Category Archives: hunting

The Lessons of Childhood Boredom

March 30, 2011 Shawn West Leave a comment

So it’s official…I’m a rock star. How can I tell? Because I receive fan mail, that’s how. Global fan mail. Apparently my blog has taken off in parts of the world where the hunting tradition is far removed from my own comfortable little pocket of Ontario, and people have written me to tell me about it. Two emails from Japan, one from Singapore, three from the U.S.A., and one from India. None from Canada yet, but it is obvious that I’m becoming a global sensation that is unappreciated in his homeland. And I say it is about time.

Of course, my tongue is planted firmly in cheek and my ego is far from that large. It is flattering to know that, thanks to the international reach of blogging and the Internet at large, that people around the world are reading my diseased ramblings (over 70% of my readership is still in North America, but you just can’t help but go global in today’s day and age). It is even more flattering that these globally diverse readers subscribe and follow my writing, let alone that they take a moment to ask me questions or drop a line and say they like what they see. I’ve also gotten hate mail (more on that in a future post) but I guess that is the risk one runs when you put your thoughts and opinions out in the global blogosphere. So where am I going with all this? I’m getting there.

One letter I received from a reader in Japan (written in impeccable English I might add…I have friends and coworkers that I wish could write that well) inquired about why I write, where I got my ideas, and when I became interested in writing about hunting and the outdoors. I actually have not responded to that email yet (I meant to I swear) but I thought I’d put my answer out there with a post instead and kill two birds with one stone.

I’ve always had an interest in reading and writing (not so much with arithmetic, but that’s another story) and at an early age was found to be an obsessively anal retentive speller of words. So I guess I come by my wordsmithing naturally. So that covers off the first question: I’ve been interested in the written word for as long as I can remember.

To the second and third points, I can frame these with a flashback.

When I was a much younger person I spent a lot of time visiting the family farm. We would go there at Christmas for a few days, some years we would spend March Break there, for three or four years before I was a teenager I’d spend a week or two there in the summer, and in the fall we would go there every year for Thanksgiving weekend in October. These regular visits were also punctuated with occasional weekend trips throughout the year.

With the exception of the week at March Break, most of these trips involved hunting in some way. In the Christmas season I could be found following my Dad around while he was hunting varying hares with a beagle and .22 rifle. Thanksgivings were book-ended with waterfowl hunts on the Saturday and Monday mornings (this was before Sunday gun hunting was legal in this part of Ontario), and in the summer we would travel scanning the fields of local farmers looking for woodchucks (a.k.a. groundhogs). Helping out with chores was also on the menu, from loading wood to occasionally helping pitch hay bales into the barn, there was always lots to do. Of course, as kids do we also fooled around and got into mischief; some of which was very unsafe. While playing tag in the orchard in the fading light of a summer evening or tossing a Frisbee around in the front yard were pretty benign, excavating extensive, ramshackle tunnels in the hay loft or tobogganing down huge hills at break neck speeds with nothing but a page wire fence and some hay bales to stop you at the bottom were slightly more reckless pursuits. I learned to drive a tractor (slowly, jerkily, and overall terribly) in one of those summer trips and I learned gun safety and how to shoot a rifle. Mostly I learned to understand and cherish the rural and wilderness places of the worlds, and I gained a deep respect and love for the people and animals that call those places home.

So how do these pastoral remembrances factor into an interest in writing about hunting and outdoor pursuits? I told you, I’m getting there.

Of course with so much to do, it was amazing that a young boy could find boredom, but I did. Rainy days, blizzards, or days when the air was so hot, heavy and still that you could almost swim through it did not really lend themselves to robust physical activity. And this is where writing and reading came into play.

The farmhouse was (and to a degree still is) a veritable library of anything that an interested and open-minded person would want to read. From classic children’s books such as The Wind in the Willows and the Tale of Peter Rabbit to field guides of birds, to huge collections of hunting and fishing magazines, there was a lot to read on the farm. It helped that television was basically non-existent, with the TV picking up just three channels up until the late-1990’s. I read Slaughterhouse Five on the farm one rainy summer weekend when I was ten years old, and Brave New World over a series of three very cold days the following Christmas. But most of all, and most pertinent to the question of my acquired interest in outdoor writing (finally!) I remember the collections of magazines: piles upon piles of back issues of Outdoor Life, Field & Stream, and North American Whitetail to name but a few. I read these voraciously; and most, if not all, of the issues were from the golden age of outdoor writing. Jack O’Connor, Ed Zern, Nash Buckingham, Robert Ruark, and dozens of other seminal names in outdoor writing became my would-be mentors. These were authors who just wrote hunting stories.

They told you what happened to them when they were hugging trees in an Arkansas swamp waiting for mallards, they took you on a deer hunt through the swamps, forests, and fields in the Deep South, or they dragged you reluctantly into the taiga on a grizzly bear hunt. One tale that sticks out particularly in my mind was a story by Jack O’Connor that related his adventures hunting Bighorn Sheep in the Rocky Mountains. You felt the ache in his hamstrings as he slogged up and down mountains looking for a ram, and you could smell the cowboy coffee percolating in the cookhouse tent in the crisp mountain mornings. While it was not a book I read at the farm, as a boy I read my father’s copy of Death in the Long Grass by Peter Capstick Hathaway and it profoundly affected my outlook and ultimately writing style with its true adventure tales of the unpredictability and excitement of being a professional hunter and game ranger in the heart of Africa. I’ve never looked at hippos the same way since I finished that book.

Ready for the rant part? Good.

These writers just simply told the stories they had lived through. They were all brilliant; they spun a yarn that combined great descriptive prose with relatable life experiences, and all without so much as a whiff of the pedagogical ego of the self-appointed ‘expert’ that is seemingly so prevalent in almost every magazine article you can read today. Somewhere along the line it seems as though market research indicated that people bought magazines not for entertaining tales that they could relate to but rather they wanted a ‘professional’ to tell them how to do things, where they ought to go to do it, and what they should buy to do it with. The exigencies of profit and sales have ambushed and killed the hunting story, and by extension the type of author that wrote them. Not to sound reactionary or alienate the outdoor writing community (a club that I am not a part of anyways…I doubt they’d want me after this anyhow) but no one out there at the major magazines, and yes I still read them, can hold a candle to the writers of the my father’s generation in terms of their ability to arrange an engaging hunting story. Jim Shockey was close, but he doesn’t do much writing anymore. The rest are too busy telling you what guns to shoot, how to shoot them, and what decoys/calls/clothing/boots you absolutely have to own in order to be ‘successful’, items that not coincidentally are marketed by the primary sponsors of whatever publication you happen to be reading.

Whatever happened to figuring it out for one’s self through old-fashioned trial and error? Furthermore, whatever happened to a story about going out, spending some time in the wilderness, and maybe shooting dinner or catching a fish? When told by a more skilled craftsman than I’ll ever be this kind of story was once wildly popular…why not now?

Of course, tips and tricks have always been a part of the hunting publication. In the old Outdoor Life they had field guides galore, and I clipped and memorized most of them. I still know how to read a compass or build a lean-to tent (skills I learned from those field guides) but my field-dressing of a deer is still something that requires some supervision (not that I’ve had much practice…I am admittedly a generally atrocious deer hunter) and the This Happened to Me! section of the same magazine gave further insight into some things to do in the field via the shared relations of everyday readers. The department editors had a couple of paragraphs (far less than most of them currently do) and they usually just gave their opinion on something they were familiar with or related a story that may have happened to them themselves. This has given way to oodles of what I call ‘niche editors’. Instead of an overarching Hunting Editor that had a little knowledge about everything you now have a Turkey Hunting editor, a Gun Dogs editor, a Deer Hunting editor, a Bow Hunting editor, etc, etc all portioning out their expertise from their fiefdoms. I’ve historically found this at best repetitious and sometimes even condescending to the point of insult.

Sorry, things got a bit opinionated there…I could go on and on but why bother?

Let’s circle the wagons back to the question from our loyal Japanese reader and try to wrap up this literary diarrhoea.

To recap, in response to your email, I’ve always loved reading and writing, and I have a long-standing family tradition of hunting and time spent in the outdoors so this blog has sprung out of an unholy marriage of those two loves. In terms of my ideas, I guess I’m just trying to do some justice (albeit in a small, and awkwardly ham-fisted fashion) to an area of writing that has become watered-down and mediocre in the last twenty-odd years. I write about things that I enjoy, and I try to enjoy writing about them. Almost nothing is off-limits and I want what I put out there to be interesting to the reader…so all that goes into where my ideas for what I’m writing come from.

Thanks for the letter, and thanks to all the others who tune in here regularly, write me encouraging words, and generally keep me going in this endeavour.

hunting, landowner permission, turkey and turkey hunting

When “Please” Just Isn’t Enough

March 26, 2011 Shawn West Leave a comment

The atrociously cold (but disconcertingly sunny) weather here in Cambridge has kind of laid siege to my scouting and general turkey-hunting related plans so I’ve been in a bit of a funk. It has also put the brakes on almost all the burgeoning turkey movement I had recently observed. And then to top it off, so far in 2011 I have had 100% of all private landowners in this area that I’ve asked permission of reject my requests to hunt on their properties. That aligns with last year’s 100% in the Tri-City area.

Counting 2010, four have told me they don’t approve of hunting (I’m not quoting directly since none of those four were polite about it), three have already granted permission to others or are hunting themselves, two did not respond to my phone call and/or friendly letter, and five just said no and either hung-up or closed the door. And in all, out of the fourteen different landowners I’ve asked over the last two years, only two said it would be okay if I asked again at a later date. Mind you, some didn’t even give me the opportunity to get to that question.

Somewhat frustrating, but not overly surprising. Landowner permission (especially near a suburban area) has always seemed to me to be a ‘several lines, few bites’ kind of endeavour and I’ll just let everyone know right now that rampant telemarketing has basically ruined the phone call angle for everyone (one more thing we can blame telemarketers for…when interrupting dinner or waking your kids up just isn’t enough!).

I guess I’ll just continue to be exceedingly polite and periodically check in with those two who left me a lifeline. I’ve offered to carry out several chores which I have no idea of how to perform in exchange for permission, but the landowners must be savvy…I guess I don’t look like the kind of guy who can mend an electric fence or hang drywall in a workshop…damn my white-collar aptitudes! But I can run a turkey call pretty well and I don’t make much noise otherwise so if anyone needs a partner for a hunt, and you live between Burlington in the south, Mount Forest in the North, Strathroy in the west, and Georgetown in the east….I’m your huckleberry.

In the meantime there is a lot of county forest in the area that is now open to hunting (thank you Wellington County and Halton Region Forests!) that I’ll start scouting.

As soon as it gets back above freezing.

hunting, lists upon lists, recipes, wild game

A Tradition of List-Making

March 16, 2011 Shawn West 1 Comment

For those of you who know me and my family you will be aware that we have a quirky little idiosyncrasy of no determined origin; we are known to make lists. My Dad does it, my brother does it, I do it, and to a lesser extent, my immediate family of uncles and cousins on my paternal side do it as well. This post is but one of many examples of list-making that will grace the virtual pages of this blog, as is this earlier post.

If anything, lists serve as a jumping off point for conversation, and many a rollicking deer or duck and goose camp conversation has sprung up around the topic of such lists. These can be lists of any sort in a hunting camp: favourite foods, favourite types of foods (soups, pies, fruits, vegetables, cuts of meat, etc), favourite hunting seasons, preferred times of year and weather, least favourite rifle calibres, most-respected ancestors, funniest comedians, and so on in perpetuity. I find nothing more entertaining than seeing the passion with which grown men will work themselves into while extolling the virtues of minestrone soup, or bisque, or why the autumnal equinox is so damn awesome in relation to the vernal equinox. These are memories to cherish, and for the uninitiated, a bizarre ritual of bonding.

I firmly stand by the belief that this proclivity to catalogue and have debates about the order of things with others is what drove me into historical studies as a younger man. It also drives my lifelong affinity with learning and trying out new experiences both in hunting, and in my limited life outside of the sport. This is why I compete in calling contests, read a wide variety of books, the reason that I now own seven harmonicas (and hopefully…soon…a banjo.)

In a semi-corollary vein, something near and dear to my heart and the ultimate goal for me when hunting, is the capture of wild game for consumption.

For those of you who have not tried wild game I can only say that you may be missing out on one of life’s finer pleasures. For the readers who simply say that you “don’t like” wild game, I may posit that you just have not had it properly prepared for you. If you think wild game is one-dimensional, strong, without subtlety of flavour, or something otherwise unappealing, I would direct you to read anything by Gene Hill, a wordsmith and hunter who had the ability to simultaneously paint vivid scenes of the wilderness while also describing supra-palatable culinary adventures in wild game.

So in an unholy marriage between my appreciation for the cooking and consumption of wild game and my compulsively twisted and uncontrollable need to organize things into lists, I give you my top five favourite game meat dishes. One of these is something I’ve had only once, and I long for it again. Others are treats, while a couple are staples at hunting camps or in my suburban kitchen. All the preparations are simple and straightforward.

Bon appetit!

1. Pan Fried Ruffed Grouse

I’ll start with this because it is my absolute favourite wild game treat, and it is exceedingly simple to make.

Take a grouse that has been field-dressed (also an extremely simple process) and cut the breasts into medallions. Melt as much butter, oil, or other delicious fat as you like in a pan (but not too much, this isn’t deep frying, here…although that would be good too.)

Pat the grouse medallions dry and dust them lightly with flour. In a small bowl or shallow plate whisk two eggs, and in another bowl have some bread crumbs ready (I actually prefer to use soda-cracker crumbs, but to each their own I say). Dredge the medallions in the eggs and then in the crumb coating. Add them to the pan and cook over medium heat until slightly browned and just cooked through.

These can just be eaten straight away as a finger food, but I also find them good in a sandwich with some mayo, ball park mustard, lettuce, and cheddar cheese.

2. Deer Heart

Not only does someone shooting a deer in November mean that I’ll be getting some venison for the winter, but it sometimes means that we’ll be enjoying deer heart for lunch or dinner that day. Those who dislike organ meat should probably move on to recipe #3. Those who do like organ meat, well, it just doesn’t get any fresher (or more ‘organic’ than this).

Soak the heart in cold water for a few minutes to make sure all the nooks and crannies are rinsed out, then (starting at the top of the heart) cut it horizontally into ½ inch thick ‘steaks’. Dust these in flour and pan fry in the same way as in the grouse recipe above. I do recommend that heart be cooked to slightly more ‘well-done’ state…no, I don’t have a specific temperature to tell you. When it is cooked through, give it another minute or two in the pan.

3. Pit Roasted Bear Shoulder

I’ve only had this once and I don’t have the recipe specifics, so I’ll just try to explain the basic method and what it tasted like.

At the end of winter up on the Bruce, some of my friends and acquaintances have a bit of a party to celebrate the close of their winter coyote hunting. In 2009, someone at this (aptly named) ‘coyote party’ brought a bear shoulder roast, put it in a roasting pan, dug a hole in the ground, put the roast pan in the hole and then covered the whole thing with hot coals. And I mean hot coals. I don’t know what they spiced, rubbed, or marinated this cut of meat with, and I have no real clue how long it was in the ground, but they did keep piling coals onto it for a good while.

When this meat came out of the ground, a large group of men chased the aroma into the cabin, and I can say that this bear roast did not last 15 minutes from carving to total and absolute consumption.

Think moist, tender, flavourful, cooked to just a hair beyond medium, and with a texture that was ‘beefier’ than beef. I’ve heard some hunters say that bear meat is only good if it is ground up and masked with fillers in the form of sausages or pepperettes. After this preparation, I would beg to disagree.

If I ever get a chance to have it again, I will ensure that I get the full recipe and share it with my readers.

4. Dry Roasted Venison aux Poivre

This is a concoction of my own design, and it is based on Steak au Poivre. It is pretty rich, but I enjoy it as a comfort food and I personally would rather have this than venison tenderloin (sacrilege, I know). Moose, elk, sheep, or any other big game animal for that matter could be substituted for the venison.

In a heavy, dry skillet toast some ¾ cup of whole peppercorns until they are aromatic. Remove the peppercorns and set them aside to cool. Once they are cool, put them in a plastic bag and beat the bejesus out of them with a mallet or rolling pin until they are crumbled (not a fine grind, just rustic looking). Add a bit of salt to taste and then pour the whole thing onto a sheet pan.

Preheat your oven to 400° F.

Take the venison roast (I prefer shoulder or neck, although some like a shank) and let it thaw to room temperature. In a heavy skillet bring a mixture of vegetable oil and butter to a high temperature (be careful of grease fires!). Sear the roast on all sides and then roll it around on the sheet pan of salt and smashed peppercorns until the roast is coated on all sides. Put it back on the heavy skillet and put the whole thing in the oven until a meat thermometer inserted in the middle of the roast indicates the doneness you desire (I prefer a perfect medium of 145° F; others may like it more or less done). Wrap the meat in tinfoil and let it rest for 15 minutes.

While the meat is resting add a cup of red wine (of your choice) to the skillet and reduce it vigorously over high heat while scraping all the brown bits off the bottom of the pan. Once the wine reduces by half, cut the temperature to low and add 1/3 of a cup of heavy cream while continuing to occasionally stir. Also, optionally, you can add a handful of whole peppercorns and salt to taste. Once this sauce reaches your desired thickness you can just keep it warm on the back burner.

Carve the roast and dress with a spoonful or two of sauce. This is great with grilled asparagus, garlic mashed potatoes, and heavier red wine (Shiraz, Dornfelder, or red Zinfandel)

5. Rory’s Goose Camp Rolls

Although this is last on my list, it would not be a complete “Top 5” without this little dish. This is ideal for early season geese that may not have a good layer of fat on them.

Remove the skin from the breasts, and then remove the breasts from the goose (don’t forget the tenders!).

Take a goose breast and cut it into thin, flat strips. Marinate these for a couple of hours in a bottle of your favourite vinegar based salad dressing. I am partial to Balsamic vinaigrette, but sun-dried tomato, Greek, or plain old Italian style vinaigrette works in a pinch too.

While the goose is marinating, soak a bunch of heavy wooden skewers in water for about an hour.

Once the marinating is done (after say a couple of hours), lay some bacon out in flat strips and then lay the goose strips on the bacon. Roll them up like a cigar and hold them together with the skewer. Fire them on the grill until the bacon is crisp and the goose strips are cooked until they just barely pink in the middle (I would not recommend eating this dish any less done than medium…I’ve had rare goose…the outcome was unpleasant).

This dish is great because unlike something that is bacon-wrapped, these bacon-rolled pieces have crispy bits of bacon throughout. The vinegar in the salad dressing helps to tenderize the goose meat, and it also adds flavour. One side note for this dish. Historically these get eaten quickly, but they are also pretty heavy and very easy to over-indulge in. Consider yourself warned.

So that’s my top five. There are countless honourable mentions including braised goose legs, deep-fried wild turkey, a variety of chilli permutations, and plain old roast mallard. I’m sure that this will not be the last post on the subject of food and recipes I post though, so stay tuned.

hunting

Academic Jerks, Hunting, and Marriage as a Fairy Tale

March 3, 2011 Shawn West Leave a comment

In a long-past academic career I studied history. I have always enjoyed the telling and interpretation (followed by the inevitable retelling and reinterpretation) of histories and traditions. Without getting bogged down in a morass of academic infighting and misplaced semantics allow me to get to my point. During my studies I perceived historians (especially instructors or those hoping to mimic them) to be of one of these two basic schools of thought.

The first held to a belief that all of history was real with objective truth innately present and that it was the historian’s job to strip away all bias, falsity, and any other obscuring factors so that the esoteric facts of any historical period or event could be observed, learned and understood by everyone. I referred to them alternately as ‘democratic historians’ or ‘idealist historians’.

The second school seemed to hold that history is only understood by the present when viewed through the lens of cultural dominance, power-brokering, and outright deception perpetrated by those with a vested interest in controlling knowledge for their own gain or personal image. I called these individuals ‘pessimistic historians’ or more usually ‘jerks’.

What gave me a low regard for this latter type (and thrust me half-unwillingly into the arms of the former caste) was that they almost invariably had no interest in actually uncovering historical facts; they much rather seemed perfectly content to spend all their time pointing out the barriers to ‘true historical knowledge’ and talking about facts that we ‘purport to know’ or ‘think that we understand’ with their underlying assumption being that we can never really understand any event that we did not actively witness, or more pointedly, be involved in as a participant.

Some enlightened individuals actually understood that a middle ground existed between these two extremes. They grasped that they could never fully recreate historical facts from say World War II or the Plagues of the Middle Ages, but they also did not get dragged down into a post-modern sinkhole where all they did was view past events as remote and ultimately incomprehensible. My favourite quote was from a professor of mine who taught courses on Modern France and the French Revolution and one who, coincidentally, trod this middle way quite well. He summed up the argument by saying something roughly along the lines of “One did not need to have lived in pre-Revolutionary Paris to understand that for the poor, things were basically very nasty…all the time.”

His point was clear, being primarily that we can know, appreciate, and understand numerous things without having to actually engage in them. It is possible that ‘being there’ may give a greater personal investment in the situation, but it does not preclude those at an arm’s length or more from even bothering to figure things out after the fact. I called subscribers to this ideology ‘common sense historians’ or ‘realists’. Sadly, on many university campus course calendars, as in almost all other avenues of life, those espousing common sense with no accompanying agenda are woefully scarce.

So what does all this highfalutin jargon and social commentary have to do with a hunting blog? Good question, and frankly when I started writing this I wasn’t sure either but I think the connection has materialized.

Men and women that hunt recreationally, in general, seem to accept hunting in its various forms as a basically good, sustainable, and necessary. I feel this way, and we have the backing of some branches of government and science (on most fronts) to complement this belief. There are also a bevy of interest groups and organizations, some good and some not-so-good, supporting this belief. For the sake of this article, lets call the hunters in this thought experiment the ‘idealists’.

Of course this yin has its corresponding yang, and that comes in the form of those who oppose all forms of hunting, fishing, and trapping in lock-step with no regard for any arguments, factual or emotional, to the contrary. To avoid sinking to the level of name-calling, let’s just term these individuals as ‘pessimists’. They also have other branches of government, science and interest groups working with them and supporting them.

And then there is a vast plain of people who are neither ‘hunting idealists’ nor ‘hunting pessimists’ and it is here, with these ‘realists’ that the hunting community can find a friend.

But the purpose of this post is not polarization, it is not politics, and it is not some utopian pipe-dream. There are those who would take away all vestiges of the ancient hunting tradition, which is bad. There are also those who feel that hunting rights must be protected and advanced at all costs, which is likewise negative. I posit that there is middle path and it is one forged by reconciliation and positive hunter representation.

And this just happens to take the form of a parable wherein my marriage is a fable…figuratively.

Once upon a time there was a boy who loved to hunt, and he grew into a man who loved to hunt. He took days off from school to go hunting, and later he took his full complement of vacation days at his job off for hunting. He met a woman who did not hunt and no real previous exposure to the wilderness short of some camping trips and a handful of Hollywood movies. She wanted to be a veterinarian and save the lives of animals. She also cherished annual family vacations that were in no way focused on hunting, or even entailed a visit to the local hunting shop. Things seemed doomed for the couple.

And then a miracle occurred. They talked calmly and rationally about hunting and all of the positive and negative aspects (yes, I will commit heresy and state that there are some negatives) of hunting in the modern world. And they saw eye to eye and they came to an agreement. And then they fell in love and got married. Family vacations occur and so do hunting trips. They have a family and a freezer full of venison roasts, goose sausages, ducks, and other delicious game meats.

Sounds magnificent don’t it? Now here I go being blindly optimistic, but I think this can be extended to the relationship between the hunting community of ‘idealists’ and the non-hunting community of ‘realists’.

Ask someone who does not hunt to go out with you so they can see what it is all about. Behave yourself, because after all shouldn’t we always behave ourselves in the field? Be respectful to the game. Hunt ethically and hunt legally. And most of all show them that we are all (generally) normal people participating lawfully and peacefully in a tradition that we love.

And then later, when you are in the public eye at an event or venue frequented by non-hunters, be a good steward of the sport. Maybe don’t wear your camo everywhere. Think twice before you roar down a country road in a 4 x 4 truck, passing other cars unsafely on the corners and basically being a numbskull. Ease up the throttle on the ATV so others can enjoy a un-eroded trail on public land. Slow down, the deer will still be there if you’re five minutes late. You know that story that your friends at the camp thought was great about your new gun or how you got that limit of geese in 40 minutes once? It might be better left for another day of less mixed company, or maybe you can write about it on a blog. (Those who know me are aware that I am guilty of this last one frequently…I’m trying to get better I swear).

Most importantly, don’t be ashamed to be a hunter; just be aware of how you portray the things you love. Others may not have the same appreciation of them that you do; they may have to be nudged gently into an understanding of everything that we already know is great about hunting. Or maybe you can just be graceful when they tell you they disagree with your choice of pastime.

Which brings me back to my original point above; you know the one that was buried in historicism and anecdotes about past academic mentors?

Yeah, that one. Basically, a non-hunter does not have to participate in the sport to understand things about it. Oftentimes their impression of hunting comes from the legacy left by s coupled with how they see us behaving. Let’s make a good impression. At the least you’ll be a role model for what non-hunters think of the sport.

In the best case scenario, you may just get a new hunting buddy and a convert to the hunting ‘idealists’.