HAVE YOU HAD your hunting career’s “oh, boy” moment? If not, it’s coming. It might be at a social gathering, like a picnic or wedding. At work. Around a campfire. Or – here’s a likely one – beside a tree or in a blind.
But someone, somewhere, will turn to you with the question.
“So,” they ask, “how long have you been hunting anyway?”
“Well, let me think…,” you answer.
You do the mental math, figuring out the difference in years between your age at that moment and your age when you started on this path, and then … oh, boy.
Maybe it’s been a decade already. Multiple decades. Or – how can this be – half a century?
Your number, whatever it is, puts you in special company. As hunters, we’re a passionate bunch, in this for the long haul. Past Game Commission surveys showed that even people who missed buying a hunting license for a period of time for whatever reason still consider themselves hunters, even if it’s been a while since they were in the woods.
Hunting is more than what we do, it’s a big part of who we are. That’s made us a powerful force for conservation for a long, long time.
As always, there are challenges to overcome if we want that to remain that. Some are familiar: the need to be the voice for wildlife, for example. Others are new: recruiting the next generation of hunters, but doing it from a society that’s increasingly diverse, urban and disconnected from nature.
We, collectively, have climbed steeper mountains in the past, though. We can do it again.
So get out there, add to your number, and take someone with you, someone who someday can pause, think back on their own hunting and say, “oh, boy.”