While I know people that have, I have never been brave enough to calculate the cost of a shot duck on a per pound basis. But I have spent enough time in ducks blin
ds to ponder such a thing, and I have a general idea based on all of the expenses involved, it would be about as cheap to hunt hummingbirds for their tongues. For what it costs to kill a duck on a duck hunt you could easily sit down and order the biggest Kobe beef steak on the menu. While we all hunt with the object of killing something that we’ll gut, or pluck, and eventually eat, in this day and age that is just a notion, and one of the many ways we cling to hunting’s traditions.
What’s the point? The point is, it is just not that important to shoot the most doves, or the most ducks, or the deer with the biggest rack, or the elephant with the longest tusks, or the biggest goose in the flock.
What is important is to go out into the field with your cell phone turned off, and your senses turned on. Go to the field with your son or daughter, or your father or mother by your side, or your uncle or your cousin. Go with your best friend and with your dog, and with whatever cast of characters you have, make the best out of the day that the resource will allow.
Make memories with the people you want to be around, and if you end up killing some birds, bring that cast together again to eat them at your dinner table, which serves as our modern day version of the caveman’s fire.
Tell the stories again, and laugh and remember the day, and make more memories that will enrich your life. Of course, we’re in the shooting travel business, and we’d like you to make those memories with us. You’ll shoot more ducks in Argentina than at home, and that is the reason you go with us, more sport and traveling for sport makes for more vivid memories. But on the trips I have made with friends and family, while we all went to enjoy the shooting, the stuff we remember years afterward is the time we laughed on a tailgate, or the night we talked at the camp fire, and those memories are priceless, no matter what they cost. Hunting, since the cave man, has connected us as humans. The food and the big antlers are just a nice bonus.
