For The Record: A Year In A Hunter's Life...

The best boar for the month so far. Read about his capture
 in tomorrow's first instalment of For The Record.

By Ned Makim

I get asked a lot of questions about hunting for a lot of different reasons.
Non-hunters want to know why and some hunters want to know how. But, for me every answer opens the door to another question, and another answer, and on it goes. It's made me think, how can I explain to people what it is I do and why I am doing it? And then I had an idea... What if I provided a week by week account of everything I did that was hunting related and not just the successes but the failures too, even how much it cost and how many kilometres were driven. The object would not be to set any sort of a standard or win any prizes but to illustrate just what goes into one hunter's attempt to breed and train a few dogs, support landholders and my own environmental agenda and put some meat on the table as well.

So today Hands-On Hunting launches For The Record: A Year In A Hunter' Life.
It will start back at the beginning of this month and bring readers up to date with where I am up to and then move on week by week through the next 12 months documenting hunt preparation, participation and post mortems.
There will also be detail on the dogs I use on pigs, the traps and related gear I use on foxes and dogs and whatever else I think might help colour inside the lines in a portrait of one man's hunting life.
The first instalment will be published tomorrow night and, as mentioned earlier, will cover the first three weeks of July 2013.

It's been a quiet month so far in terms of yield but there has been a lot of prep work with two pig traps set, a fox trap in the ground and news of a wild dog in a new area.

So take a look tomorrow and come along for the ride.