How an anti-hunter was converted to a lifetime hunter

By PJ DelHomme

Before making a career out of writing about hunting and conservation, I was adamantly opposed to the idea of hunting. In part one of this two-part series, I step into the confessional to explain why I never wanted to eat Bambi or cut down a tree. 

When I was a freshman in college in Mobile, Alabama, I remember my dad telling me in a rambling conversation that two duck hunters had gone missing in Mobile Bay. “Chalk two up for the ducks,” I said. It was a heartless comment that illustrated my flippant attitude toward human life and my feelings about hunting. 

After my freshman year, I moved to Montana for a summer to work. The West set its hook in me hard, and I promptly dropped out of school to figure out life away from humidity, gumbo, and sweet tea. I immersed myself in the world of natural resources. I worked on Forest Service crews with guys who hunted elk with a bow and arrow. I hiked through timber stands, marking trees for removal. I lived in a small town where people hung their deer and elk from a sturdy tree in the backyard when the weather was cool. All the while, I was just smart enough to keep my mind open and my mouth mostly shut. 

Hunting isn’t an afterthought in Montana. It’s ingrained in the culture. It’s just what people do to put meat in the freezer. I was intrigued 20 years ago, and I still am today. 

Back in Alabama, one had to belong to a hunting club to hunt. We had little to no public land where I grew up. In Montana, people just park the truck and start walking. My mind was, and continues to be, blown. I liked to hike, and I liked to eat meat. It made sense that I would try to make my own meat, but how? I started by learning from the inside out. 

One fall, I got a job working at a wild game processor in Bozeman. I slung all kinds of meat for 10 hours a day: elk, bison, pronghorn, deer, moose, and bear. One time, a guy brought in a llama and thought it was an elk, but that’s a story for another time. I spoke to the hunters, and most seemed like good people. They were tired but happy. Most had respect for the animals they brought us because the carcasses were fresh and clean.

After learning how to break down an animal into chops, steaks, and burger, I borrowed a .30-06 and took to the hills. It took me a few years and a mentor from my Forest Service days to figure out the hunting thing. It was an evolution that I could not have done on my own. There are real barriers to hunting and making new hunters. I was/am what they call an adult-onset hunter, and I overcame the bias I carried for hunting before I moved to the promised land. I’ve thought a lot about why I didn’t like hunting as a kid. I do not doubt that if I still lived in Alabama, I would be slapping a Sierra Club sticker on a Prius before chaining myself to a feller buncher somewhere in protest. Here are a few reasons that might help explain why I was an anti-hunter. 

1. Non-hunting Family 

Hunting isn’t like baseba,ll where a few friends get together and play a game. You need a weapon. You need habitat. You need a mentor to show you what to do if you kill something. My dad showed me how to do things, but hunting was not one of them. Hunting simply was not part of who we were as a family. And that’s fine. I found hunting on my own, but I wasn’t exposed to it through an uncle or grandparent. As a result, I formed my own opinion on it because of societal labels, and that’s a problem. See #2. 

2. Hunting’s Image 

I grew up on Looney Tunes, which included Elmer Fudd chasing that wascally wabbit. Even though I knew it was a cartoon, it validated my preconceived notions about hunters. I still remember seeing Bambi in theaters as a seven-year-old. You think that scarred me? Hell, yes, it did. But it wasn’t just when I was a child. 

When I was in my teens, hunting shows started going mainstream. I recall sitting at a friend’s house flipping channels, and we landed on an unsuspecting turkey strutting around. Cool, we thought, a nature show. There was a BOOM, and the turkey’s head exploded. Two camo-clad and face-painted hunters emerged from the bushes, high-fiving and yucking it up with a Southern drawl that put mine to shame. We looked at one another in horror. With few exceptions, hunting shows have not evolved. They still suck. 

3. Access to Land 

As a high school kid, I desperately wanted to be outdoors. You can go outside in the South, but you better know how to play football. I remember driving to a state park in nowhere Mississippi just to find a place to hike, but we never found the trailhead. We went to New Orleans that day instead. My folks didn’t have the money or contacts to belong to a hunting club, which means you don’t hunt. Because I had limited access to public land, I had developed an unrealistic ideal that all land should be pristine, never hunted and never harvested. Just let nature take its course, I thought. Only after I moved to Montana did I learn first-hand that natural resources can be used wisely to last generations. 

In part two, I’ll examine how hunters can help tree-hugging anti-hunters understand that hunting is not evil. We can do a few things to tell the world that we’re not all Elmer Fudd wannabes. In fact, there is a whole lot that Americans (even hunters) don’t know about hunting and its contributions to the greater good. Stay tuned.