There are supposedly Five Stages of a Hunter:  My friend Woods Walker over at D&DH laid them out very nicely:

The 5 Stages Of A Hunter

Hunters change through the years. Factors used to determine “successful hunting” change as well for each hunter. A hunter’s age, role models, and his years of hunting experience affect his ideas of “success.” Many hunters may fit into one of the following five groups. In 1975-1980, groups of over 1,000 hunters in Wisconsin were studied, surveyed, and written about by Professors Robert Jackson and Robert Norton, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. The results of their studies form a widely accepted theory of hunter behavior and development. Where are you now? Where would you like to be?

SHOOTER STAGE
The hunter talks about satisfaction with hunting being closely tied to being able to “get shooting.” Often the beginning duck hunter will relate he had an excellent day if he got in a lot of shooting. The beginning deer hunter will talk about the number of shooting opportunities. Missing game means little to hunters in this phase. A beginning hunter wants to pull the trigger and test the capability of his firearm. A hunter in this stage may be a dangerous hunting partner.

LIMITING OUT STAGE
A hunter still talks about satisfaction gained from shooting. But what seems more important is measuring success through the killing of game and the number of birds or animals shot. Limiting out, or filling a tag, is the absolute measure. Do not let your desire to limit out be stronger than the need for safe behavior at all times.

TROPHY STAGE
Satisfaction is described in terms of selectivity of game. A duck hunter might take only greenheads. A deer hunter looks for one special deer. A hunter might travel far to find a real trophy animal. Shooting opportunity and skills become less important.

METHOD STAGE
This hunter has all the special equipment. Hunting has become one of the most important things in his life. Satisfaction comes from the method that enables the hunter to take game. Taking game is important, but second to how it is taken. This hunter will study long and hard how best to pick a blind site, lay out decoys, and call in waterfowl. A deer hunter will go one on one with a white-tailed deer, studying sign, tracking, and the life habits of the deer. Often, the hunter will handicap himself by hunting only with black powder firearms or bow and arrow. Bagging game, or limiting, still is understood as being a necessary part of the hunt during this phase.

SPORTSMAN STAGE
As a hunter ages and after many years of hunting, he “mellows out.” Satisfaction now can be found in the total hunting experience. Being in the field, enjoying the company of friends and family, and seeing nature outweigh the need for taking game. Not all hunters go through all the stages, or go through them in that particular order. It is also possible for hunters who pursue several species of game to be in different stages with regard to each species. Some hunters feel that role models of good sportsmen, training, or reading books or magazines helped them pass more quickly through some stages.

I started writing about this few years ago after I went through Hunter Ed again with son #3 a few years ago. They were trying to teach this 5-stages thing. I didn’t buy into it then or now.

Why do I hunt?

. . . and then I thought about it some more and wrote:

Evolution of a Hunter

That was all back in 2007.  I’ve had a lot happen since. That Fall, The Big One walked out and offered me a perfect broadside shot at 30 yards. The past few years, I’ve had minor triumphs and set-backs. This year, the biggest deer I’ve ever seen outside of a pen walked out and gave me just a peek before waddling behind a cedar and out of my life. My season pretty much ended right there, except Moose, and Angus and SuperCore had yet to get their bucks and I got a nice one too and along the way, I learned life goes on even after The Big One.

It’s easy to say, “Well, shaman! You’re just a Sportsman, aren’t you?” You’ve arrived! You’ve attained. . .

. . . No. Believe me. This is neither a boast nor a confession: there are days out there where I all I want to do is fill the freezer and go in. There are times when I tell myself it’s The Big One or nothing. There are times when I gauge how I am going to fill my tag, based on how close I can get the truck to the carcass.

More and more, my mind keeps returning to this:

Genesis 9 (KJV) 1And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth. 2And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are they delivered. 3Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things. 4But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat.

I don’t want to seem to be getting preachy. Yeah, it’s the Bible, but just bear with me for a moment. Underlying all this talk of Method vs Trophy vs whatever is far more basic view of or relation to the game we hunt. God gave these beasts to us for food. We can choose to make anything we want out of it, but we keep getting back to the basic reality that these critters are our dinner. In essence, we’re just trying to pile prideful fantasy on top of prideful illusion by trying to deal with them as anything else but food. It’s fun. It is largely harmless. It gets us outdoors, and we get to see some Nature along the way. But, in the end, it’s still food, and all we’ve done is find a very elaborate way to play with it.

There’s a scene in Close Encounters of a Third Kind– the Mashed Potato scene. Where Dreyfus’ character starts piling potatoes on his plate. It’s the turning point in the film. What does he say?

Roy Neary: I guess you’ve noticed something a little strange with Dad. It’s okay, though. I’m still Dad. I can’t descibe it– what I’m feeling– what I’m thinking. This means something. This is important.

You see what I’m getting at? I think the Mashed Potato scene is one of the funniest scenes in all the movies I ever saw. It is also one of the most poignant. It probably suits us as hunters. We’re all a bunch of Roy Nearys trying our hardest to make sense out of something much much more than what our poor little pea-brains can grasp. We keep piling it in our freezers, trying to figure out what’s behind it all.

I don’t know what happens when people die
Can’t seem to grasp it as hard as I try
It’s like a song I can hear playing right in my ear
That I can’t sing
I can’t help listening
And I can’t help feeling stupid standing ’round
Crying as they ease you down
‘Cause I know that you’d rather we were dancing
Dancing our sorrow away
(Right on dancing)
No matter what fate chooses to play
(There’s nothing you can do about it anyway)

— from For a Dancer
by Jackson Browne

Maybe this is why God did this to us. Maybe that is the heart of this whole hunting gene or hunting disease thing. Maybe that was his gift to us. You are born, you live, you die. There is all kinds of other stuff to throw in here, but I promised I would not get preachy. The bottom line: Maybe it was Nature’s way of easing us into the most basic of all realizations. We can hunt or we can play with the mashed potatos, and we can take our whole lives to doing it, but one day we realize what is on the plate is just like us. We make the connection. Little by little we come to understand. Along the way we have good times, we learn a lot, and we try to pass it on.

Where does it end? What’s at the end of this evolutionary progression? I will tell you what lies at the end: some middle aged guy and his wife trying to figure out a way to get 90 year old Pops to come down out of his treestand and give up his rifle so they can cart him off to the home. That is what is at the end of this. If you live long enough, eventually they come and try to pry that rifle out of your hands, or they wait until you fall asleep and saw the tree down, and then Pops gets carted off kicking and screaming. The smart ones use tranquilizer darts and Pops wakes up in the home with a nasty bruise and a hell of a hangover and keeps demanding his rifle and his pack and they have to drug him and drug him and . . .

from Why do I hunt?

Genesis 9:2-4 Ministries

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