Off Season Poll: How did you get your start into hunting?

[Redraider7]

Fellow Hunt Talkers,

I did not grow up in a Hunting family or even a Hunting culture but for some reason I always wanted to go hunting. I begged my my non-hunting mother to take me hunting and finally my whines were answered with a $50 dove hunt in Uvalde, TX when I was 12. My very supportive mother watched me miss a lot of birds that day but I have been hooked ever since. Since then we have shot quite a few things together (deer, birds, alligator) but I eventually started hunting solo.

I imagine I am the minority of hunt talk and the overwhelming majority of you got started hunting with your hunting family members. Maybe your Dad or an Uncle took you to show you the ropes when you were young. Feel free to comment below with how you started your hunting career.

 

[SD_Prairie_Goat]

Pretty simple for me. Old man took us deer hunting on the islands growing up. I started hunting in 6th grade and got my first deer, a buck, in 8th grade.

Been at it ever since but going to school in South Dakota really helped cement my joy

 

[BluBronc]

Grew up hunting with dad and granddad. Miss those. Good memories.

 

[CodyL]

Technically the first couple of times I hunted was with my family, but I wouldn’t say it was a proper hunting culture. I didn’t start to really be obsessed with it until I started hunting on my own or with my cousin (who was my age). We sort of learned together. Ironically, my dad started hunting with me after I did it a few years.

 

[WildWill]

Dad and mom hauled me to and from the duck blind when I was still in diapers and started tagging along deer hunting as a toddler. Started killing small game at 5 and shot my first deer at 6. Haven't missed a deer season sense.

 

[np307]

I was kind of a mixture of both. I grew up with uncles that hunted and a lot of my friends hunted, but my dad was not physically able to get out in the woods anymore by the time I was old enough to have any desire to hunt. I had other stuff to keep me occupied, mainly sports, and so I never really got a chance to go. Once I got into college, I decided that I wanted to start figuring the whole hunting world out. I researched game lands and stumbled around in the woods making plenty of mistakes. It took several years before I really started to figure out what I was doing.

It's interesting now to be able to talk about hunting with my dad. We can't share any stories of hunting together, but I get to learn about what these woods used to look and feel like and he gets to relive his youth through my adventures.

 

[Derek44]

Family and culture all the way

 

[IArrowElk]

Hiked about 8 miles in the mountains chasing a herd with a friend when he was learning to hunt and the physical aspect hooked me right away. Growing up the Midwest, the tree stand style didn’t appeal to me whatsoever.

 

[FairWeather]

Didn’t grow up with it, but had friends who did. It always sounded like a lot of fun. I even took hunters Ed in HS in hopes that’s I’d get to go somehow.

Afterwards I joined the army, and met a lot of folks there who were hunters, and it sounded like fun then too. Eventually I got out with a few on a squirrel hunt and a duck hunt. That was my early 20s. Didn’t go again for about 8-9 years.

Then during COVID, I re-took hunters ed, thinking to go grouse hunting but I wanted to brush up on it all first. The hunter Ed course was more focused on big game/deer hunting, and by the end I was convinced to try that. Had a few seasons of tag soup, but I learned a lot along the way and got my first turkey last spring and deer last fall.

 

[INMT]

My dad had me in a tree stand with him long before I could hunt. Not sure how I made it up the 2x4’s nailed into a tree! Started shooting cottontails and squirrels not long after.

 

[glass eye]

I’m the youngest of 6 boys and my older brothers were surfers growing up in San Diego.
When my dad retired from the Navy we moved to NorCal gold country. My older brothers got into shooting guns but didn’t hunt, nobody in my family hunted, but I had access to guns.
With no training or supervision at age twelve I began hunting and with every bit of coins I could scrape together I bought ammo.
Even though I was just a kid our local gun shop would break open a box and sell me ammo by individual rounds if I didn’t have enough for a complete box.
Good times.

 

[hank4elk]

My folks were WWII vet's , guns not allowed in house. Dad was a fisherman. So there was that and a love of our outdoors.
He had a brother, my uncle David, he showed me and took me for my lic.
I basicly started after the Nam.

 

[406dn]

The interest in hunting goes as far back as my earliest memories. My father was serving in the Air Force and stationed in Mountain Home, Idaho. He hunted birds and fished often while there. I would linger around home waiting for him to get home to see how he had done. I would take the spent shotgun shells from his vest and smell the aroma of burnt gunpowder. Paper shot shells left an aroma that modern shells don't.

I begged and begged for a bb gun for years. My mother was quite certain that I'd shoot my eye out. I got one for Christmas when I was 12. No sparrow or ground squirrel was safe in our neighborhood after that.

My father was more or less done with hunting by my teen years. I hunted ducks with my uncle and cousins. There was one deer hunt as well.

I learned big game hunting by trial and error with friends my age. I had never seen a deer field dressed before killing my first deer. I managed to complete that by myself, without any major screw up. The friend I was with killed a deer the next day. He had never dressed a deer either. So, I dressed out his deer.

Hunting had such a central place in my life that I convinced my wife to move to Montana 43 years ago.

 

[Darkside]

I grew up in a Hunting and Shooting family. Granddad, dad and uncle's all shot in Trap Shooting and all hunters, I started hunting and shooting in 1970.

 

[Gr8bawana]

Dad used to carry me around on his shoulders when I was 2-3 years old when he and my brothers went rabbit hunting.

 

[rjthehunter]

I started really young, hunting and fishing with my dad and grandpas.

 

[44hunter45]

Reading and editing this before I hit post reply, it is kind of narcissist. Oh well, just gonna send it.

I came from a "license and tag optional" family. At this risk of pissing off The Boss, my dad was "a hunter, a father, and a Christian." Most of the time we never even had a license. We party hunted and ran deer drives into waiting shooters. We baited. We regularly trespassed. We shot deer with a 22LR at night and stuck an arrow in them in case we got checked driving home.

I started hunting deer when I was 9. That one seems no big deal anymore, but was certainly taboo in California when I grew up. All these things were.

We needed the meat. Both my parents worked two jobs outside of the ranch work. I started young because it was contribute or starve in our house. I smile today when I see threads about child hunters in destination hunts with all the coolest gear. Compared to that level of wealth, we were white trash. And guess what? Now that I have had some success in life, I'm buying my granddaughter nice hunting gear and inviting her on out of state hunts.

We often ate horrible venison. We would drop a deer in the morning and leave it, "as it lay". We would then bug out to avoid anyone marking the location of the shot. Then we would come back after dark and pull out the deer. When it is 90°-100° plus when you put down a deer in California, it gets pretty sour. I never knew that venison didn't taste like liver until someone later taught me proper field care.

My dad could make an educated case that Natural Law supersedes government law. It was commonly understood in our "community" (as the term is used today.) that God had placed everything on the earth for man's use. No law which restricted that could be just.

Here's the irony of that other thread about poachers. When I had a protestant religious experience in high school, I walked away from all that. As I explained to my father my conviction that my faith required me to respect the law of the land, he cleaned up his act as well. My brother and sister stopped hunting altogether about that same time; for reasons of their own.

Having practiced all the tricks in the poacher bag, my radar pings a lot from hunting media. I'm here because BF runs a clean shop.

My penance for those past sins is to support ethical .orgs, to be an active participant in IDFG public input requests, to be a wildlife activist who writes letters to representatives at various levels of Government, and whatever else keeps the game on the earth. Concomitantly, to learn and follow the regs. After retirement, I hope to get into Hunter Ed as well.

I have my local warden on speed dial and I will drop a dime on you.

Not to get too far into my own head, but part of me feels that finally drawing a MSG tag is a sign that I am absolved. That, and I put in for the one of the best draw odds, physically toughest GMUs in Idaho. If I die out there, my work here is finished.

 

[buxnbullz]

Even though my father has never been much of a hunter, he is the one who first took me out to light the fire. The fuel to feed that fire really began when a friend took me to the Crawford Mtns. along the Utah/Wyoming border to see all the huge bucks that used to roam that area. That was nearly 30 years ago & I've been hooked on hunting ever since.

 

[Redraider7]

Reading and editing this before I hit post reply, it is kind of narcissist. Oh well, just gonna send it.

I came from a "license and tag optional" family. At this risk of pissing off The Boss, my dad was "a hunter, a father, and a Christian." Most of the time we never even had a license. We party hunted and ran deer drives into waiting shooters. We baited. We regularly trespassed. We shot deer with a 22LR at night and stuck an arrow in them in case we got checked driving home.

I started hunting deer when I was 9. That one seems no big deal anymore, but was certainly taboo in California when I grew up. All these things were.

We needed the meat. Both my parents worked two jobs outside of the ranch work. I started young because it was contribute or starve in our house. I smile today when I see threads about child hunters in destination hunts with all the coolest gear. Compared to that level of wealth, we were white trash. And guess what? Now that I have had some success in life, I'm buying my granddaughter nice hunting gear and inviting her on out of state hunts.

We often ate horrible venison. We would drop a deer in the morning and leave it, "as it lay". We would then bug out to avoid anyone marking the location of the shot. Then we would come back after dark and pull out the deer. When it is 90°-100° plus when you put down a deer in California, it gets pretty sour. I never knew that venison didn't taste like liver until someone later taught me proper field care.

My dad could make an educated case that Natural Law supersedes government law. It was commonly understood in our "community" (as the term is used today.) that God had placed everything on the earth for man's use. No law which restricted that could be just.

Here's the irony of that other thread about poachers. When I had a protestant religious experience in high school, I walked away from all that. As I explained to my father my conviction that my faith required me to respect the law of the land, he cleaned up his act as well. My brother and sister stopped hunting altogether about that same time; for reasons of their own.

Having practiced all the tricks in the poacher bag, my radar pings a lot from hunting media. I'm here because BF runs a clean shop.

My penance for those past sins is to support ethical .orgs, to be an active participant in IDFG public input requests, to be a wildlife activist who writes letters to representatives at various levels of Government, and whatever else keeps the game on the earth. Concomitantly, to learn and follow the regs. After retirement, I hope to get into Hunter Ed as well.

I have my local warden on speed dial and I will drop a dime on you.

Not to get too far into my own head, but part of me feels that finally drawing a MSG tag is a sign that I am absolved. That, and I put in for the one of the best draw odds, physically toughest GMUs in Idaho. If I die out there, my work here is finished.

Thanks for posting! I love your honesty