Sun Outdoor Columnist Eric Davis

Just this past Monday I saw a picture from a former coworker on a social media sight with a doe he shot with his bow in the Northern Zone. When I clicked on it to write a congratulatory comment, I read through what others had already said.

While 8 out of the 9 comments were along the lines of “Atta boy,” the last one stood out to me. It said, “I’d say good job but why would you shoot a doe in September?” Reading this made me a little hot under the collar. I cannot know for sure how well the commenter knows the successful hunter, but I know that the hunter has only been bowhunting for a few years. This deer might have been his first bow harvest ever.

Yet here was someone so quick to put him down over it. What is more troubling is that this is not the first time I have seen or heard something like this said to successful hunters after harvesting game. So after seeing that combined with the beginning of deer season in the Southern Zone just one day away, I felt obliged to write a column on how to be a good fellow sportsman/sportswoman this year and for many to come, I hope.

Television hunting programs seem to show deer hunting as solely focused on inches of antler that are on a buck as the measure of success. While it is shown that one of the stages of being a sportsman/sportswoman is the trophy stage, not everyone is in that stage at the same time. While your mission may be to shoot the biggest buck of your life, there are others who hunt to put food on the table for themselves and their family. The main argument that goes with this is that those hunting for meat should shoot does, not small bucks. However, in New York not everyone gets doe tags. Yet any hunter who buys a big game license gets a buck tag. If you really want to shoot bigger bucks, convince the state to give everybody a doe tag and have buck tags be on a draw system.

When you see a picture posted on social media, the person posting it is doing so because they are proud of their accomplishment. Most of them are looking for encouragement and support. As I have written about before, the retention phase of the R3 Initiative is especially important. This is when they are deciding, do I still want to do this, or do I want to give up? So, if you are angered by their post, be a grown-up and just scroll past it. I believe the saying is, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, then don’t.” With hunter numbers low, the last thing we can afford is to lose new, young hunters.

When looking beyond just social media and thinking about in person interactions I have witnessed while working in sporting goods retail, there is another side to the “brotherhood” of hunting. Like in many families, being the toughest seems to be a competition. However, new hunters do not want to hear how hard your firearm kicks compared to what they are using, or how you dragged your deer farther or in rougher terrain. They are looking to be included in the hunting community, not belittled for being new.

I can’t count how many times I would be helping a female customer trying to find a firearm to use and male customers would chime in to say how much better whatever they had was compared to what the customer was looking at. A similar conversation would happen with young hunters looking for low recoil options. Many of those customers walked away with a look of defeat or shame because they were just told what they were looking at was not what “real” hunters use.

So when it comes to the notion of the “brotherhood” of the hunting community, it’s time to change things from the good old boys club to a welcoming community if we want our hunting tradition to continue into the future.