30 yrs, then and now

the only thing that i think has changed in my neck of the woods is population and huntable land.

I'm not sure if deer got smarter, but have adapted to population around the city limits. it's hard to go to the "deep woods" in southern ontario, but when i started all this, a guy at the bowshop told me that if "a smelly Mennonite teenager who's wearing blue jeans and plaid climbs a treestand and shoots a deer on opening day, so can you".
that year i got out with no clue what i was doing and had 3 perfect opportunities in about 6 hunts.

add in a few years, more toys and you've got the same idiot in the woods counting on dumb luck to bag a deer.

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Originally Posted by rf2

I guess you guys didn't get the sarcasm!

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I was going to PM you earlier Rob and apologize, I didn't catch the sarcasm till this morning when I was re-reading the post, I missed the emoticon. Sorry.

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Originally Posted by MikePal

I was going to PM you earlier Rob and apologize, I didn't catch the sarcasm till this morning when I was re-reading the post, I missed the emoticon. Sorry.

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No need. Sarcasm doesn't work too well in online forums.

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Originally Posted by be2man

35 years ago we had compound bows, "Martin Cougar Magnum", XX75 aluminum shafts, insulated camo clothes, home made tree stands, and cars you could fit 3 or 4 deer in the trunk.
But the rush is still the same!
And yes it's tagged, in the nose

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That's an awesome picture by the way.

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Originally Posted by Longears

Will ,determination and luck ...but most of all the passion not the stuff they sell on the shelves !!..

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Age! Don't forget age.

I don't know that people have "more money" now, as much as more credit and more flexibility. I am always seeing people selling guns that they have owned for a few shots, but now the moose season is over so they need a deer gun. Two weeks later that gun is being traded for a xbow. We bought or were given the first gun we had cash for and eventually bought a second better one. Twenty years later when the family was moving out we might trade up again but by then we could really handle that gun we had been using all that time....

what has changed is that the majority of hunters do not live on/very close by the land they hunt.
more and more kids are brought up in suburbia. thanks to marketing and various online talk, these youngsters have little hands-on experience and try to compensate with (for the most part) unnecessary gear.
as someone else stated, the only new stuff that I feel is worth considering (assuming you already own quality firearms and optics), is a rangefinder and GPS.
for clothing, goretex and fleece were around over 20 years ago. fancy camo doesn't help if you cannot sit still. and since everything is made in China (or worse) you don't pay for quality, but marketing. for other gear, proper made DIY projects are most often better and cheaper, but require considerable effort.
hunters nowadays are just another group of consumers. and as such we have been told for decades that it is the right thing to buy a lot of worthless garbage. the more the merrier. don't believe me, put a sales sign on and some sucker will pick it up

Hunters have always been another group of consumers, and have always been encouraged to buy worthless garbage. Go look at old catalogues and you'll see it. The outdoors industry has been with us over a century and it has always thrived on telling people about the gear they need. Hunting travelogues from the nineteenth century always begin with lists of guns and gear. Le plus ca change, le plus we keep on buying stuff.

It's interesting to look at this thread in a broader context. On the one hand we're sure that hunting is declining as more and more people live in suburbs, and that very few city dwellers hunt. But here, we're sure that all that outdoor consumerism comes from urban hunters, and that nobody outside the suburbs is buying into the idea you need all this gear. No real backup for these claims; they're just fables we tell ourselves, ignoring the contradiction we've created: somehow, the very very few city-dwelling hunters have managed to support the entire overextended outdoor retail industry, all those 100,000+ square foot Bass Pros and Cabela's.

I think you're likely to find that younger or less experienced hunters buy a lot of gear regardless of where they live. Also, that hunters with more disposable income buy more gear just because they can. And we have more disposable income today than we did in 1950.

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Originally Posted by welsh

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I think you're likely to find that younger or less experienced hunters buy a lot of gear regardless of where they live.

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absolutely correct.
but how many people spent every day outdoors on the patch they hunt today.
perhaps I shouldn't have written suburbia as some might equate it to a certain area code. the overall lifestyle has changed. and although that was more than 30 years ago, I think we start to feel it now more and more.

and to your earlier point regarding marketing: I was reading some hunting magazines from the 50s last summer. you're certainly right, there were ads. not as many, prices were steep (compared to what the average income was). the articles were long (something most people would not even start to read nowadays).

people focus on the low hanging fruits: back then it were the skills, now gadgets.
also the merchandise hunters spent their money on has changed. it used to be guns, ammo, clothing, maybe optics. nowadays, people are at least as cheap on those, but spent a fortune on "accessories"

Should point out that the 30 yrs of change we are discussing here in regards to Hunting, runs parallel with Fishing..if not more-so....now there's a Marketing empire.

Hard to belief that we have more disposable income, I think we just have a greater access to money :)