How to Teach and Recruit New Deer Hunters

Copyright 2011, 2012 by Jackson Landers and John Athayde

During the past month I have received a lot of emails from representatives of state game and wildlife agencies. Each of these representatives has been tasked with putting on some type of class for new adult deer hunters.

I am doing my best to help everyone who has asked for help. The reason why these agencies are coming to me now is that I have spent the last three years or so honing what is absolutely the definitive deer hunting educational program for adults. I started with an acclaimed program for locals and ended up teaching groups of aspiring hunters from around the US and from around the world.

What makes my program different even after all these years from similar programs that have tried to imitate what I teach is the fact that I aim to teach students to be completely independent as hunters after completing the course. Both men and women are taught techniques that will free them from guides or hired hands. None of my alumni need to depend on someone else to find, move, or help process the deer. They can go out and hunt on their own and then go forth and multiply, teaching more new hunters without my direct involvement.

The fact of the matter is that I cannot personally teach every single person who wants to learn how to hunt deer for food. After the hundreds that I have already taught, there are too many now for me to help. The best use of my time is no longer teaching deer-hunting classes, but rather I need to be training new instructors. So here it is. I'm going to boil down the most essential factors that a prospective deer hunting instructor needs to know about.

When I wrote my first book, 'The Beginners Guide to Hunting Deer for Food', I tailored it around the questions, fears and ideas most frequently expressed by my students. My goal was to distill as much as possible from my classes into a written format that anyone could read and use to start hunting deer successfully. But the fact remains that there are some things in human experience that can't be duplicated by the written word. Those things are what state educational programs need to start imitating.

The number one most intimidating thing that a prospective new deer hunter faces is the initial dissection of the dead deer. The new deer hunter has already contemplated that moment of squeezing the trigger and watching the animal drop to the ground. Imagine standing there over the freshly dead, still bleeding animal and smelling that strong horse-like aroma and wondering how you are going to turn this thing into dinner. No parent or grandparent told you what to do, the sun is going down, and you're all alone.

Yeah, its scary.

I've done everything I can to prepare new hunters for this moment, but if you are going to offer a class to recruit hunters then you had better have a lesson plan for that moment. Classes for new deer hunters need to have a 'lab' that teaches students how to gut, skin and quarter a dead deer. You need to do the leg-work to figure out how to guarantee a dead deer on location at the prescribed time for this. You also need to have an anatomy portion of the curriculum planned out in advance that teaches the students what the different organs are which they are about to see and why some of them are better shot opportunities than others. When you teach the material this way, it has the same context as the dead frog does in 10th grade biology class. Not scary at all.

Everything that comes out of your mouth as an instructor need to be based on the perspective of the 100 pound woman hunting alone. The days of deer hunting as a men-only club are over. Women are the fastest-growing demographic among hunters. Women hunt now and they are teaching their daughters. This needs to be part and parcel of the educational program. Every technique that you teach needs to be considered from the perspective of a 100 pound woman hunting alone.

Most mainstream male hunters will shoot a deer, drag it to the truck (often with someone else's help), drive it to where it needs to be, and if they will be butchering it themselves then they get another man to help them hoist the deer up into a tree or into the garage rafters for ease of processing. This is of no help whatsoever to the 100 pound woman hunting alone.

She cannot drag or lift the deer. Like new hunters in general, she probably doesn't even own a pickup truck. You need to teach her to leave a cooler on wheels in the truck, go get it after she shoots a deer, and then bone all of the meat off the carcass and into the cooler (unless you live in one of those rare anti-hunter-recruitment backwaters where the entire deer needs to be brought to a check-station rather than checked online).

Don't teach tree-stand tactics unless local laws require it. Treestands account for a majority of hunting accidents and treestands also require spending a lot of money on equipment that new hunters find intimidating.

Copyright 2011 by  Jackson Landers

Involve food at every point. The biggest potential group of hunting constituents are self-described foodies.  Hunting for food already meshes with the values of locavores. Hunting for food is a critical component of the local food movement. This activity has a more ethical blood footprint than buying a steak at the grocery store, grass-fed or otherwise. The same people who get excited about bacon ice cream would probably like to learn how to kill and butcher their own deer. Telling them to hand it off to a third party processor is not going to cut it. Your course needs to demonstrate how to take a dead deer completely through every step of the process from shot to steak.

Leave politics out of it. You don't need to promote any political views while teaching people how to hunt deer for food. If you want them to agree with you about the Second Amendment, the best lesson will probably be by your example and by their personal experience rather than snarky comments or political lectures. Obama supporters are just as likely to support hunting for food as Romney supporters. It is better to delight in this union than to argue with it.

I have been blessed enough to receive a great many emails and phone calls from my students detailing the deer that they have bagged on their own. Every single time, it feels like I just got my own first deer. Alumni tend to go on to take deer of their own and I can't ask more than that. It works, and a whole lot of harvested deer can prove it. There are innumerable other details involved in putting on a successful deer hunting class for adult beginners, but the things I have described are the most important that come to mind right now.

One of my tutored students took this spike in 2010 on his own.

Probably a thoughtful group of people working for a state DNR can pull off a pretty good program based on what I have described here and using my book to crib from. Do it a few times and it will keep getting better. But if any agency would like help in planning and executing the first round of classes, or in training new deer instructors, I would be very happy to help. Shoot me an email at jack.landers@gmail.com and lets see what I can do to get out there and start recruiting new deer hunters in your state.