Say you didn’t grow up hunting. Say you don’t have any friends who can teach you. Say you head out and manage to shoot a deer.
You walk to the carcass.
Now what in the heck do you do?
For adults who didn’t grow up hunting, killing and processing a deer can be daunting. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
The Pocatello office of Idaho Fish and Game has debuted the first round of a new training course meant for adults who want to learn to track, shoot, gut and butcher their own game. The “Wildavore” program aims to get more grown-ups into orange vests.
It worked for Brian Miesch, 42, who grew up in Virginia and North Carolina, and lived in Oregon for several years before moving to Pocatello four years ago.
“I’ve always been an omnivore, and I’ve always felt like it was important for me to go out and get my own game, my own meat,” he said. “But I’ve just never had the opportunity. I don’t have any friends or family who hunt.”
Miesch was one of eight participants in the Wildavore course, which began in mid-July and finished in late October. But he is no stranger to the outdoors. He has taken month-long mountaineering courses in Washington state and British Columbia. He has been certified as a wilderness first responder. He has been fly-fishing for almost a decade, and ties his own flies.
But before the Wildavore course, he’d never shot a rifle. Program coordinator Liz Horsmon remembers Miesch shaking when he first was handed a .22-caliber rifle at the gun range.
But Miesch took to it, eventually buying a Tikka T3 Winchester .308 and shooting at least 100 rounds at the range before heading into the wild.
In the Wildavore program, he practiced skinning and butchering deer, received training in gun safety and ethical kills, and learned how to spot, stalk and kill a deer. On a mentored hunt this fall he bagged his first deer, a two-by-two 1 1/2 -year-old buck. The buck was on a ridge near the Arbon Valley when Miesch fired the shot from 140 yards away.
“At the moment when I had a chance to shoot the deer, I felt like everything was dialed in,” Miesch said. “I aimed right for the shoulder, and that’s where it hit.”
Now he has 60 pounds of venison in his freezer.
“Delicious,” he said.
Miesch belongs to the adult demographic that Liz and Merritt Horsmon, a conservation officer, were trying to reach.
“The focus has always been on children,” Liz Horsmon said.
But focusing on children exclusively presents problems. Children need an adult to drive them, provide a gun and help them with the hunt. If parents don’t know how to hunt, it’s unlikely their children will, either.
As a result, the number of hunters in the field has been flat to falling throughout the nation, Merritt Horsmon said. And with about two-fifths of the Department of Fish and Game’s budget coming from hunting and fishing license revenue, including its entire enforcement budget, a shrinking base of hunters presents a big problem.
“Rather than try to introduce a kid to the outdoors, if we train their parents then their parents can do it for us,” Horsmon said.
The Horsmons said other Fish and Game offices around the state have expressed interest in developing similar programs. Following its success with deer, the Pocatello office plans to hold another Wildavore session — focused on turkey hunting — beginning in February.
