Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Why do we hunt?--and Thanksgiving

Well said everyone.... great thread!!!

We have enough wild game in the freezer so the muzzleloader season here will be an exercise in hunting with friends with them sitting on the best stands. I plan to try to knock down the coyote population while hunting with them.....

we have subsistence hunted my entire adult life (indeed my kids won't eat beef/pork - except for bacon!)

we have 9 of 11 tags filled this year so far (2 elk left)


one thing that really started to bug us several years ago was the fact that, even though we're lucky to live in a place where we can get 10-11 tags a year, we fill them all too quickly.**

** this is one of the bigger reasons we got into falconry, allowing us to hunt 3-4 days a week for 6-7 months of the year

This pretty well sums it up for me too. I love the planning the anticipation the gear the smells the sounds the dogs the equipment knives, guns, leather goods etc. Actually w/o hunting I really can't see the need to own a gun except for maybe a bedroom drawer pistol

Seems like a pretty good reason to me. Throw in the enjoyment of paying deep attention to animals in nature, and reloading and shooting (ostensibly to hunt! ) and the fact that it was passed down to me from the previous generation, would wrap up my reasons.

Sycamore

Some are hunters , some are not.

All or most of the above reasons are true and add to it.

Still and all , some are hunters, some are not.

Happy (belated) Thanksgiving to my friends and neighbors

As much as I love a full freezer (with the many recipes running through my mind), hunting season is a magnet for nourishing amazing friendships. I would not hunt in absence of that.

I find myself doing that a lot!.........

Hope everybody had a good Thanksgiving.

Casey

That is ONLY 1 of the reasons I hunt. There are several more. I would continue hunting w/o that reason.


Jerry

We eat a lot of deer,but we give most of it to our friends,and older relatives..I like to hunt,just like some folks like to raise a garden..I usually kill deer until I'm so sick of working them up that I quit...I probably don't enjoy hunting like I did when I was a kid,because I never get the urge to go squirrel hunting,like I used to.Mother made the best squirrel gravy,and she didn't even eat squirrel.

John:

That has been my experience as well, only not so much with hunting in particular but with firearms in general. I have found that many of my anti-gun friends have never fired a gun to begin with. So what I do is take them to the range; and while they may not always change their minds, often their rhetoric softens a bit. As a matter of fact, most of them come off the range saying "That was fun! When can we do it again?" It's funny how we can hold strong opinions about things we've never experienced, only to have them changed (or at least softened) once we do.

Mike

Me, I just HAVE to hunt. Probably don't hunt now as much as I'd like to[big game], But, I've turned my attention to upland birds. Big time. Something pretty neat about going after those birds with a good dog and my trusty 20ga. Really likin' this stuff. Hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving.

I now hunt mostly to get out in the woods. I haven't shot a deer in several years now, and the squirrels have been pretty safe too, if you exclude the little bastards that raid our birdfeeder. I've found that they really don't like getting tagged with a paintball gun. We've got a couple very nervous booger green squirrels running around the neighborhood right now as a matter of fact. And then I discovered there's full auto paint ball guns.......

For me, it's become more about just getting out. My health issues the last couple years have really put a dent in my method of hunting. I'm a lot closer to the trail heads than I used to be, but I have become a much better still hunter, totally out of necessity.

I really enjoy watching the woods wake up in the morning. The owls settling in from their turn on the night shift, the grouse walking past my stand picking seeds, the mice and squirrels busy on the forest floor. The crows alerting their friends to my presence, and the little chickadees and whiskey jacks that always seem to find me. The day just isn't complete till a chickadee lands on my gun barrel. Now a days, the local chipmunk gets more of my cookies than I do, but that's okay too.

Now it's more about just enjoying being out of the office, and away from the house. I may never kill another deer, and that's okay, but then again, I still dream about hanging a tag on a nice buck and bringing it home. Right now though, the other stuff is way more important to me.

Ever since I was a little kid I loved to explore the woods in back of my house. My father was a small game hunter and we ran our beagle in those same woods. My uncles and cousins were hunters and that was my exposure to and start of my love affair with hunting big or small game.
This year has been a blast (even with no deer yet) in that a young gentleman from the office I worked at asked if I would teach him turkey and bowhunting. I have been going out regularly with him and showing him the ropes, critiquing equipment, showing him good spots to hunt etc. etc. He's got the hunting bug and I hope to nurture it as he is the future of our sport.

Thanksgiving day is past; hope all of yours was a good one. But giving thanks goes on.

As to hunting, fishing too, the love of guns, etc., I stand alone in all my family with the exception of a few cousins. But they were only mildly afflicted comparatively; I'm sure I've always been thought a bit of an curious aberration among my more liberal relatives, the recipient of some covert, throw-back gene. My sig line is, in part, a response to that attitude and that remarkable mindless goal of putting a small white ball in a cup. (If you are a golfer you should have developed a sense of humor). I digress.

While we eat beef, pork, and domestic fowl too my family (wife and two adult girls now) grew up on deer, elk (no elk on this year's hunt) but particularly pheasants which I think make some of the most exquisite table fare and are one of my favorites. But I love fish too.

Whether with friends or going alone, I enjoy it and am thankful for the interest I've been given and the opportunities to do it.

George,

For quite a while some of my family wondered when I'd "get over" hunting, but after a while they quit wondering, especially after I married Eileen and she became a very avid hunter too!

I helped look for a deer the otehr morning in rain and 40s. Then got Tiger out and let him find it for us. LOL.

Anyway soaked adn cold, I went back, ate, and headed out and put tiger in the stand, and then went down closer to the feeder to put a suppressed 240 smk into a doe to see what results would happen... Raining and harder than I thought.. forgot the binocs and rain pants in a hurry to leave. Sat in the rain and 38 degrees and 15 mph north winds for 2.5 hours. I finally got cold. Did not wear what I should have at all.

WHY? Because I enjoy all aspects of nature, just being out. Sure I wasn't happy that no does, only 12 bucks showed up, but thats life. Got to see a sparrow hawk take a sparrow out of the air in the process. TIger got some needed rest after jumping the wounded buck earlier, running him to a pond and swimming the 4 acre pond to wear teh deer out so a buddy could shoot the buck and finish him off.

I fish for the same reason. Enjoying the outdoors.

In fact I don't like some of the stuff that goes with outdoors, like reloading, cleaning guns, probalby won't like tying flies and such until I'm retired either. But its the evils that need to be done...

The harvest is wanted. Not needed, but wanted. And we rarely don't have game in the freezer, in fact I can't recall when we didn't... but its only probably 50% of the overall goal....

John, as you know I "got over" elk hunting!


Granted it took 35 years.......

Tom, after this year's hunt I'm darn near over it.

Mule Deer;
Belated Happy Thanksgiving wishes to you and Eileen John and thanks for the interesting reading your query and subsequent thread has been providing.

My late father farmed for a living, but was a hunter to the core of his being.

As I'm the youngest sibling, my family like to tell me of when I was maybe 3 or 4 and would become quite unmanageable when Dad would leave for his annual moose hunting trip and not take me along.

For me, the same as many here, I'm convinced it's deeply interwoven into my DNA.

Then too John, when I was a kid of maybe 5 or 6, I'd draw pictures of guys on horses hunting deer and moose in the mountains. The kicker is of course that as a Saskatchewan boy I'd never seen a mountain outside of a picture book or TV - but it pulled at me even then.

So then when my good wife and I drifted west into the BC interior, bought a small acreage and picked up a couple riding horses which I subsequently learned to hunt with - well one of the two anyway John - my family thought it was interesting that I'd finally arrived at the place I'd dreamed of and drawn so many years previously.

While I'm finding that I hunt with less "intensity" now than I did in my 20's and 30's, the call of the mountain behind the house still pulls me up there each September.

Those who know me best say they assume I'll continue that annual pilgrimage until prevented by health or death and I'd have to agree with them on that assessment.

Thanks again John and all the best to you and Eileen as we now run up into the Christmas season.

Dwayne

It's good to read this thread and get a glimpse into the grateful hearts of my fellow hunters.

I grew up the son of a hunter, which undoubtedly shaped my life in ways that defy description to a nonhunter. I am thankful beyond words for that legacy. My brother and I still hunt, and 2 of my 3 kids are hunters. The memories afield I share with these kin, and with some fine friends I've known over the years, are among my most treasured memories and are true gifts in my life.

My first wife was perpetually exasperated by my intense need to hunt, and even though she eventually gave up wishing & hoping, I never have been able to "get over it", nor do I want to.

I have fresh venison hanging today, ready to be carefully butchered and wrapped and frozen for winter suppers. I suffered a tragic loss of meat this past summer when the contractors I had building my new patio tripped a breaker and didn't bother to tell me, which led to my chest freezer going without power for a week... so I lost the better part of 100 pounds of good meat, and as a consequence haven't had venison nor wild game birds since June. Today's collection, the first meat of this year's hunting season, means fresh venison tenderloin on our plates tonight and is the harbinger of more good organic meat in our larder for the rest of the winter.

I am blessed to be a hunter who can hunt, and to have family who understand and share in the blessings.