As more and more women are getting involved with hunting, it’s important that they have resources to gain knowledge about the basics. While there is a lot of information on the internet, it’s hard to find a single place to start which can be frustrating and overwhelming.
Huntress View team member and founder of MissPursuit.com, Carly Brasseux, recently published her e-book “How to Hunt Like a Girl” and provided me with a copy. Since Huntress View's goal is to provide information to women hunters, I thought this was a great opportunity to not only refresh my mind on some hunting basics, but also provide our followers with a review of the book.
Details
Title: How to Hunt Like a Girl
Format: E-Book, 83 pages
Ordering: MissPursuit.com and Amazon.com
Cost: $1.99
Carly Brasseux is a female hunter, conservationist and outdoor enthusiast from Dallas, Texas. While she didn’t grow up hunting, she developed a love of the outdoors after meeting her now husband and finding herself throughout the pursuit—resulting in the moniker “Miss Pursuit.”
The goal of “How to Hunt Like a Girl” is to provide a single resource for basic hunting information, everything from terminology to conservation, gear and apparel, where to hunt, cooking and healthy living, and much more.
“How to Hunt Like a Girl” is an in-depth look at all things hunting. It starts off with the Fundamentals, including common terminology, understanding hunting seasons, places to hunt and guns. This chapter provides a great basic introduction to get a woman (or anyone) started. For hunting seasons, it has information specific to Texas, so readers will need to look up information specific to their state, but it’s a good place to start to understand the various seasons and time of year in which they occur. The only thing lacking was information specific to archery hunting, which would be helpful to many hunters.
The next section, Ethical Hunting, is a great overview on being a respectful and ethical hunter. It provides information on how to address hunting with non-hunters, what to do with the meat and respecting the land.
Chapter 3 is all about Conservation and provides a lot of great insight on what this means in regard to hunting, and how hunting impacts conservation efforts. This basic information is not only great for a hunter to know and understand but can be used and referenced when discussing the benefits of hunting with non-hunters.
Some of the most common questions new women hunters (and really, all women hunters!) have is in regard to gear and apparel. This information is covered in chapter 4, the largest chapter in the book. This chapter not only has pros/cons for several different brands of women’s-specific hunting gear, but also includes input from several other women hunters, including Huntress View founder Andrea Crider. One negative with this section is that it doesn’t really have any information on cold-weather gear, which is understandable since Carly is in Texas! But many of us hunt in cold-weather climates, so that information is definitely important. Fortunately, having information on the specific brands will at least provide some insight on what to expect for all of the gear. Although I have been hunting for several years, I found this information helpful as I'm still on a quest to find the perfect gear!
The next several chapters in the book are related to outdoor lifestyles – Outdoor Families, Conscious Eating, Advocates and Health. These are extremely important topics to include since they cover some of the benefits of hunting and are all areas in which new hunters have questions or need advice. Carly includes several creative ideas on how to involve kids in the outdoors and various activities, outside of the actual hunt. While the Conscious Eating chapter does not include any actual recipes, it discusses the overall benefit of eating the food you hunt and includes a link to several wild-game cookbooks. The Health chapter discusses the need to not only be physically healthy, but mentally healthy as well. I think this is an area that is usually overlooked, so I was happy to see type of information included.
In the next chapter, Social Media, Carly includes quite a few hunting-related hashtags that are popular. I personally would have like to have seen more information here about how social media can influence people’s perception of hunting and tips for posting in a non-offensive way or dos/don’ts for posting hunting content on social media. Social media has become such a huge part of our lifestyles and it’s important that new hunters know the tactics to posting with a positive message.
Overall, I think "How to Hunt Like a Girl" is a positive book that will be very helpful to new women and girls getting into hunting. It has a lot of information to help someone understand the basics, and provides quite a few resources and tips on commonly asked questions.
Sarah Honadel is an avid outdoorswoman from Kentucky, now living in Idaho, who enjoys hunting elk, deer, turkey and waterfowl. She is a team member at Huntress View, Pro Staff for Browning Trail Cameras and Brand Ambassador for the GoWild app and BaseMap app. Follow her on Instagram @waddysarah and @arrowridgecreations.