'The resulting food has meaning': Why I am teaching my children to hunt

This is an opinion piece by Cam Houle, a dairy farmer from Osler, Sask.

For more information about CBC's Opinion section, please see the FAQ.

My boys were probably five and three years old when we found ourselves crouched in the woods in the early fall weather during deer bow season. 

I had let the boys play with the animal calls — the grunt and the rattle — just for fun. Suddenly a respectable whitetail buck came out of the tree-line a few hundred yards away.

We all saw it. I was quietly contemplating how to get it over to us when the three-year-old grabbed the deer call and blew a hideous, ear-piercing wail that no hunter has heard before or since. The deer understandably bolted.

I looked at my child in shock and horror. He proudly smiled at me as if he was the greatest hunting guide the world had ever seen. I felt self-pity for about two seconds, then we all laughed like heck.

This is what hunting with young children is all about. I had made my peace with that.

Fostering the connection to life

I've always hunted. My family has always hunted. It's just a thing my family has done, probably as far back as the genetic line goes. So now I feel strongly about helping my kids — the ones who independently show an interest in this sort of thing — develop their ability to hunt, harvest and process their own game.

Some of my children have asked me to teach them how to hunt and some have not. I'm only teaching the kids that want to learn.

I think hunting is vital to fostering their connection to life and to the entire world around them.

People spend too much time and money trying to distance themselves from the reality of the natural world — except for their cozy annual trips to their Lake Cabin or the Lake Louise ski hills with their friends to see the greatness of nature, of course. We have advanced to a point where we are too good at filtering life — the cold, the heat, the damp, the sweat, the struggle — and thus we are losing our connection to the world.

I want my kids to be grounded in the realities of life as it is found in nature. Life shouldn't always be warm, comfortable and easy. Sometimes it should be cold and miserable. I am a firm believer in the idea that we need the darkness to appreciate the light.

I want my next generation to appreciate the harsh realities of the outdoors, and what it means to supply yourself with food, so that they don't take for granted the ridiculous luxuries most people consider to be the bare minimum. I hope I can remove most of the filters civilization has put up between them and the actual experience of life.

The meat means so much more

This leads me to the core of why I want my children to learn and appreciate hunting: to go out into the harsh world with the express goal of hunting and killing an animal to feed yourself and/or your family.

Hunting is, for the most part, a difficult endeavour. We walk a lot, we sweat a lot and we actually fail a lot. We work hard to be successful, so any success is meaningful. The resulting food has meaning.

It's a very different experience than going to the store and picking up a package of beef steaks. That steer was killed for human consumption, regardless of your personal plans. It's easy, clean and readily available. It's filtered.

But to put deer in your freezer, you have put personal effort into hunting it. You have chosen (for whatever reason) to kill that particular deer in a world full of them, so you naturally feel a strong connection to that animal and the meat it provides. It means so much more than another store-purchased meal. 

It is no longer something taken for granted.

This column is part of CBC's Opinion section. For more information about this section, please read this editor's blog and our FAQ.

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