Large Fierce Mammal

I recently read an article titled Armed and female: States mark rise in women hunters. While it didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know, the article still filled my heart with gladness for a number of reasons.

First off, I have never accepted what has come to be seen as “traditional” social structures that compartmentalize and define hunting as time out with the boys. Hunting is the acquisition of food at its most primal level, so what’s exclusively manly, and unwomanly about that? To quote the article, “Women are not just stuck in the kitchen these days, and hunting is no longer a gender-specific activity.”

Another observation I heartily endorse is, “The growing number of women heading single-parent households also has led to more moms wanting to provide their families fresh game — part of a trend that favors local and natural food — as well as instill in their children a taste for hunting.”

Trigger time with Mrs. LFM. Long ago I taught her to shoot, and now she shoots as well as, or better than, I do with rifle, shotgun, and pistol.

As a firearms and hunter safety instructor of many years experience, I was likewise not surprised to read that women are still topping men in the realm of marksmanship. From a teacher’s perspective, they tend to have a lot fewer bad habits that have to be unlearned first and, once they have decided to learn how to operate a firearm, they’re all in for doing it right. The best students I have ever had on the range were female, and I’m married to one of them.

Too often, a male will invite a female to the shooting range so he can hand her something that generates major recoil for the purpose of impressing her with how big and tough he must be to shoot such a beast without later spitting out all his fillings. Like many women, Mrs. LFM had fired guns before me, but had never been taught the fine points of marksmanship necessary to comfortably and confidently deliver accurate fire.

I am happy to report that she now shoots everything in our inventory as well as, or better than, I do, and has to her credit an incredible shot made while standing on an unstable surface (the mattress of our bed), firing out a window into a cross wind on a very breezy day, employing a scoped .22 calibre air rifle rated at 500 fps. The target was a red squirrel that had been caught for the third time in the act of chewing a hole through the side of our house in a foiled attempt to enter. The squirrel had run to a mature Pine Tree at the corner of our property where it stood silhouetted about ten feet up the trunk. Distance to target was 60 meters, and death came in the form of a perfect, instantly lethal, head shot.