Legal hunting age in my state was 12 when I got my first license, so 45 years of legal hunting for me. My Dad allowed me to shoot a groundhog with his Savage 340 .222 Rem when I was 8. When he told my Mom about it after we got home, she freaked out and said he was turning me into a poacher. I remember thinking she was being unreasonable.
I got my first .22 rifle at age 10, and still have it, along with the Savage model 220 20 gauge I bought with my paper route money at age 12. Prior to that, I did serious damage to the local bird and chipmunk population with my Whamo sling shot. I had a large bing cherry tree right outside my bedroom window, and when the cherries were getting ripe, the robins would wake me up at sunrise eating the fruit. One morning, my Dad yelled at me as he was leaving for work because I already had 3 large paper grocery bags filled with dead robins. He said they were protected birds, and I couldn't shoot them, but black birds, bluejays, and starlings were OK to shoot. I argued that the starlings ate the whole cherry, and the robins just pecked them and ruined the fruit... to no avail. I still hate robins to this day.
A couple years ago, I was deer hunting with my nephew. We came to the edge of the woods and saw that someone had left a very old man sitting alone in a lawn chair with his rifle, overlooking a small creek bottom. He had to be in his 90's, very frail and decrepit looking, and covered with a blanket on a cold snowy day. I thought that would be how I would like to end my days. Hunting is ingrained into my soul, and it was something I wanted to do as soon as I was old enough to comprehend it. It must be a large part of my DNA, so I guess you could say I've been into hunting for 75,000 years or so.
