Hunting is a deeply rooted tradition that provides many lasting benefits. One of these benefits that is often overlooked is what hunting teaches.

Hunting, by its very nature, teaches valuable life skills such as problem solving and organization. It also instills character traits such as self-reliance, self-determination, self-discipline, and self-respect.

Hunting is not a sport like basketball, football, or soccer, but there are lessons that can apply to hunting from the coaching of these sports.

Coaches are taught to identify two different personality types in their athletes so they can adjust their coaching style to best benefit both the athlete and the team. The two personality types include task-involved and ego-involved.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a bad picture might be worth a million.

Those of us who care about hunting can no longer afford to dismiss the fact that some of the images we share and post on social media are, at a minimum, having a negative effect on the public image of hunting, if not providing animal rights and anti-hunti

Man-made; adj. Made by humans rather than occurring in nature; artificial or synthetic.

A conversation about hunting and fair chase would be incomplete without talking about the pursuit of “game” that has been genetically manipulated to produce abnormally large antlers, which are then sold as “trophies” in artificial hunting situations. Why is this an important conversation to have?

The lines between hunting and poaching are being blurred.

What this means is the non-hunting public is increasingly not making a clear distinction between hunting and poaching. Increasingly, the two are being used interchangeably. Even the media is getting it wrong.

Yes, people do make mistakes, but there is no such thing as illegal hunting; only poaching.

Poaching is the illegal take of wildlife by kill or capture. Poaching is often defined as unlawful hunting, as if some kind of subset of hunting, which it is not. Poaching is a crime. Poachers are not hunters, nor conservationists. They are thieves.

It would be tough for anyone who hunts not to be disturbed by the rhetoric being put forth by anti-hunting groups.

Maybe it’s because the media has long taken potshots at hunters. Maybe it’s because social media invites inflammatory, soundbite headlines and unfiltered keyboard terrorists. Maybe it’s because animal rights and anti-hunting groups never seem to let the facts get in the way of a good argument. Maybe it’s all of the above and more.

Regardless of our motivations for hunting, studies show that all sportsmen evolve through, or are currently in one of five identified stages in their hunting careers. As we age and our experiences accumulate, what we give and get back from hunting changes over time. What defined success or accomplishment at age 14 can be very different at ages 24, 34, and 54.

The guiding and outfitting industry has been in existence since man first had an interest in exploring and hunting new lands and for different species of game than one could hunt locally. In North America, the exploration and opening of the West primarily rode on the backs of three things: the fur trade, the gold rush, and big game hunting.