According to Dr. Don T. Jacobs, author of Teaching Virtues, "hunting is the ideal way to teach universal virtues," including humility, generosity, courage and fortitude. As I said in The Sacred Hunt, "Hunting teaches a person to think with his heart instead of his head. That is the secret of hunting."

Consequently, the most successful programs ever conducted for delinquent boys have focused on hunting. The taking of a life that sustains us is transformative experience. It’s not a video game. Hunting is good medicine for bad kids because it is good medicine for all kids.

Hunting is a model for living. When we hunt we discover that we are more than the ego.

That our life consists of our ego in a mutually interdependent and transcendent relationship with nature. We keep returning to the field because for us hunting is a dynamic ritual that honors the animals and the earth on which we depend both physically and spiritually.

While interviewing Felix Ike, a Western Shoshone elder, I asked him, "What kind of country would this be if the majority of men in it had been properly initiated into hunting?" He replied, "It would be a totally different world."

In a world imperiled by egoism and disrespect for nature, hunting is morally good for men and women, boys and girls. Hunters understand the meaning in Lao Tzu’s statement,

Some aboriginal peoples believe that the Creator made us perfect, too, and that He made us to be hunters, dependent on nature and close to the earth. Like Narcissus, civilized humanity has fallen in love with itself and turned its back on its hunting companions and its animal kin. Heed the teaching of the ages summarized in this admonition from Loren Eiseley, "Do not forget your brethren, nor the green wood from which you sprang. To do so is to invite disaster."