Yesterday my daughter (22 y.o. and about to graduate college) and I graduated from a Hunter Safety Education course. I've been hunting for 42 years, but as I'm planning trips to Canada and Colorado, I need a certificate. My daughter, who has tagged along on hunting trips since she was knee high to a grasshopper, decided she wanted to start hunting 2 years ago. She's been to pheasant preserves with me a number of times and is a pretty decent wingshot, but now she wants to hunt deer, so needed to take the course in order to get a license.

I was really amazed at the quality of the online course we took, and the full day of practical training we did yesterday was really, really valuable to my daughter. They taught her stuff I take for granted and had never told her about (eg: that a 20-gauge shell dropped into a 12-gauge barrel can cause a Kaboom). When we walked out of there, she was absolutely beaming. Next week we're going together to buy her first centerfire rifle, and we've got a farm to hunt on come November that's simply lousy with whitetails.

I couldn't be happier about the way hunter safety education has benefited my daughter and even my grey-haired old self.

My question for the gunwriters is this: how come I haven't read a mention of hunter safety education in a gunzine for years? No offense intended, but I think the hard work put in by the guys and gals who teach hunter safety has made our sport much, much safer than it was a generation ago, and I think you writers should consider plugging the hunter safety education programs more often. Just a friendly suggestion!

That's a good idea......

Casey

A 28ga shot shell will do the same thing in a 16ga as a 20ga in a 12ga. A tip for your daughter, use a full size color deer target to practice with. It's natural for a new hunter to shoot center of mass and not place the shot. I used this method when I started handgun hunting and it works. I've recommended it to several folks that have had good success.

FWIW- I took the Texas corse several years ago with my son. I didn't need to because I am old enough to be grandfathered. We did a classroom version. I aced the pre-test and according to the instructor was the first person he had seen do that. I must confess that I learned much of what is on that test through reading gun rags during my youth.

Doc,
I too had the pleasure of attending a course here in CT and was very happy with the level of teaching the kids got. The class was well attended and taught by folks who clearly put in a lot of time keeping the tradition going. Between the hunter safety instructors and our legislative county league reps I am always in awe at the time and commitment that is dedicated. As an average "Joe" who sends his check in to the NRA and a few conservation groups each year these guys and gals really make a difference.

I went through the course when my pre-teens went through it a couple of years ago, and am pleased to say I aced the test.

The course was very good, and the instructor was excellent.

There were a few things I disagreed with -- particularly in the ethics session. One of the "don't"s was "don't go into the grocery store wearing your camo hunting clothes". Now, I would agree if you just came off the mountain from gutting an elk, but what in the world would be wrong with going into the store for some granola bars and water bottles before a hunt? Just seemed bizarre to me.

One thing about the current hunters ed bothers me GREATLY, however. I can't take my kid's friends out to hunt with me, not even to shoot some rabbits or some such. Before they can go out and carry a hunting arm, they HAVE to go through 30 hrs of classroom instruction. That's too much for most kids who are "sort of interested". There SHOULD be some sort of "supervised" license to buy kids for a short period of time, where they can carry a gun while directly supervised by a licensed adult. I think this is a big reason in our decline of young people entering the hunting community. JMO, Dutch.

I have only done one course, came first in the class with 100% but if I could offer one thing, It would be to include the tag system, how it operates and incorporate the local hunting regulations and how to use those tags legally without hunting in the wrong place unintentioally.

If ignorance of the law is no excuse, then there is an obligation from the training courses to include all you need to know as a new hunter to be within the law. Once the money is paid, an obligation has been made.

AGW

DocRocket: Very glad you had a positive experience. While Oregon is one of the few states that doesn't mandate hunter orange, the hunting mortality rate has dropped from about 12-16 per year in the 70's down to 0-2 fatal incidents per year now. Most attribute that to mandatory hunter ed for those under 18. It's a difficult class for adults to enjoy because the material is obviously geared to about a 12 year old.

There are moves afoot to require the course for everyone in Oregon to maintain reciprosity with the rest of the states. Many will roll their eyes at that. With our urban life style for the majority now, there are many that have no experience and first enter the field as adults. Comrades at work invite them out, they visit Walley World for 20 minutes, and are ready to roll with a bore sighted rifle. Kudos to many parents though, for attending the class with their kids.

Most classes in Oregon require about 8 two hr evenings and a 2 to 3 hr range session. About half the kids in the class really have the passion though, and it's a real joy to teach in those instances. Even out here in SE Oregon though, about a third of the attendees have not handled firearms before. Again, Glad you enjoyed it. 1Minute

I have been a hunter ed instructor for about 15 years and I completely agree with Dutch about the need to get the kids into the field early if they are to become hunters. By the time kids are old enough to take the class, many are tired of waiting to be eligible and have moved on to other interests. Any kid should be allowed to hunt with a parent or supervising adult without any requirements other than an adult to take charge if something amiss happens.

I can see this as a tool for the antis to use to keep kids out of hunting during their formative years.

Leon

Doc & daughter,
Congratulations on graduating from your HE course! Taking your kids hunting (or mentoring a kid from a non-hunting family) is a highlight of any hunter's outdoor experience. I cherish the times afield with my family.

I'm a HE instructor in Arizona and really enjoy sharing the world of firearms, hunting, and the outdoors with my classes and fellow instructors. Our team teaches a 35 hour course to residents and a 12 hour 1-day course to nonresidents that are primarily looking to obtain a permanent bonus point for our big game drawings.

Arizona will soon implement an online HE course with a practical field day with demonstrations, rifle handling and shooting, archery handling and shooting, and simulated hunts in actual field scenarios. Offering an online course grew out of the nationwide surveys showing alarming hunter retension and hunter recruitment statistics trending downward. We need more hunters and we need more hunters staying with the sport over a lifetime. Making it easier to get folks in the field, especially youngsters and women, is seen by many as the salvation of sport hunting.

If any of you visiting the 24CF are interested in taking the NR HE class in Az to stock away that permanent bonus point, send me a pm and I'll forward the info and p.o.c. to get you in a class.

Jim

You don't see anything in magazines about Hunter Education or young hunters because magazine editors have their head firmly planted in the sand.

Most editors do not think young hunters are their audience so they refuse to run any articles slanted that way.

My Hunter Education class had its field course this past Saturday. What a great time and a great bunch of kids. In the last few years more and more girls are taking Hunter Ed. to the point nearly half my students are female.

I too have been teaching HE in AZ for about 15 years. We run about 600 people a year through our two classes, one in January and one in September.

In AZ you can't hunt BIG GAME until 10-year-old and then you have to have a HE certificate. Once you turn 14 you can hunt without it.

We have no hunter orange law and enjoy the lowest hunter accident rate in the country. Hunter Orange is a crutch for good safety practices. I wear it when bird hunting with someone else, but rarely have any on while big game hunting. Our most recent accidents involved alcohol- go figure.

A little gunrag exposure might go a long ways to getting those who haven't taken a course to do so- regardless of who you are, you can learn something in these courses.

I don't like some of the ethics topics the manual has either- I usually don't try and teach ethics- only bring up what is perceived of us and let people make informed decisions.

Good stuff

Dennis and Jim. Where in AZ do you teach. I've been doing it for about five years down here in Tucson. When one looks at the list of instructors on the rolls, and see just how few classes there really are, at least here in Tucson, it make one wonder. I've seen people all enthusiastic about becoming instructors, maybe just for the ego trip, but do no instructing. Some that do teach for a while, feel it takes too much of their time and drop out. I think that there is maybe about 20 down here who do it and stick with it. I just hope that in 10 more years I'll still be around to teach the course. But then, I'll be 79 years old. The Good Lord a willin', I'll still be at it.
Paul B.

AGW

I taught HE for years. I still want to get back to it, but time constraints.....

Anyway when I taught we went over the rule book pretty good in reference to tags and location etc... even covering issues faced in out of state hunts to the best of my ability. Started some good discussions and so on. Got them to think. THEN brought in a game warden to go over common infractions, what to and how to do it correctly, pass out his cards, and answer questions. Those questions are free in class, may be costly in the field. I always felt that was a good addition to the given literature.

Jeff

When I run a HE class in Alberta, I bring in a CO to teach the Ethics lesson and the legal stuff. It has been found that when it comes to teaching ethics, it is easier to have a CO teach the two together, keeps things from getting clouded by the instructors opinions. As we all know, legal is black and white, the ethics are the grey area.

Thank you for making that effort. Unfortunately there is no standard curriculum and this important feature is ommitted, or was at least, during the 3 days I spent doing it.

I am used to government intrumentalities being accountable to the people (meaning the law)and not teaching something and then deriving income from breeches to regulations not covered during mandatory classes, would render the DOW deregistered and unable to trade, with full compensation to studends and a judgement from the courts at no cost to the applicants under the Consumer Protection legislation, to rewrite the course and render all fines accrued from said negligence, null and void.

I found out in a hurry that the consumer has no such protection here. Shame.

AGW

Paul B.

I'm part of a HE Team in Kingman, AZ. Don Martin, of Arizona Wildlife Outfitters, is our Chief Instructor. We do at least four classes a year, 2 each of the 35 hour version and 2 each NR Supplementals.

Well, you guys must be doing something right in AZ then, hats off to you. I agree that hunter orange is a crutch, but the sad fact is that there are a few out there who need crutches. You can't control what other hunters do or don't do in the woods. I've heard too many stories from guys getting "scoped" by other hunters I guess, so I always wear it during rifle seasons.

I lived in VA back when they made hunter orange mandatory and accident rates of the type that hunter orange can prevent went way down there.

Hunter Education is a good example of why Barak's fantasyland can't work. If hunter ed. weren't mandated by government, very few would-be hunters would volunteer to take it, and the well-documented improvements in hunter safety of the past 50 years or so would not have occurred. I fully realize that some folks on the libertarian side of things would find that acceptable, but to me it's a reasonable trade-off. BTW, I'm willing to bet that I have the oldest Hunter Safety card in existence, or at least at the Campfire. Can anybody beat 1953?

Paul

I don't think I'd agree that hunter orange is just a crutch. A couple years ago I was stand hunting on one end of a section line (open to public hunting) near a spot where deer liked to cross. I saw a slowly moving orange dot at the other end of the section line which, of course, was another hunter. If he had been dressed in camo or plain farm clothes he would've been darned hard to notice in the weeds a mile away in late afternoon light. Convinced me that orange is good anyway.

I wear orange bird hunting even with people I know are safe, figure it's a courtesy to make myself easier to locate in the slough bottoms.

And thanks to you HE guys, much appreciated.

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