Brave Little State is Vermont Public’s listener-powered journalism podcast. Every episode begins with a question submitted by our audience.
Today, we explore a question from Alex Larrabee, a sophomore at the Danville School in the Northeast Kingdom. She wants to know about how hunting has changed in Vermont — if it’s gotten more or less popular, over time.
But she’s not just curious about statistics:
"I've always wondered, what is the fascination of hunting? Like, why do people like to hunt so much?"
Alex doesn’t hunt, but her family does and her classmates do. And she’s noticed that people who go hunting… it’s not a casual interest. They’re passionate about it. Alex, on the other hand, doesn’t really get what all the fuss is about.
So, we put on our blaze orange and headed into the woods to find out for ourselves. We hope you’ll tag along.
Note: Our show is made for the ear. We highly recommend listening to the audio. We’ve also provided a transcript. Transcripts are generated using a combination of robots and human transcribers, and they may contain errors.
Loading...
It's all in the family
Burgess Brown: From Vermont Public and the NPR Network, this is Brave Little State. I’m Burgess Brown.
Lola Duffort: And I’m Lola Duffort.
If you ask a hunter how they got into hunting, you’re likely to hear something like this.
Jackson Giroux: My dad hunts. So I kind of grew up around hunters.
Kamden Potter: I had hunting in the family, so I just grew up hunting.
Nick McReynolds: I've been raised from hunting. My family hunted and all that.

Lola Duffort: And that’s what I heard — what you just heard — when I sat down with a group of high school boys in Danville.
Now, the reason I’m talking to you about hunting today is because of Alex Larrabee. She’s a sophomore at Danville, a K-12 school in the Northeast Kingdom. I'm the youth and education reporter for Vermont Public, and so for this episode — my Brave Little State debut — I thought it'd be fun to collect questions from high school students around the state, and then put our favorites up for a public vote. And Alex Larrabee’s question won. She wanted to know about how hunting has changed in Vermont — if it’s gotten more or less popular over time.
But she’s not just curious about statistics.
Alex Larrabee: I've always wondered, like, what is the fascination of hunting? Like, why do people like to hunt so much?
Lola Duffort: Now, Alex doesn’t hunt. But a lot of the people around her do. Her dad hunts. Her older sister, who is now in the military — she hunted. And as you heard, a ton of her classmates — mostly boys — they hunt. And what she’s noticed is that the people who go hunting: They love it.
Here’s another one of Alex’s classmates, Sebastian Eldred.
Sebastian Eldred: I just look for, like, counting down the days, every day, every year, to whatever season it is.
Lola Duffort: It can be kind of boring to be a teen anywhere, especially in a rural town. But the kids who hunt — Alex says it feels like they look forward to the weekend in a way few people do.
Alex Larrabee: It's not like a casual thing. A lot of the people I know, they hunt, like, every day after school, and they hunt like, all weekend.

Lola Duffort: Like Dylan Costa.
Lola Duffort: How big a part of your life is hunting?
Dylan Costa: It's most of my life, if, like, during the summer time when nothing's open, I'm pretty well bored. I look forward to hunting all year round. Like right now, turkey season isn't until May, and I'm already looking forward to that, so.
Lola Duffort: I’ve also noticed how emotionally potent it is. Sure, hunting is kind of this ubiquitous thing in Vermont culture. There’s camo and hunter’s orange everywhere. In November, a lot of local shops will advertise hunter’s “widow” sales — you know, for the partners who are quote-unquote, “left behind” during hunting season.
But it’s the way hunting animates people that interests me and that interests Alex. And her observation — that people who hunt don’t really do it casually — it’s actually borne out by the state’s licensing data. If someone gets, say, a fishing license, maybe they’ll get one next year. And maybe they won’t. But it’s not the same with hunting. If you hunt one year, you’re almost certainly going to hunt the next. And the next. And the next. People who hunt basically hunt until they can’t anymore.
I don’t hunt. So I figured the best way and probably the only way to answer Alex’s questions — about who hunts, and why the heck they like it so much — was to head into the woods and see for myself. I hope you’ll tag along.
_
Into the woods
Lola Duffort: Hello!
Burgess Brown: Morning!
Lola Duffort: Good morning.
Burgess Brown: How do you feel?
Lola Duffort: (Laughter) I feel awful!
Burgess Brown: Can I pass you this coffee?
Lola Duffort: It’s an hour before dawn and my producer Burgess and I are headed to an undisclosed mountain in Addison County. We’re not going to be too specific as to where, because Alex Smith — not to be confused with our question asker, Alex Larrabee – has asked us to please not blow up his spot.
Alex Smith: Not that, like, this is a big secret or something, but it's a good spot, and—
Lola Duffort: Like a good swimming spot.
Alex Smith: Yeah, exactly.

Lola Duffort: Alex is our hunter guide and one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. When we meet up with him, dawn is breaking, and while that’s extremely early for me, it’s actually pretty late for Alex, who would’ve been out here by 4 o’clock if it weren’t for us.
Alex Smith: You'll see the sun rising over Mount Abe and the mountains in Lincoln, and you'll see the Adirondacks.
Lola Duffort: We’re parked on a logging road and Alex is holding a bowl of oatmeal and blueberries while he’s talking, but I don’t think Burgess and I ever catch him taking a single bite. He’s just too excited.
Alex Smith: And it's just like the most it's, it's, there's no other time of day like it. All the birds kind of start coming alive in the springtime …
Lola Duffort: If you couldn’t tell already, Alex is an extremely avid hunter. He’s been doing it most of his life. And now he’s on the leadership team for the Vermont chapter of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers.
And he’s so good at hunting that, today, just three days into Vermont’s rifle season, he’s already bagged a buck in Vermont and another in New York, which is all he’s allowed for the season. But he’s generously found two other people who still have deer tags, and that’s who we’re meeting in the woods — Bailey Walker, a Middlebury College student who grew up hunting in Colorado, and Emmett Smith, Alex’s cousin who recently took up hunting.
Alex Smith: Shall we take a walk?
(Crunching leaves)
Lola Duffort: Now, you’re hearing all these leaves crunching because there’s no snow on the ground, which, for a big woods hunter like Alex, is kind of a bummer.
Alex Smith: I grew up in Long Lake in the center of the Adirondacks, and around there, for a lot of people, like, hunting season doesn't even really start ‘til there's snow on the ground. I don't know if my dad knows when opening day is — he just like would go buy his hunting license when he saw snow in the forecast and go out, you know?

Lola Duffort: Following buck tracks through the snow is just the most straightforward way to hunt, at least in mountainous terrain. It’s also the best way to hunt bigger bucks, because you can actually tell deer tracks apart in the snow.
But nowadays, you can’t really count on snow falling in time for rifle season. And so hunters like Alex are making do by studying the more subtle clues that tell you where deer might be.
Alex Smith: It's been a fun way to get better at hunting, to, to slow down more. And I feel like I get better shots that way, creeping up on deer and seeing more deer that don't see me than before.
Lola Duffort: So the day’s lack of snow will dictate the day’s slow-and-steady hunting strategy. We mostly walk along at a leisurely pace, sometimes through the very lovely woods, and sometimes through some very unlovely brambles, looking for signs of deer. Emmett, Alex’s cousin, notices something.
Emmett Smith: Straight there. You can kind of see the bare trees. You'll need to use your binoculars to see what I'm looking at.
Alex Smith: Moose rub.
Emmett Smith: Moose?
Alex Smith: Moose, yeah.
Emmett Smith: OK, that makes sense, like that's a lot of activity for a deer.

Lola Duffort: Because there are so many of us, and the leaves mean we’re making quite a bit of noise, Alex has decided we’ll try and use sound to our advantage. He sets Bailey and Emmett up in these saddles — that’s low points along the ridgeline — while Burgess, Alex and I set up shop between them, up top. Then Alex walks around, clanking these antlers together.
Deer are pretty curious creatures, and the hope is that one of them will come see what sounds like two bucks fighting.
So, just to recap: Alex has positioned two armed and hidden men on either side of himself, and then he’s walking between them and impersonating the creature they’re trying to kill. Burgess remarks on how funny this all sounds.
Burgess Brown: (whispering) This feels like a dumb question, but it feels um crazy to go, to set people up with guns around you and then walk around and—
Alex Smith: (whispering) Smacking antlers together?
Burgess Brown: Smacking antlers together.
Alex Smith: Blaze orange is a critical component of this play!
Lola Duffort: But on this Tuesday morning, the play doesn’t work. After a totally deer-free hour, Alex calls Bailey and Emmett up the mountain.
But Alex, an inveterate optimist, is not one for quitting. We will repeat this process several times in several spots across the mountain.
No luck.
In the afternoon we try a new tactic that involves splitting up our party around a pond.
Alex Smith: Shoot straight!
Bailey Walker: Thanks.

Lola Duffort: No luck there, either. And at this point, honestly, I’ve started to pray no one shoots a deer. I haven’t been seized by doubts about the morality of hunting, to be clear. I’m just exhausted. We’ve been in the woods for six or seven hours, and the last thing I want is to finish this hike by dragging a 150-pound carcass out of the woods.
My wish comes true. No one kills a deer today. But we do talk about it — what it means to kill what you eat.
Alex Smith: For very few people that I've ever been around, it's like a huge, you know, fist pumping experience to kill a deer. Like, it's, you know, it's, it's a little somber.
Lola Duffort: To hunt something, to hunt something successfully, you kind of have to develop a reverence for the animal you’re killing. At least, that’s true for Alex, and it’s true for a lot of the hunters I talked to.
Alex Smith: It's not like we're at war with deer, you know, like, we love them. We also love to hunt them. We love to eat them. And they're, you know, you kill a deer and you get, like, a year's worth of meat, you know, which is a huge deal. So it's, it's big, and it's, we're very determined to do it, but it's, you know, it's, it's, certainly, it's heavy, and it gets heavier. I think the older I get the, you know, the more time between pulling the trigger and getting excited it takes. They're just an amazing animal.
Lola Duffort: At the end of the day, we’re in Alex’s truck getting a ride back to our cars. He asks us if we’ve caught the hunting bug. I tell him, to be perfectly honest, no. I am not one for waking up this early to be that cold and that wet for that long.
But I can also honestly say that I am full of admiration for this uniquely difficult practice. And Alex gets it.
Alex Smith: Whenever I'm, I'm explaining it to somebody who doesn't do it, it often sounds like a whole lot of things that wouldn't be very fun. I can see how, like, it's like, it's a collection of somewhat torturous events, and for some reason, it's totally under my skin, but it doesn't get under everybody's skin.
Lola Duffort: We’ll be right back.
Demographics vs. destiny
Lola Duffort: Podcasters aren’t the only people who ask other people somewhat intrusive and occasionally indulgent questions about feelings and why they do whatever it is they do. Anthropologists like Marc Boglioli — they do that too.
Marc Boglioli: You know, some of those questions are hard to answer.
Lola Duffort: Marc — who hunts, and teaches at Drew University — wrote this book about hunting in contemporary Vermont called “A Matter of Life and Death.” And he’s interested in the sorts of questions that I’m interested in, that Alex Larrabee is interested in: the why of it all.
But he also had this professor, back in the ’90s, who would kind of rib him about it.
Marc Boglioli: He would say, “I can tell you why people hunt. It's not about how they feel about animals or some mystical thing, Marc.” He goes, “The reason they hunt is because they're male. They grew up in a rural area. They're white. And their father hunted. That's why they hunt.”
Lola Duffort: Marc’s professor was this guy named Tom Heberlein. And he wrote this landmark paper with his wife Betty Thomson in the early ‘90s that foretold the end of hunting. Based on demographic trends, he predicted hunting as we know it would basically be extinct by 2050. It made a big splash in the hunting and conservation community.
And over a quarter century later, a lot of people think Heberlein was kind of prophetic. As America got less white and more urban, hunting participation rates did decline.
But there’s reason to think demographics may not necessarily be destiny.
Marc Boglioli: In that basic like combination of like variables there — like the rural, the white male — those things don't necessarily always stay the same. So that's why some of those predictions don't necessarily play out. For example, nationally in the last 10 years, the numbers of women hunting has doubled.
Lola Duffort: And if you do a quick Google search on women's hunting apparel, it's considered a huge growth market. So, part of the predicted losses have been made up by this new demographic, women, entering the sport.
Marc Boglioli: Some of those things really can't be predicted from the models from the ’80s and ’90s that kind of had a, you know, not an untrue but a particular view of who a hunter was that might be changing.
Lola Duffort: Now, I’ll note that Vermont appears to be actually lagging the rest of the country, in terms of getting women into hunting. But the state data does show more women getting into the sport over time — women like Nicole Meier.
Nicole Meier: I'm a 36 year old white woman who's all of five feet tall when I'm wearing, like, heels, right, so.
Lola Duffort: Nicole coordinates hunter education programs for Vermont Fish and Wildlife. You may notice that Nicole is not like the other people you’ve heard from so far in this episode: She’s not a man. Her dad didn’t teach her how to hunt. And she came to hunting not as a kid, but as a young adult. It happened when she was working for the New York Department of Environmental Conservation after college.
Nicole Meier: I had this stereotype in my mind that all hunters were this Elmer Fudd type of guy who was really redneck-y and dumb. And I was blown away at how wrong I was about my stereotypes of who a hunter is. I met this guy named Ed O'Connell, and he could tell you where a deer was going to be based on the temperature, the wind direction and how much, like, sunlight there was. And I had never met someone who could communicate or know animals that intimately. I thought it was this superpower that he had, and that just kind of had me in a trance.
Lola Duffort: So at 22, Nicole picked up a gun for the first time. She took hunter education courses in a VFW, with a bunch of 11- and 12-year-olds who knew every answer to the instructor’s questions. She sat in the back and prayed she wouldn’t get picked on.
But eventually, she got the hang of it. The key was a good mentor — and that’s something hunters can’t emphasize enough. You really can’t get into hunting unless someone is there next to you in the woods, walking you through every single step.
Now, Nicole is one of the more than 3 million women who hunt in the United States. A U.S. Fish and Wildlife survey in 2022 found that 22% of all hunters in America are women. That’s more than double the participation rates from 20 years ago.
And there’s also this other kind of person who’s getting into hunting. People with more, shall we say, urbane sensibilities. People who like their food local, seasonal and free-range.
Marc Boglioli: I gave a talk a few years ago, University of Wyoming, on hipster hunters. Like ‘hipster hunter’ is a term now.
Lola Duffort: Marc Boglioli, again.
Marc Boglioli: For better or for worse, there's a lot more white guys with beards down to their waist, driving Toyota Tacomas running to Vermont to gather edible plants. Like, who predicted that?
Lola Duffort: And Vermont is leaning really hard into this trend. That’s not particularly surprising, given how big the local farm and food scene is here.
Now, most of the people enrolling in hunter education courses — they’re still mostly young boys from rural parts of the state. But Nicole says there’s been a spike in adults showing up, mostly because of this interest in local food and self-sufficiency.
Nicole Meier: We're having these really fantastic conversations with people who think, who, who think local food is important, and that it's not, and that it's not so different to grow a zucchini in your garden and then eat it. That's not so different than going out hunting in your backyard and bringing home a squirrel to make squirrel pot pie, or a deer to make venison tacos or whatever.
Lola Duffort: This is why she’s been traveling to farmer’s markets to hand out venison sliders. And it’s why the state has started Vermont Wild Kitchen — a cooking class that brings local farmers, foragers, hunters and anglers together to share recipes.
_
So part of Alex Larabee’s winning question is about hunting trends in Vermont over time. Are there more hunters? Less hunters? If you just looked at annual hunting license sales, you would think participation in hunting was falling off a cliff. For the past few decades, numbers have been down, down, down — even if you account for growth in demographics like women and quote-unquote, “hipster hunters.”
But, it turns out it’s really tough to tell an accurate story about these trends. That’s because in the mid-90s, the state started offering the option of a lifetime permit.
Chris Saunders: Vermonters love a deal, and they've been exceedingly popular.
Lola Duffort: This is Chris Saunders, who handles license data for Vermont Fish and Wildlife. Today, you can buy an infant a lifetime hunting permit for a little over 200 bucks.
Chris Saunders: Probably, you know, some years, 18 to 20% of all the infants born in Vermont are being gifted these licenses.
Lola Duffort: Basically, the people hunting with these lifetime permits — they were invisible in the state’s annual license data for a while. In 2017, the state finally required people with these lifetime permits to register for free with the state each year if they were actually out in the field hunting. And overnight, there were over 12,000 additional hunters being captured by the state’s tally.
And except for this spike during the pandemic, between 2017 and 2023, the number of hunters has basically stayed the same, at 70,000.
Chris Saunders: There are fewer people hunting than there were in the ’70s and ’80s. That is undeniable. But at least in the last five years, and I think the last 10 years, at least, hunting participation has been pretty darn stable.
Lola Duffort: Now, before anyone accuses Chris or I of being PollyAnnas about the state of hunting in Vermont — demographics do present a challenge. That, of course, should surprise absolutely nobody that’s read a single article about the state of Vermont in the last ten years. Participation rates are higher with older Vermonters than with younger Vermonters. And those older Vermonters — they will eventually age out of the sport.
But honestly, when I’ve talked to hunters about their anxieties around the future of the sport, what really concerns them isn’t whether we’ll run out of hunters — it’s whether we’ll run out of land. You don’t need to come from a rural place to hunt. An urban transplant can learn just fine. But you do need a rural landscape to hunt. And as more and more people post their land, and sprawl creeps into the hills, the forest increasingly becomes off-limits to hunters.
And for hunters like Nicole, connection to the land isn’t just necessary to hunt. It’s also kind of the whole point.
Nicole Meier: The intimacy that you have with nature when you're hunting and trying to be part of the environment is it's unparalleled. It's beautiful. I was hunting a flock of turkeys one spring, and I was just too far off to get a shot, and then out of the corner of my eye, I see this movement down this hillside, and there's a bobcat coming down the hill slowly. And I realized the bobcat was hunting the same turkeys that I was hunting. And there was part of me that was like, “Yes, you get those turkeys. I want to see that. That is amazing.” And there's part of me that's like, “Oh, no you don't. Those are my turkeys.” So it kind of felt like I, I'm obviously not a bobcat, but it felt like I was a predator too. I didn't shoot a turkey that day. That was one of my best days of hunting ever.
Butchering
Alex Smith: Could you ask Zelie for the big jug of vinegar?
Bailey Walker: Yeah.
Alex Smith: Oh and maybe can you wash that knife too while you’re at it?
Bailey Walker: Yeah
Lola Duffort: I’m back at Alex Smith’s place — that’s our hunter guide from earlier — in a woodshop behind his house. And right now I’m looking at a fairly gorey scene: a large ribcage and spine, with most of the meat cut away. There’s also some bloodshot meat off to the side, which can’t get processed because that’s where Alex’s bullet struck through the deer’s neck.
Alex Smith: That's the unusable portion of a 150-pound buck. That and the hide and head.
Lola Duffort: This is the deer Alex bagged on the opening day of Vermont’s rifle season, a few days before our less successful outing. He's agreed to let me watch as he processes what's left of it.
Because we’ve had a bit of a warm spell, Alex couldn’t leave the deer hanging to cure. Instead, he skinned and quartered it, storing the backstraps and shoulders in three large coolers on the floor. Now, he’s taking maybe 15 pounds of flesh out of those coolers at a time and butchering it into smaller pieces.
Alex Smith: It's not rocket science with a deer. It really is basically just separating muscles out, you know.
Lola Duffort: It’s pretty remarkable how much meat a deer can provide. The two that Alex shot this season will provide his family of four the bulk of their meat through the year. But Alex jokes that when his two boys get older, and start eating the way he once did, they’re gonna have to start pulling their own weight in the game department. And that’s when his cousin, Emmett, chimes in with a joke.
Emmett Smith: You can start picking it up off the road too!
Alex Smith: Yeah, no, nab them off the road. We could take them any way we can get them. People are quick to jump on the roadkill in Addison County. I like that about, I like that about this place.
Emmett got into hunting from having a bad roadkill year, (laughter) basically.
Lola Duffort: Now, Emmett isn’t alone. Plenty of people salvage roadkill for food here in Vermont, and have for a long time. There’s even a state program for it. But while some people might turn to roadkill when they have a bad hunting year, Emmett did the opposite. He says it started because his ex didn’t eat farmed animal products.
Emmett Smith: But she would eat game. And she had gotten into the habit of picking up roadkill and taught me the fine art of it.
Lola Duffort: Emmett explains that his ex — she was a vegan because of climate change. But if you’re thinking about your food’s carbon footprint, roadkill is kind of unimpeachable.
Emmett Smith: I’m having a little self-conscious moment with this microphone. You know how, like, the weirdest thing about you becomes the thing that everybody finds out about first, right? So, yeah, right. This is, this is, this is something that often comes up at dinner parties. You know — whether road kills on the menu or not.
Lola Duffort: Remember the wave of so-called “hipster hunters” our anthropologist friend, Marc, was describing earlier? Emmett fits the bill — he came to hunting from an interest in sustainability. And when we were out hunting, he was using a vintage rifle. A Winchester Model 94. The hipster-est of hipster guns, according to Alex.
Growing up, Emmett’s dad didn’t hunt. Neither did his friend group of art kids, punks and nerds. In highschool, he might not have fit in with those hunter boys in Danville you heard at the beginning of this story. But now that he’s out in the woods, he sure sounds a lot like them to me.
Emmett Smith: I think one of the things I find most rewarding about it is it forces you to be really mindful, in the moment. Forces you to be present. You can go from being in the woods, seeing an animal, taking the animal, taking it apart — going through all of the emotions involved in that, and it is a very emotional process that I think we're very separated from in most of our meat consumption, and every part of that is just, it's not always easy, but it's rewarding, and it's sort of essential to the human experience in a way that is very meaningful.
Lola Duffort: Alex Larabee asked us two questions. She wanted to know about how many people hunt and why they hunt. And maybe this is where Tom Heberlein — the famous sociologist who foretold the end of hunting — maybe got it a little wrong when he collapsed both those questions.
Remember when he told Marc that people hunt because they’re men, they’re rural, and their dads hunted? That may be how most people got into hunting in the ’70s and ’80s. But I don’t think it’s why they hunted then — at least, not primarily. And it’s not why people hunt now.
Because whether you’re a rural kid who inherited the tradition from your dad, or an urban transplant who got into the sport later in life, I think it really is about how you feel about animals, or nature, or some mystical thing.
Lola Duffort: Do you eat meat that’s not hunted or roadkill anymore?
Emmett Smith: I do. I don't make any claim to ethical purity, I guess, on that front.
Alex Smith: I make a lot of claims towards purity in that department until I see a Stewart’s chili dog. I eat free-range, organic venison — and Stewart’s chili dogs. (Laughter)
Loading...
Credits
This episode was reported by Lola Duffort. It was produced by Burgess Brown and edited by Sabine Poux and Josh Crane. Digital support from Sophie Stephens. Angela Evancie is Brave Little State’s Executive Producer. Our theme music is by Ty Gibbons; other music by Blue Dot Sessions.
Special thanks to Abagael Giles, Travis Tremblay, Mike Covey, Matt Breton, Rachel Keach, Natalie Conway, Chris Bray and all the teachers and administrators who helped facilitate the high school voting round that led to this episode.
As always, our journalism is better when you’re a part of it:
- Ask a question about Vermont
- Sign up for the BLS newsletter
- Say hi onInstagram and Reddit @bravestatevt
- Drop us an email: hello@bravelittlestate.org
- Make a gift to support people-powered journalism
- Tell your friends about the show!
Brave Little State is a production of Vermont Public and a proud member of the NPR Network.