BIG GAME HUNTER FULL

BIG GAME HUNTER FULL

The group put the meat in a marinade of milk and garlic for a full day, and then in a marinade of hot peppers. He tells me about skinning the deer with the help of a little girl, the child of one of the local guides. Shockey went at the invitation of Mexican hunters, who want the world to know that there is more to Mexico than the country on the other side of a symbolic wall that is tearing the American people apart. I brought him back to his hunt in Mexico. “Right now, it’s the reality of this world.” I know there are 7.5 billion people in this world. “But there’s room for both our point of views.” “We look at the world very differently,” I said. That includes my ancestors, whom I rarely think about.Ī tribe is a tribe, whether it’s held together by shared values or by blood ties, and when we get so comfortable in our own tribes that we begin to discount those outside - well, that’s a problem. And he had a point, or he led to me to one: No one should be discounted, seen or unseen, living or dead, whether I know them or not. That’s when I realized that arguing with Jim Shockey may be like taking on a force of nature. You're here as a product of the best of the best.” “You’re here because of decisions they made. Don’t dishonor them by calling it luck,” he said. “In your blood runs the survival abilities of your ancestors. Look, I said, there is a mother just like me on the other side of the world. Objecting to this fatalistic view, I protested. We’re going to find out that nature has ways of dealing with problems,” he said. “The real question is, are we instruments of nature’s change? We’re part of change. How did people possibly affect that? There’s 30 million bison roaming the plains. “ People aren’t going to like this: We as humans are not a cosmic event. “But not one of them will stand up and say they’re a hunter.”Īnd then, because the interview was going just a little too smoothy, I asked him about climate change. Shockey said he knows of soccer players and surfers who hunt. “If you climb up the mountain to go get that sheep, suddenly you’re putting a period on the end of that sentence. “Eventually, you figure out that climbing up the face of this mountain to get to the top, because it’s there … It’s kind of empty,” he said.

Shockey says, perhaps optimistically, that some extreme sportsmen and women are coming around to hunting. They contribute 58.8%, 3.3 billion of the annual expenditure of state wildlife agencies of $5.63 billion. The nation’s wild lands and parks depend on them. The number of Americans who hunt, has fallen to about 18.2 million, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation and the NSGA Annual Sports Participation Reports, down 6.5% in 2018 compared with 2008. Shockey’s a rare species, himself, these days. “Is it because of the Inuit that I remember that, noticed the flowers? Maybe.” “Do you know what Oscar Wilde called snow drops?” He asked. There’s nothing noble about facing nature and beating it up.”Īfter his trip to Mexico, he’s back home in Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada, where the snow drops are blooming. “Among the Inuit, it’s an absolute rule that your home is where you are.

“We Southerners, we die and we’ve always died because we try to stick to our schedule on a world that doesn’t allow scheduling,” he said. He’s learned that home is always where you are. That people who revel in the pain of other creatures are an aberration.

Over the years, in travels all over the world, he has learned that nature is beautiful and brutal, and always about itself. But “if you keep driving in one direction for 40 years, you get somewhere,” Shockey said. Novelist Jeannette Winterson was called a ‘bunny-butchering bookworm’” I wrote about how Shockey's son-in-law was attacked on social media for a bear hunt. It’s not a popular view - hunters including Chris Pratt and Eva Longeria have been vilified.

Big game hunter