I’m not a hunter. I prefer eating beef; it tastes better and it is a little easier to hunt. However, I have many friends and family who are hunters, and that has provided me with several observations on individuals who enjoy hunting. 

In order to be a big game hunter, there is a delicate balance that needs to be observed. It mostly starts with convincing your significant other that the act of hunting is a sacred act of providing for the family. Since this act is tantamount in nature to surviving or dying of starvation, no expense ought to be spared. 

Since the foundation of the family’s survival is dependent on these purchasing decisions, only the best rifle will do. After some consultation with those in the know, and a sales guy who feeds his family the old-fashioned way by going to the supermarket, you settle on a $1,200 Winchester 7mm Remington Magnum. For this initial purchase, you get a bumper sticker that says, “Vegetarian is an ancient Indian word for bad hunter.” You are officially in the club.

Now, if you care about the people in a 5-mile radius of the animal you are lobbing lead at, it only makes sense to invest in the finest optics money can buy. The finest optics come in the form of a $900 Leupold scope that will allow you to not only see your animal, but you can pick out which particular flea you want to pick off at the same time as dispatching your big game. For this indulgence, you are rewarded with a T-shirt that says, “So many deer, so few sick days.”

You do not want to be tromping around the forest with animals staring at you in your common civilian clothes. You need to purchase $3,000 worth of the best camouflage clothing known to man, which has been outlawed in 37 states because it makes you disappear like a Dutchman when the group bill comes at a restaurant. Since you have now put the sales guy’s kids through private school, he decides to offer you urine of your choice. For the uninitiated, hunting means dousing yourself in the finest pheromone-saturated urine that sends out a beacon to any male animal within 5 miles that there is a set of ovaries open for business for the first time since exactly one year ago. This does not work on any other species. I did ask. 

Now that you have all your equipment, you need to send in $500 for all your hunting licenses. 

The hardest part is upcoming, as you have to go home and tell your wife the kids are not getting Christmas presents this year, and your two-week vacation is being used to go to the mountains of Colorado. Your trip will, of course, be fruitless as you go home with 500 mosquito bites and 10,000 pictures of sunrises. This is what it looks like when the animals win. 

I have chosen a different path; I do most of my hunting in the grocery store. It does tend to scare people in the frozen food section, however, as I take out a frozen turkey with my shotgun. 

At our dairy in Oregon, we have a massive herd of elk that comes through and decimates our grass crop, to which the state has remediated by giving me two depredation tags to harvest a couple of elk. 

This is hunting the way God intended. It means driving out to the field in the pickup, turning up the heater and AC/DC on the radio and picking out the elk of our choosing. I have usually let my forlorn friends do the shooting, and then we drive the tractor out to pick it up. No 14-mile hikes back to the pickup through three mountain ranges. 

All this leads up to our fateful day last week when I had the chance to shoot a deer. The state highway in front of my house does not have a symbiotic relationship with the local deer population, and I passed an injured deer on the side of the road. As I walked up to the deer with two crying ladies, she asked if I knew how to put the deer out of its misery, as it had three broken legs. So my first deer ever did not set any long-distance shot records, but it was successful. 

As farmers who work with animals, we pride ourselves on caring for and fixing animals. Equally as important, however, is making sure we limit animal suffering and know how to effectively euthanize. 

Thanks for reading; I gotta run. The local grocery store had some frozen ducks come in.