Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Hunter Safety Education

AZJR: Right you are. My daughter REFUSED to take HE at our local class because she didn't want to spend 40 hours of valuable time in a class with a bunch of 12-year-olds. She found the online class, and it was great. ALL of the 40+ attendees were adults, and about 1/3 were women. Truth be told, we were all there because we needed our certificates and couldn't face spending 40 hours in the equivalent of junior high school.

A resident course takes 35 hrs? WOW! The course we teach in NY is nominally 10 hrs, which we sometimes manage to keep under 14... The expense is that there's always more that we'd like to talk about, and more field work we would like to do...

WHAT do you use 35 hours for?

Dan

In Missouri I believe its 12 hours of class. The one my girlfriend took was 3 nights, 4 hours each, sometimes they do 2 nights at 6 hours each.

I went the first night with her and bit my tongue the whole time. The instructor while he meant well, didn't understand a lot of the technical aspects of guns-repeated a lot of the old wives tails we've all heard, nothing that would really harm anybody, just not technically right. An example was the 'need a 30 inch barrel to shoot that tight pattern to really reach out and hit the goose', never mentioned anything about chokes and their various constrictions.

I believe Kansas recently passed a law allowing kids under a certain age to hunt with a licensed adult without having taken the hunter education class. I know when I was in high school and college there are a lot of friends of mine that would have gone out and hunted small game with me, get their feet wet so to speak, but couldn't because they couldn't buy a tag. They didn't want to devote 2 nights to a class that they weren't sure they would ever use in their life. You can't blame them for that, and I did talk a few into going and they enjoyed it immensely.

"The expense is that there's always more that we'd like to talk about, and more field work we would like to do..."

We do the extra field work such as realistic game recovery trailing, an indepth compass and map/survival work shop, a lively, entertaining, and devastingly clear demonstration day of firing projectiles from rifles, shotguns, bows, pistols, AR15's, and muzzleloaders into typical home built wall structures, water jugs, heads of cabbage, and blocks of ice, all which provide a really sobering visual image to the students that a moment of carelessness can cause life changing damage. We also burn small samples of different propellants and black powder so the class can get an idea of different burn rates.

We have a practical final exam that is set up in a station rotation format that take a class through a simulated hunt for multiple species of big game, small game, upland birds, and waterfowl, a fence crossing station, a firearms and ammunition identification station with demonstrations of firearms removal from a vehicle, a compass course, an archery range, a .22 cal rifle shooting station, and a blood trailing course.

The students are outside for hours during this practical test. They break for a working lunch and then have an LEO/Game Ranger come in and have a Q&A session with strong reinforcement in game rules, laws, and statutes. We finish with a review and the class takes the final written exam and each student turns in a report on how they'd plan a hunt for any one of dozens of hunts from our big game proclamation. Final exam day is right at 9-10 hours and deadly serious. You point a muzzle at someone and you're done, come back and try again next time.

The class is conducted over a 5 day period during two consecutive weekends. There is a handbook with chapters to read and a Q&A at the end of each chapter. We have a laser rifle simulated hunt with a neat, modern production video that is a big hit with every class. I could go on and on, there is lots of material to cover and we take the time to cover it. If someone wants a shorter class they can find it in other spots around the state, but I like it the way we do it, and so do our students by the comments they write on our post class evaluation forms.

As for taking the class with kids, well, our resident classes are a mix of youngsters, often their parents &/or relatives, folks popped for wildlife violations, and other adults looking to take the class to get a bonus point for the drawings. We have the kids sign an "attitude and behavior contract" the first night and I have to say have had zero problems. Our chief instructor was an MP in the Army and he brings a no-nonsense charisma to the class that the kids respond to, as do the adults. The adults in the class become mentors in a sense and the dynamic of the youthful, inexperienced students learning from the instructors and the adult students in the class is exciting to see. I'd bet your daughter would have enjoyed Hunter Ed the Arizona way just as much as what she experienced in your state's version.

The 10 hours is of instruction. We are required to give breaks every 90 mins or so, lunch breaks, etc, and the test is not supposed to take up the 10 hours of instruction... so the classes always take longer than the 10 hours.

We do field carries, safe handling practicum, etc. We *DO* talk about chokes, and how they work. We *may* do live fire if we have a facility that allows it. We will do blood trails. We are planning to try to get road-kill deer for field-dressing from the highway dept --

We talk about survival, the kit, hypothermia, first aid, etc. We do a VERY LITTLE in orienteering.

We do presentations on turkey hunting and muzzleloading...

Oh -- did I mention we talk very fast? ;-)

Seriously, we always have trouble fitting our class into the requisite 10 hours, and tend to take more like 16 hours (two solid 8 hour days + some at the end).

Dan