Why learn to hunt?
Why do we hunt when we can buy all the food we want….Somebody else killed it so we have dispensed with that part of the food chain. And the mess that orbits around getting it ready to prepare - someone else has done that too.
Where did the food come from? If it was chicken, it likely came from an industrialized farming operation like those here in Georgia. Poultry houses raise around 42,000 chickens in 22,000 sq ft of space every 35 days. That’s around 2 birds per square foot, that go from chick to broiler in around 5 weeks.
What was it fed during its life...Typically industrially raised chickens are bred for maximum growth in the shortest period of time and fed a mix of grains composed of corn or soy, with a range of antibiotics added to the feed.
Industrially raised beef graze during spring and summer and when moved to the feedlot prior to slaughter, they are then fed corn, barley or wheat and typically administered growth hormones (rBGH), insulin-like growth factors (IGF-1) and antibiotics.
What kind of life did my store-bought chicken or beef have? Free range maybe, but that is not reassuring...while some organizations like CertifiedHumane.org have more generous definitions, the USDA defines ‘free range’ as a chicken having the ability to pop it’s head out of a hole and look around.
So one of the overriding reasons I have to hunt is to know what food I am actually eating and feeding to my family, where it came from and how it was processed. When you hunt for food, that means your family is consuming food you sourced yourself.
That food contains no steroids, no hormones, no genetically modified feed, and it comes from animals that were never kept in cages, never administered growth hormones nor electric shocks and it was not placed in plastic packaging for weeks on end.
Another strong reason to learn how to hunt is that one has to become intimately familiar with one’s environment and its inhabitants, the ever changing seasons and the ever changing weather.
All this teaches one how much work is involved in actually providing food, day in and day out.
But in the end, I think the most important reason to learn how to hunt is to gain the wisdom that comes from handling yourself in a life-or-death contest with an animal that is completely equipped to avoid you.
Hunting teaches self-sufficiency, discipline, patience, stealth, hard work and reward, success and failure and above all, the cycle of life and death and large parts of how this world works.
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