It's not a sport to me...

HUNTING for me is not a sport. It is not something I do in my spare time. It is not a choice I make...

For me hunting is part of a bigger whole, a relationship with the natural world that includes the birds, the bees, the wind and the rain. I never know for sure what the date is but I always know the phase of the moon.
I look at the world in four dimensions. There is everything I see. And overlaying that is everything I already know and everything I have yet to learn about how all of that fits together.
I don't see wild animals as good or bad, as more or less entitled to respect, or as guilty or innocent. I just watch what they do and try to understand.
So why hunt? Why not just watch?
Well I do watch...a lot. I watch every bird I see. I watch insects, the weather, the flowering of trees.
However, I don't feel like just an observer. I feel like I am a part of it all. I feel like a part of the natural jigsaw in which everything relates to everything else.

When I was little I was fascinated by anything to do with catching things. I watched movies and TV shows about Daniel Boone and the mountain men of the American West. I read about animals hunting one another and indigenous people's understanding of their natural environment. The commonality for me wasn't fun, or ethics it was about need. The people and the animals needed to hunt and gather because they lived in the natural world and their capacity for survival was a function of their ability to hunt.
As well as that fascination, I grew up among country types. My father was a farmer, soldier, saddler and my mother, the daughter of a bullock driver and opal miner worked with Dad on the land and later in the saddlery as well as doing the books for Mother's Choice bakery among other things.
Lots of things lived and died around us; pets, horses, working dogs, livestock and pest animals. I had to adjust to death because killing was not something that came naturally to me but it was obvious it was necessary if we were to eat, or protect our food or ourselves.
A dog called Mac that my father loved bit me when I was less than three years old. It was shot without hesitation. Countless snakes met their end as they crossed the yard, tried to make it under the house or made it into the house. And my mother would slither through the kitchen on her stomach with a .22 to poke the barrel through the smallest of gaps in the back door to shoot the crows that stole our little chickens...
There was no thrill in any of this and no judgement of the animals involved. It was all just practical. Some things live for now but everything and everyone dies in the end.

I predominantly hunt pest animals. I am obsessed with hunting wild pigs and in the past few years I have developed an almost all consuming interest in trapping wild dogs and foxes. I use my own family of dogs (known as Makim Dogs to some) to find and grab wild pigs which I kill with a knife. It is potentially dangerous for dogs and hunters but offers a means of getting pigs in thick and/or steep country which might not offer many clear shots (and I don't like shooting near my dogs because of the potential for a misplaced shot). With the wild dogs and foxes, I like the science behind out-thinking an effective predator and trapping it. But both of those passions are subjects for another day.

My point is I hunt pest animals now because I love the challenge of attempting to manage their impact on the natural and agricultural environment. To me it is part of my role in the natural world and something about which I have no choice. It is my part to play in the same way as a bird flies, a 'roo hops and an eagle soars.

I hunt because that's the way I am made.