Begining hunter

[freedomlives]

Hi there!

I've been shooting since I was age 8 at summer camp, owned firearms since 13, and often thought about hunting, but as a teen and young adult, I had trouble imagining myself cleaning and skinning an animal. Almost all of the past decade I've lived in Slovakia with my Slovak wife, where we have a homestead, raise some goats, sheep, chickens and pot-belly pigs, so, thanks to my father-in-law, I'm rather well acquainted with cleaning, skinning, and portioning animals. The problem over there is that hunting remains something complicated to get in to. I decided, as I'll be home in Smyrna for half a year, that I'd finally get a hunting license here and give it a try, along with my older kids.

Which, I guess this is as good a place as any to ask: which online course is best? I can see which is cheapest! Particularly, which one would have the most useful advice on rabbit and squirrel hunting and preparation, if any of them do, since with the kids I'm sure we'll be getting a lot of those.

Thanks in advance for any tips!

-Andrew

 

[NOYDB]

Welcome and enjoy!

Spend of much time as you can manage in the woods you intend to hunt in. A course can not teach you as much as the woods can. Then go as often as you can to the range and practice your free hand shooting skills.

 

[Batjack]

Welcome to the campfire.

 

[4HAND]

Welcome to the campfire! A lot of useful information & knowledgeable folks on here.

 

[JustUs4All]

Go over to the small game fourm and start reading and asking questions.
Welcome to Woody's.

 

[Cmp1]

Welcome,,,,lots of great and knowledgeable guys and gals here,,,,

 

[freedomlives]

I finally got the hunter education course done now!
I tried the cheapest one first. Glad they didn't want payments up front, because their server was really slow and then became unusable in the afternoon (probably lots more people accessing it).
The next option was much better, for $13, www.hunteredcourse.com . This one forces you to watch videos that are more like slide shows with narration. There were a couple of animations showing the operation of certain firearms. Note that three options other than the cheapest are all produced by kalkomey.com, presumably the content covered is similar, but from what I can tell, the others have more motion-video.
The quizzes and exam reminded me a lot of taking the driver license test 18 years ago-- most of the questions, despite having kids interrupt and distract me, were anyway pretty obvious what was the right answer.
The question for the drivers license I always remember was:
"If you come to a railroad crossing and the gates are down do you:
A: drive around the gates
B: look both ways for a train, then drive around the gates
C: wait for the gates to go up"
The gun safety related questions were pretty much the same. Only on one, I clicked "unload the gun" as it was first in the list of answers and I didn't read further to see "point muzzle in safe direction", which was the correct "first step".

 

[crackerdave]

Welcome!

There are answers to any questions you might have on this forum.Folks are great about sharing their knowledge here.