Start them Small

I started to write this as part of the thread about my son’s buck, but I thought I’d strip it out and start another thread on this topic. I wanted to respond to you guys who have young ones and are thinking about how you get from where you are to where you want to be.

Start them off small– small as you can.

1) Start taking trips out to the park to watch deer together. I used to go over to the local county park with a blind and a deer decoy with the kids long before we got the farm and could sit and watch them in the backyard. Go out and look for sign together.
2) Get them introduced to firearms early on. At two, I brought out firearms for the kids. These were unloaded. They were too heavy to hold and after a little bit, they went back in the safe. The point was to get them used to seeing them and touching them. There was one simpler rule: you can ask to see them any time, but only under parental supervision. No one ever broke the rule. Firearms for a little kid are boring as long as the mystery is taken away. We never had problems with firearms.
3) Don’t be shy about exposing them to dead deer. This is one of the easiest ways in the world to demystify death for a child. They are going to have to come to grips with it sooner or later. I brought home a little buck back in 1998, and all the neighbor kids came down and wanted to touch it and ask questions. A dead deer is a wonder. All my kids had the choice of watching their dad clean the deer too. It helps to get the “ick” factor out of that sort of thing.
4) Watch hunting shows together. This is probably the best use for TV deer porn I know. Explain what’s good and what’s bad about the shows.
5) When my kids were very young, I bought them Daisy training rifles. When we went for walks in the woods they carried the rifles and had to treat them as they were real. There were toy guns in the house, but the training rifles were treated differently.
6) I had Angus and Mooseboy on bows as soon as they showed an interest and could pull the smallest compound bow out there. Junior had to stay with toy bows. Interesting thing: despite being unable to correctly aim a bow in the normal way, Junior could still hit a target.

As my oldest got older, his autism got to be more noticeable. Junior is in his 20’s now. Some things that have stuck? He loves eating venison. He still knows proper gun safety. He knows how to call a turkey, and he still gets excited about scouting deer.

Here’s two other things before you go. First, my three sons an my biggest buck all in one pic. It took a lot of years to get there, but it was worth it: