Mr. Swan writes with a love for hunting that we, as fellow hunters, all share. He starts the book with an overview of who hunters are, the statistics say they are predominately white males, in their early forties, live in a rural area, have some college education and work in a professional/management job and/or service/labor job.
He talks about his hunting background: hunting with his father, and how he trained his son the same way.
He speaks of the sacredness of hunting, how we should appreciate the animal that we hunt, and how a hunter often develops a fondness for the animals he is stalking. He mentions the excitement of the chase, and the art of blending into nature while still-hunting.
One chapter tells of his meetings with anti-hunters, and how skewed and unscientific most of their claims are, and how one speaker he was listening to used inflammatory words such as repugnant, barbaric, cruel, sadistic, to describe hunters and hunting.
I like one of his paragraphs when he asks, How do we know that animals really support the anti-hunting movement? He mentions shamanic cultures around the world that agree that animals understand the predator-prey interaction, and they understand that some live and some die but the species, as a whole, continues.
He mentions that if hunting in America were to stop tomorrow, the consequences for many species would be devastating. Road kill crashes, crop predations, and outbreaks of disease would jump dramatically, and suffering to animals would be far greater than it is with hunting as a measure of controlling species' healthy existence.
The book is easy to read, and has a lot of knowledge. It discusses the hunt in ancient cultures and the hunt today. Swan talks of hunting guides and how sometimes it almost seems as if animals are guided to a certain spot for the hunter.
In the back of the book, there is an appendix with suggestions for saving hunting, such as supporting women hunters, create opportunities for hunting, safeguarding hunting yourself, and other ideas.
I recommend this book highly to any hunter. It is full of information, and easy to read, however, you might want to read it and re-read it extract all the information from it.
