Recently I was reading an intriguing article in the Vancouver Sun titled, “Ethical Killing: Hipsters, hippies and women are taking up hunting“. After momentarily being sidetracked with the thought of geek-chic and skinny jean laden folks venturing into the woods to fill the freezer, I got to thinking about the changing dynamics in the once declining hunting population and the desired paradigm shift to eating wild, read “organic” meat. I know I’ve talked before about being more aware of where your food is coming from and how it’s produced, turns out the growing number of new hunters have those concerns and are asking more questions. In my opinion it’s also a tug on our internal instincts to “get back to the land”. People want to garden and grow their own veggies, they also want to know where they got their meat from.
And as the article mentions, hunting has its own baggage. Without enough information, some only picture a stereotypical redneck trophy fist-pump, when an animal is shown being shot on TV. With the proper education its way more diverse and challenging than just that two-dimensional image. In Canada prior to receiving a certificate to purchase a hunting license one must go through a hunter education course. It won’t teach you how to hunt necessarily but it will teach you about conservation, outdoor survival and safety, the ideas of fair chase and proper wildlife identification. It’s a great foundation to attain a set of life skills that can be invaluable and give you the confidence to step out into the woods. If anyone is even mildly interested in taking up hunting and not sure where to start, just search out hunter education in your state or province. For the folks that were asking me about programs in western Canada, BC has the CORE (Conservation, Recreation, Outdoor Education) and in Alberta there is the Online Hunter Education Certification. Both are great programs and ladies I urge you to check it out even just for the knowledge base alone.
However, hunting can take a huge effort to be successful and I don’t even mean in the trophy sense, for an animal to be harvested successfully in my mind it has to embody the ideologies of fair chase and respect. And maybe the largest challenge in our modern day is that successful hunting takes time. Lots and lots of time spent in the wilderness, with maybe the biggest upside being that with this time a visceral reconnection is made to the “organic” side of ourselves than had once been forgotten in our urbanite surroundings.
There’s still an extensive a Hunter Ed program available for our schools. I really wish more schools knew about it & used it to help educate about conservation etc. I’ve never hunted in my life (I’m married to an avid hunter), but am very grateful for the Hunter Ed program I completed in Junior High. Great article!
I really wish more schools knew about those resources as well! I truly believe it’s valuable purely from the conservation and educational aspect of learning about the outdoors and how to interact and survive in them properly. I know that Alberta Hunters Education would welcome any school groups or classes that wanted more information or content.
So interesting that you have commented on this article. I read the same one and thought that it was a good one…..it doesn’t quite touch on how “the hunt” is not just a romp in the park.
Agreed it’s a bit ideological on the concept of people leaving the grocery store to get their meat in the woods. I think if that were the case, lots of folks would go hungry. The agricultural and industrial meat production is there for a reason and have no thought that hunting would ever sustain or replace that. However I think it’s great for people to want to be informed, they just need to be aware of what they’re getting themselves into.