To Make a Hunter
It is not enough to ask someone to go hunting, show them hunting, or even take them hunting. For one to decide to hunt is personal and primal. It needs to be nurtured as such.
Perhaps, instead of having the focus solely on hunting, which many recruitment, retention and reactivation programs do, we must focus on the whole. Hunting is but one small part of a properly functioning land mechanism.
To create a hunter, we should start by showing them a butterfly. Not just any butterfly, but the Monarch Butterfly. It’s a familiar species, even if they don’t fully understand everything associated with it. A lone Monarch has the opportunity to set off a true “butterfly effect”.
Let’s take a child and show them this butterfly. The way it floats on a breeze to land only on a few specific plants in their yard. It seems to be targeting one plant species in particular. The young girl observing this may not know what the butterfly is, but asks her parent to look it up. Using their phone (the modern field guide) the butterfly is identified in a matter of seconds. It will likely show links with a picture of the flower that the butterfly was nectaring on, Common Milkweed. Odds are there will be other articles in that search that describe the plight of the Monarch Butterfly, explaining that they can only lay eggs on Asclepias (Milkweed) species. This parent sees the light in their child’s eye and wants to nurture that glow.
This parent reads about out how to get more butterflies to come to their home. It’s all about habitat. On the way home from work one day they purchase a premade planter with many native flowers mixed in with milkweed, and place it out on their small apartment patio. It may seem like a long shot, but sure enough if you plant it they will come! Soon they have caterpillars chewing up their milkweed leaves. This family is now actively participating with nature, and not just watching through a window. A fire is lit inside the young girl.
Fast forward a couple years and that child advocated to have her high school plant a pollinator garden. She gets involved in student council and develops a passion for politics and activism. The once small girl is now a woman, who has a place of her own. She can’t wait to put in her own butterfly garden to pass that fire on to her children. All the while she’s nudging her local parks, township hall, and schools to also help support the declining pollinator populations.
Many organizations push back as it’s a little bit against the grain to put “wild” flower beds in place where manicured lawns are supposed to be. Through persistence and nonstop community education, slowly but surely, a ground swell is forming and urban landscapes begin to change around her. People are beginning to care about what plants they put in the ground and the food web they are helping restore.
The park behind her neighborhood soon decides to cut the budget and what was once mowed is now becoming wild. There are butterflies galore, but also rabbits, turkeys and deer. All the critters that the neighborhood loves to watch.
Soon the property begins to degrade from an imbalance of predator and prey. The park, township, and neighbors agree that they must do something before the park is literally eaten alive. A family, who only cared about butterflies in the beginning is now exploring hunting and its role in habitat management. The small park budget simply wont allow the town to even explore a controlled cull. A managed hunt is the only economical way to achieve balancing out the deer herd. A hunt that will rely on the town’s residents and will cost the park nothing. Something that was simply never on their radar is now staring them in the face.
This mother, who loves the butterflies, who loves the land, is now considering participating in nature in a way she had never thought twice about. She decides that she helped “create this mess” through her involvement in improving the habitat, and that she now needs to participate in the solution. She picks up “Call of the Mild, Learning to Hunt My Own Dinner” by Lily Raff McCaulou. Takes in recipes from field to fork books written by Steven Rinella. Reads about the ethics of hunting thanks to Jim Posewitz. Gets sucked down the rabbit hole of internet articles and lands on Conservation Visions page about the Wild Harvest Initiative. She even manages to be repulsed by many of the hunting TV shows that glorify the wrong parts of the hunt. This Lepidopterist is now ready to take the leap into becoming a hunter.
A quick hunter’s ed course has left her with more questions than answers. Sure she is legally able to participate in the hunt at the park this fall, but feels deep down that she isn’t ready. This woman is truly living up to Aldo Leopold's quote “Ethical behavior is doing the right thing when no one else is watching - even when doing the wrong thing is legal.”
She decides to join a local conservation club and archery range, the one she caught wind of in the local paper when they held a benefit for a sick child. The same one she read about conducting a 30-acre restoration on their property to remove invasive species and restore native wet prairie habitat. She drags her two kids, along with the husband who would rather be anywhere but outside. Lo and behold, the family falls in love with archery. The kids just want to pop balloons. Dad, just wants to have a higher score than anyone else. Mom is pretending every shot is the first one she’ll put on a deer.
Summer comes and goes. Fall, and everything it brings to sportsmen and sportswomen, has arrived. In another month, our butterfly loving mother will be taking her first deer home to feed her family. She’ll be helped by a member of a small conservation organization volunteering his time to help new hunters get their feet wet. She harvests a small doe, the trophy of a lifetime. Thanks to her love of the big picture that nature offers she has participated in something that very few do. She has taken the life of another animal, of her own volition, to feed her family.
The emotional roller coaster associated with taking an animal’s life for the first time is one that is difficult to put into words. Emotions that are unique to anyone who has experienced this. Will she hunt every year? Probably not. Will she hunt if it lines up with a free weekend or if she is asked by a friend? Sure. Will she now vote on the side of sportsmen on legislative issues? Definitely. Will hunters around the buckpole scoff at the tree hugging butterfly lover? Never again.
She’s shown we are all in this together. We just come and go into it at our own pace, at our own time. It’s easy to blame “kids these days.” Or should we blame the parents? It’s easy to blame technology, or work, or family when things don’t run according to our schedule. If we want to create more hunters, we need to change what we expect from hunters.
We are working more than ever before. We are tied TO work more than ever before with our electronic leashes (phone). We may not ever see the hunting numbers like we saw during the baby boomer generation, but we can have a new generation of part time hunters who love it just as much as previous generations. We are going to have to pull from different demographics. We are going to have to change the face of hunting. It’s no longer about asking friends if they want to go kill an animal. It’s about showing everyone you meet a butterfly, and letting them come to hunting on their own terms.
