![]() Why in the world would I start feeling sad after hunting an animal? Was I growing soft? Hunters aren't supposed to feel bad about this stuff! All the way down the mountain and throughout the rest of that year, I'd continue to wrestle with this turmoil until I finally figured that maybe this was a sign that my hunting days were coming to a close. I'd shake it off, but it would continue coming back to me and it began to make me slightly uncomfortable. Somewhere between the time I shot my buck and when I had him in the back of the truck, I began to feel this odd sadness build up over the act I just performed. The wind was howling and making my breath freeze to my beard, the sun was just coming up over the mountains, and there I was, all alone sitting next to my harvest enjoying every moment. I remember sitting there in the snow soaking in the entire scene. I've written about this hunt in a previous post so I'll forego the details, but just know that it was an amazing hunt full of emotions. I never once questioned the ethics of hunting until I killed my last buck on a cold November morning during my first successful solo hunt. After serving in the Marine Corps for a handful of years, I moved back home to Washington State to begin a new career and pick up where I left off with my love of hunting. I look at those horns on the wall every day and remember precisely the moment it happened and nearly all the events leading up to and after it. It was a great experience and another one of those I'll never forget. Hunting began to peak my interest in my teenage years and I eventually shot my first deer on my grandfather's land back in Oklahoma around the age of 15. I'll never forget that day for as long as I live and will always look at it as a time when the realities of life began to take hold. 22 rifle and start walking towards those hogs, I knew I was about to learn a big lesson. I'd seen this guy preach in church on many occasions and knew his heart couldn't have been any more appreciative of life, yet when I saw him pull out that. I learned at a young age where meat comes from when I witnessed the county chaplain butcher a couple of pigs from start to finish like it was second nature. I grew up in a conservative household and spent the majority of my life on a horse ranch run by my father. Considering my background, I never thought in a million years I would ever begin to question the hunt. But, couldn't I just purchase my meat in the store and forego killing a beautiful animal? I could find these creatures and not kill them, right? My heart was becoming split between my desire to hunt and my sorry attempts to rationalize why I was hunting. Why did I wake up at an unreasonable time in the morning to go search the woods for that buck of a lifetime only to take his life? Whether you like it or not, the pinnacle moment in hunting is the killing of an animal so you can harvest the wildest and organic meat known to man. This wonderment began to grow and grow to the point where though I would obsess about the prospects of the coming hunting seasons, I'd continue to ask myself more and more often if hunting was really something I wanted to continue to pursue since I didn't need to hunt for my food. To get right to the point, after I killed my last deer, I had a moment where I wondered if what I was doing out there in the backcountry was really that necessary after all.
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