Pondering over this thread, a lot of things come to mind. Firstly, hunting is changing, considerably.
What bothers me, is when the subject of "Why" you hunt comes up, the over whelming answer is, "For food, or to get meat for the freezer."
Really. Just think about it. The wild meat costs maybe twice to four or five times what good beef would cost and you may cook the beef as little as you like, to enjoy it at its very best. Oh, I know, no antibiotics and other chemicals in the wild meat. But how about all the bad little beasties and diseases that can be and often are, in wild meat? Some of these can be life threatening. But that's OK, just cook it "well," meaning until all the pink is gone and it becomes the color of an old shoe.
Many wild male animals shot in the peak of the rut are beyond what a person will eat, even with all the pungent spices one can put in it, to try and hide the strong taste. Old mule deer bucks fit this role perfectly, but they are not the only ones.
When northern Canada was first settled, the people shot wild game for the meat, for food to live on, indeed for actual survival. But this ended with the end of WW2, or even a bit before.
Even under those dire conditions, where wild meat was a necsessity, most hunters were good at judging what animal would be good meat. Some were terrific at shooting only the best animals for food. There were no regulations followed, thus they just took their pick of the game. My oldest brother, the hunter of the family, almost never brought home an elk that wasn't a dry cow. And believe me in the cold country we lived in, that was really prime meat. The bush Indians, even todays bush Indians, had (have) a different twist. The best moose meat in the bush in the winter is a pregnant cow, that doesn't have a calf with her, and this is what they strived for. The pregnant cow loads up on food in the fall and stays fat all winter. I have eaten steaks off of such an animal, shot in late February, and the steaks were delicious.
Absolutely no way would the Indians, or the white settlers, eat a big male animal that was shot in the peak of the rut.
The greatest hunting era North America has ever seen, occurred for about a twenty year period after WW2. If you took a poll at that time, you would see the hunters declaring they hunted for pleasure, for sport, for the adventure of getting into virgin hunting areas, to get a big head to hang on the wall and some would say they hunted to get the meat. In that great era we shot at every wolf or coyote, or maybe even bear, that we saw. Now, the vast majority on here state they won't shoot anything they don't eat, and that includes many who wouldn't even shoot at a wolf they saw while hunting.
Today's hunters, at least the ones who we hear from on these threads, are scared out of their wits to publicly state they are hunting for pleasure, or for trophies. The anti's might trash them. And what is even worse, if I wrote on here that I hunted for pleasure, or for trophies, the sheep on these threads would trash me!
This is very disturbing, when one thinks about the future of hunting and the direction we are going.
If hunting is just in the same catagory as going to the bush with a pick up and chain saw to get wood for winter, then I can't see too much future in hunting. No wonder a lot of hunters are losing interest in it.
