I went deer hunting this weekend. For the first time in nearly ten years, I shot a deer. While that is a long time, I took about five years off from hunting in the middle of that, starting back up last year. For me, there is a strong connection between hunting and family. When my brother moved away and we had two babies at home, it just seemed like the right time to take a break.
I’ve hunted since I was 12, almost all of it deer. I hunt with my father, uncles, and cousins. At one point, during the weekend, I was cleaning my hunting knife and realized that my uncle had given it to me twenty-five years ago. So that weekend in November deer hunting is a long tradition that I’ve grown up around. During the five years that I took off with little children at home, I thought about hunting a lot, and what if any place it would have in my life as a father and as an option for my own boys. As they started to get a little older, I decided that it was going to be an important part of how I would teach them about the outdoors, nature, and sharing the world with other living things.
I believe that it is hard to otherwise have a connection to your food and surroundings without the experience of hunting and I wanted to provide that for my children. To do that I wanted to establish first that hunting was something that dad did. Then, we could discuss that hunting is killing an animal, but with that comes a responsibility to do it quickly and that you eat the animals that you kill. Next, if there was interest they would be able to join me to try it themselves. If they didn’t have interest, that is fine, but I felt that the progression above was necessary to provide them with a foundation from which to thoughtfully try hunting and make a decision for themselves.
I also enjoy hunting the act of hunting, sitting silently in the woods. I don’t really have another excuse available where I can actually leave home to spend hours simply sitting in the woods. I also like having the connection to the land and the animal that lives on the land, and knowing that I have the knowledge and ability to harvest such an animal to feed myself. It is meaningful to me know and remember that I harvested this deer when I and my family and friends consume the meat. I know that I don’t think often enough about where my food comes from, particularly the meat that I consume, but when an animal is harvested from the wild, that animal lived the life that it was meant to. The DNR aged the buck at four-and-a-half years, so he was an old deer as well, living years beyond that of a farm raised meat animal.
With last year and this year, I started to establish the first point of my hunting introduction plan. By going hunting, I was able to start talking with my boys about hunting. This year, I started step two. I brought the deer home and the boys were able to see it up close, both were apprehensive, but I took them with me to take it to a butcher for processing. While I have and can process a deer myself, it is something that we’ve typically had done by a butcher. First my mom, and now my wife, don’t approve of processing deer in their houses, and I can respect that, but at some point under other circumstances. I could see processing more deer myself in the future, particularly if I were to take time off in those days before Thanksgiving and have another location to complete the processing.
When we get the meat back from the butcher, my boys will have the opportunity to try the meat that I harvested for myself and them, and to talk about the deer that gave its life for us to eat. I hope that I can continue those discussions and experiences with them so that we can all appreciate our food. Maybe I’ll have one or two more hunters in the family.