau wrote, hunting may represent an early stage in human development. But it’s not one we’re likely to outgrow anytime soon.