The zealotry for bone.

I saw this video posted online some time ago and it got me thinking about the issues of highly selective trophy-based management, as well as the ethics and politics surrounding it. Manipulating wildlife through selection is not new. The act of leaving a certain buck to breed trophy offspring is a common practice and certainly on the ‘lesser-end’ of manipulation; the animal also remains functionally wild. At the more objectionable end is the use of livestock breeding practices to farm fantastically bigger horns and antlers. I personally don’t mind the former but I think we lose something innate to hunting (and to being an honest hunter), when we embark on the latter, when we seek domestic trophies purely for the inch value. This is not the conservation of endangered species through intensive management and domestic captivity; it’s the acquiescence and surrender to the Record Book Religion.

The Debutante Hunters - Sundance Film Festival

 Click the link below. A great clip about women hunters in South Carolina with some honest expression and real love for the hunt in its entirety (sorry, I couldn't embed the clip).

The heartfelt admission that 'it's like home' makes me think that those lessons and that ethic will be properly passed to her children...

http://screen.yahoo.com/sundance-2012-debutante-hunters-short-27874990.html

What tripped YOUR trigger?

I have often wondered if other hunters ever experienced revelatory moments that were a distinct catalyst in their decision to take up hunting. This is especially true of those who came to this decision largely per chance or after an largely isolated epiphany, one that arose without any clear influences. After some discussion with a new friend, author Tovar Cerulli, I spent time thinking about my own hunting and outdoor influences. Tovar has some excellent and well researched insights into ‘adult onset hunters’, many of these types of new hunters come to the activity without the benefit of a community to influence their choice. This parallels my experience, albeit in my youth.


I have always been passionate about being outside. I was drawn to angling at age 6 which I believe was the result of being entranced with all the bits in a tackle box I rooted out in my late grandfather’s garage. My family were certainly pro – outdoors but no-one in my immediate family was an angler, shooter or hunter. Both parents and my older brother were also very supportive of my often annoying compulsion to spend seemingly uncomfortable hours in or alongside water bodies with a rod in hand.

Dear Anas undulata, thanks for tripping my trigger!

The birth of my desire to shoot remains a fuzzy mystery to me. I was exposed to it a few times and always relished the opportunity to shoot and accept the responsibility to do so safely. By the onset of my teens I was fairly interested in it but by no means passionate, until the revelation happened…

My gang of normally-muddy buddies and I used to fish for carp in a small stream that ran through our local suburb. Late one afternoon while waiting

On measuring success

The satisfaction of participating.

Bear camp this spring was a success. I didn’t get a bear. I was however part of a successful hunt where my friend took his first (he is an otherwise very experienced hunter, just not with black bears). My proposal for the hunt was that seeing as he had never hunted bear and I had taken one in the same area last year, he should have the first opportunity. I was happy to attempt any subsequent opportunities and was keen to attempt it with archery gear (perhaps with some temerity!).

The joy of being in camp.

After our success on the first evening I was thoroughly enjoying being out and being a part of the bear success. The camp was great, we were shooting our bows, my partner was having her first big game hunting experience, we were philosophising in camp chairs and skinning/butchering a bear over cups of tea – damn grand if you ask me.


 After my friend’s bear was tagged I had this feeling that the trip was a great success and began to feel that it no longer mattered as much if I got one or not. I have had similar experiences while fishing my favourite runs for Yellowfish, on the Vaal River in South Africa. At times, after making a number of successful pocket casts and getting into a few fish in a rapid, I have felt like I have been granted my fair share of success and harassed the fish enough. I have then retreated to watch birds and Monitor Lizards and laze on rocks – often even in the face of a likely looking eddy imploring me to try and cast a Gold Ribbed Hares Ear into it!

Towards objective hunting ethics?

“Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have a right to do and what is right to do”

- Potter Stewart

I embark on writing my thoughts about hunting ethics with some trepidation. Far from being prosaic, there are few discussions surrounding hunting that can be as fierce as those concerning ethics. Often these debates descend into a quagmire of subjectivity and opinion; proponents of widely varying ethical views predictably claim a right to their doctrines and challenge others to disprove their definitions of sound and acceptable conduct. While hunting ethics can be a horribly messy issue with ample room for debate at their margins, there are certain fundamentals that I believe the vast majority can, and do, agree on.

What gives me the right?

“What gives you the right to kill a deer”? This was the challenge recently posed to me by a non-hunting friend. She wanted me to explain what gives me, or anyone else, the right to take a life while hunting. Far from being an exhaustive essay on animal rights and the morality of taking an animal’s life, I thought I would try and answer that question from 3 different positions and in a logical and succinct manner.


So what does give me the right to kill an animal and eat it?