Happy New Year to all !
I seldom post anymore. Mostly because there is such talent here. My contributions can only be minor.
As a lifetime member of Traditional Archers of Oregon, I have shouldered a somewhat new responsibility of editing the Scroll, our twice yearly publication.
Ed Putnam penned this article and I believe its worth sharing with our larger traditional archery family. Please let me know what you think about Ed's writing.
If you would like to receive the last issue of our little Scroll, please post your email address here. It's free. I won't use or share your address other than to send you the PDF file.
Bob McMahan
Rethinking Success
by Ed Putnam
The email looked like an infomercial. It claimed that by following an elk hunting “formula” I could increase my success rate by 4X. So I clicked on the attached survey and answered some questions about how I hunt, how many elk I’ve killed, that sort of thing. Nowhere in the survey did it offer a definition of “success,” or ask what being a successful hunter meant to me.
So I asked the question: What do you mean by “success?” If, for example, a gun hunter shoots a bull at 700 yards, is he more successful than a bowhunter who stalks to within 20 yards only to have a swirling wind send the elk running for the next drainage? And which hunter would you rather be? Personally, I’d rather be the latter.
I don’t hunt with a traditional bow because I want to increase my success rate. I do it because I want to increase my level of hunting satisfaction. At the end of the season it matters less whether I got an elk or not. The only question that really matters is, did I hunt well?
Increasingly though, the standard of success is measured only by the size and quantity of elk a hunter kills. As long as it’s legal, all other factors seem to be of little or no consequence.
Last hunting season I ran into three hunters. They were packing two bulls out of the backcountry. All of them carried compound bows. They were all very intrigued with my longbow, and wanted to know more about how I hunted and wondered whether I was unnecessarily handicapping myself. Not unnecessarily, I assured them. “I’ve been wanting to switch to a traditional bow,” one of them admitted, “I just need to kill three more elk first.”
The need to make a kill versus the desire to experience a more fulfilling hunt is the compound archers quandary. They’ve chosen a weapon that intentionally limits their reach and makes the hunt more challenging. However, at the same time they continue to value technological advances that make the weapons shoot further, so that they can increase their success rate.
Focusing on success obscures the bigger picture of our relationship to the environment, and our responsibility to the resource. ODFW tries to strike a balance between maintaining management objectives for wildlife, and providing hunters with opportunities. Rising success rates place a burden on the agency’s ability to maintain management objectives without cutting tag numbers, or imposing some other restrictions that limit hunter opportunity. In other words, failure is built into the system. In order to maintain healthy populations of elk most of us have to fail to fill our tags.
And that’s fine by me, because failure doesn’t detract from the joy of the hunt. Rather it elevates it to a higher plane, making each animal harvested all the more precious. The real value of the hunt comes from the challenges it offers, and its ability to connect me to my hunter/gatherer origins. Failure provides an opportunity to practice skills that can’t be honed with artificial substitutes. Thinking less about what I can take out of the woods allows me to concentrate more on what I can give back.
So if there really is a formula for filling your freezer, my advice is, be careful. You might be trying to solve a problem that doesn’t really exist.
Topic: R E T H I N K I N G S U C C E S S 2017 (Read 1557 times)
