Everyone seems to think that hunting is something that you has to be taught and ingrained in you since the moment you can hold a gun. I’m not so sure that’s true.
Many of us “Adult Onset Hunters” were never exposed to firearms as kids, let alone got to go hunting. The best I got growing up was fishing and hiking with my family in the Rocky Mountains of Alberta. While a fun and fulfilling childhood it was, it never exposed me to the very Canadian tradition of hunting.
In my early 30’s I got the bug, seemingly out of nowhere to those that know me best. Maybe it was shows like “Mountain Men” and “Alaska: The Last Frontier” (two of our favorites, BTW) that inspired me to be more useful and self-reliant, or maybe it was my experience coming to Canada as a child from a country ripped apart by civil war that awoke the inner “prepper” in me. The thought that global instability could possibly leave us to fend for ourselves was a sobering thought, to say the least. I work in the Energy Industry in Calgary, and being a big and modern city it’s easy to rely on the infrastructure in place to keep us alive and happy. But what happens if all of that goes away overnight?
I found myself thinking “I don’t even own a gun, let alone know how to find, stalk and take down an animal…”
Below I break down the simple steps that you can take over the course of the next 3-6 months to elevate your skill-set so that you can safely and legally use a firearm, learn to find, track and stalk small and large game, humanely and ethically harvest an animal, and safely field dress and process the animal for immediate or future consumption.
Each of the steps below is an article that you can use as your guide. I’ll be updating the links when the articles go live!
