Hunting for Beginners: Tips and Resources Carve Out Time-a Lot of It Chasing elk with Tim Montana in Routt National Forest in September. If you’re curious, here’s what to expect and how to get started. Hunting for beginners can be an intimidating world to navigate. But thankfully for wildlife conservation efforts-which are mostly funded by the purchase of hunting licenses-a new generation of adults are discovering hunting on their own. Hunting rhetoric is filled with talk about the familial passing of age-old traditions. Now hunting is an integral part of my identity.īecoming a hunter as an adult, or as I’ve come to refer to it, “adult-onset hunting,” isn’t the conventional path. The next season I began bow hunting, and while I harvested elk and deer with a rifle in the meantime, it took seven more years of hard work before I killed my first bull elk with a traditional longbow. The following year, I stopped consuming any meat (besides fish) that I didn’t kill. With a freezer full of elk meat, I made a personal resolution not to eat beef for the rest of that year. I killed a cow elk with a rifle on the last morning of my first season in 2012. I’ve never been more ravenous for information than while learning about hunting. The following eight years were a joyful journey. I didn’t want to cast my votes for an industry that made an outsized contribution to climate change and environmental degradation, and was directly responsible for an immense amount of human and animal suffering. I didn’t support factory farming (which provides most of the meat America consumes), and I loved the idea of having a reason to spend more time outdoors. I saw my diet choices as the most effective way to make a positive individual impact in the world-an opportunity to vote with my dollars three times a day. I wanted to feel a deeper connection to what I was eating.
In reality, the decision was made over time, a culmination of concern for animal rights and environmentalism, coupled with what felt like a primal draw toward an ancient tradition and a new adventure. If I was going to continue eating meat after this meal, financially supporting the killing of animals for food, I was going to be involved in the process. In the dancing candlelight of a dim Argentinian restaurant, at the age of 31, I made one of the best decisions of my life.
It didn’t yet hold the connections it would later represent in my mind, but it was the start. A perfectly seared steak glistened on the plate in front of me.
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