Introducing The Children To Hunting

FEATURE Mitch Rickarby

Introducing kids to hunting, via the kitchen

After just over 4 years of parenting I’m certainly not putting my hand up as an expert in the field or going to sit around and tell anyone who’s right or wrong on any matter. The idea of this article came to me on the back of some very positive feedback I’ve had from friends, family and peers in the hunting and fishing scene.

I unknowingly stumbled across a method that has worked wonders for launching my son’s hunting and fishing career virtually by mistake. Looking back on it now a few years on though, it seems like an incredibly basic method that can be implemented in any family with young children who you would like to get into hunting and fishing as they get older.

It’s all about teaching them about the prize of the hunt, the value to the family and normalising the enjoyment that comes from the outcome, as opposed to the actual hunt itself. By the time you come to pulling the trigger, so to speak, you’ve already created a positive atmosphere and idea about the ‘kill’ so that the reward isn’t viewed as the poor dead deer. It’s already instilled into their minds about what comes next and the rewards that follow.

This all revolves around my son Heath, who is 4, and what can only be described as his love affair with cooking and getting involved in the kitchen as much as physically possible. Heath’s loved cooking ever since he was young and even now his younger brother Tyler, who is yet to turn two, certainly gets involved doing his best to cut up any vegetable and make as big of a mess as possible.

We’ve always been a family that’s always tried to grow as many of our own vegetables, catch our own fish and hunt as much wild game as possible. So, the aim of teaching the boys where their food comes from was going to be relatively easy in some regards.

Growing up I loved going fishing with my Dad, so it’s only natural to think almost instantly about what the future holds for the exciting adventures you’ll get to share with your own sons throughout the years. While Heath was young, up to about two and a half, he was petrified of loud or strange noises. That meant that rifles and the boat were out of the equation … for now. Even getting him into his life jacket was a task. So, the process of easing him into the joys of my passions was a slow task.

The joys of hunting came to Heath in a roundabout way from food. He loved cooking, he loved tenderising schnitzels, and he loved sucking marrow out of bones. The rainbow trout we’d catch while camping were instantly salt and peppered by him and cooked on the barbecue. The joy on his face from seeing something come from a river and into his belly in minutes is something that you can’t explain.  The amazing simplicity and his joy in being able to see and do it all himself was incredible.

These small tasks that we would do as a family, and the conversations we had around them, were all amazing stories that must have seemed like the biggest of adventures to a toddler, and he was involved. While his love for food and cooking has always been there, it’s only now that his love for fishing and hunting is really beginning to shine.

Although not yet knowing the full effects of how he’d enjoyed and viewed these activities with the family, it started to come to light as he got older and more used to the activities that we loved doing as a family. Easing him into fishing on the river for small amounts of time, catching yabbies by putting a pot in and checking it every so often … they were small activities that didn’t take a long time but that involved a very hands-on basic exercise to get them to the table. To a three-year-old they would have been a mountain of a task, but he loved the reward.

Butchering deer was an easy task to get them involved in, feeding the dog off cuts, and giving him a blunt knife to copy dad. He was hooked. Living along the Yarra River in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne, I think we are blessed to have a huge population of sambar deer. Some people don’t see it that way, but having an educational resource nearby was always going to be helpful to us in some way or another.

Being able to sit 100m off the side of the road and watch five to 10 deer consistently feeding in the evening on the hill by the main road gave us a chance to show the kids real wild deer under five minutes from home, and talk to them about all things deer and hunting. Getting asked for the first time “are they the tasty deer Dad?” was when the penny began to drop that going the long way into hunting could be the way for us.

The benefits of taking the long way into hunting after a bit of a shaky start is paying dividends. We’ve bunny busting, yabby fishing, fishing in the boat, catching his first gummy shark, and while we haven’t quite been out on the deer yet, it’s our next step together. With the consistent questions about “can we shoot that deer?”, “that looks like a tasty deer”, “does that deer have schnitzels on it?”, my mind is certainly sitting in an easy state that when the time comes he’ll be very happy to come along.

Having absolutely zero experience in writing or sharing experiences like this I didn’t quite know or understand how to get this into something worth sharing with the hunting community, but if it helps a mum or dad get their kids into hunting by a less confronting way, then I’ll be glad.

Teaching kids where their food comes from is incredibly important to our family and it should be taken a lot more seriously in society as a whole. If kids were shown the very basics of it from a young age, I have absolutely no doubt a lot of teething issues around the idea of certain topics being seen to be ‘good’ and some being ‘bad’ would probably almost flip around and become the opposite. Like many things, education from an unbiased perspective is key.