Experience is Not the Best Teacher

It is impossible to go hunting without learning something new. Unfortunately, sometimes the tuition comes in the form of animal suffering.

Yesterday I sat down to cull the squirrels around my house. After a while, some showed up. They were closer than usual, and I was using a rifle sighted in at 50 yards.

I have been trying to shoot squirrels in the head. The idea is to kill them humanely and to avoid ripping up the meat. I tried this on the first squirrel yesterday, and he went down, but he wasn’t dead. I figured I had the answer, because I was prepared. I had a pistol with me. I walked over to him and shot him in the head again, and he still kicked. I shot him a third time. Finally, I crushed what was left of his head with my boot.

Lesson: a squirrel’s brain is tiny, and you can shoot one in the head and not kill it. I should be shooting them in the upper body.

I don’t think most hunters care about this, because head shots are commonly used. If they are shooting squirrels in the head all the time, they’re having the same problem I had. You don’t see them on the Internet complaining about how long it takes squirrels to die, so my assumption is that they aren’t concerned about it.

A second squirrel got close to me, and I missed him. The problem was my scope. He was so close, the scope’s zero didn’t apply to him. I shot at him twice, and he ran up the tree.

Lesson: I have to get a target and shoot at various distances to find out how to adjust my point of aim when squirrels are too close.

I found blood on the tree the squirrel was standing on, so I regret not checking the rifle’s trajectory before sitting down to shoot. This is not what I set out to do.

I feel like the best thing is to go for the lungs and heart from now on, even if it ruins meat. It’s not like a fried squirrel is a treasure I can’t afford to miss out on. I can always throw them over the fence and let the crows have them.

The main goal is to thin them out around the house. Meat is just a bonus.

I don’t want to make a big deal out of how unpleasant it was to deal with these botched shots, because I’m not the one who really suffered. I’m not the victim. I caused the problem.

My experiences show how important it is to teach kids to hunt. I shot a few rabbits with my grandfather, but they died quickly, so I didn’t learn much about humane hunting. If I had had someone to show me how to do it right, I wouldn’t be learning things now in unpleasant ways.

I don’t know if he would have taught me anything, had we hunted more. Mountain people from his time were hard on animals. They saw animals as survival tools, so empathy was just an open door to feelings that made the things they had to do with animals more difficult. They kept their dogs outside in winter, and they didn’t hire veterinarians to look after livestock. My grandfather used to shoot his bird dogs in order to train them not to run after rabbits. Nonetheless, there must be a lot of dads and granddads and uncles out there who know how to hunt humanely, and kids who hunt with such people probably avoid a lot of painful mistakes.

I have some fragmenting .22 rounds on the way, and they should dispatch squirrels much more quickly. We’ll see how it goes.