For most hunters, the motivation is strong to go out and try to kill their own animal for consumption. It has to be, because of its costs: wildlife identification card (Cad $8), basic wildlife certificate ($22.85), white-tailed deer licence ($31.75), economy deer rifle ($300), firearms licensing ($18), cartridges for practice and hunting (approximately $50). Our hunter's outlay is $421 for a month of hunting. That is about the cost of a two-day weekend of skiing or golfing in Banff, if you pinch pennies.

What are the benefits to the successful hunter? A mature whitetail buck will provide about 50 kilograms of succulent lean meat worth about $300 at supermarket prices. Wild-killed venison, however, is priceless because it is illegal to sell it in Alberta. For one deer, our hunter has paid $3.80 per pound. Many hunters legally harvest four deer per year on various draws and permits and can bring the cost down to under a dollar per pound. The occasional moose or elk is an additional jackpot. Alberta is one of the few places where even urbanites can make a reasonable economic argument for subsistence harvesting.

But hunting is much much more than economics. Venison meals also bring a sense of satisfaction found in harvesting from nature. To make this real to non-hunters, consider how home-canned raspberry preserves not only taste better than store-bought, but they bring a pride and satisfaction to our tables that makes them quite different from anything Smuckers can deliver. Many people find it easier to give thanks over a venison roast than a pork loin, for example. Hunting for one's meat protein also becomes an act of community and shared experience. The organized pursuit, kill, processing and packaging, predispose us to share this bounty. Offering parts of one's kill to landowners, hunting party members, family and friends is the norm. In contrast, when was the last time any of us bought beef or poultry to distribute to our friends?

What about the meat? Venison is to beef what homegrown tomatoes are to those tasteless hydroponic things at the supermarket. Venison has an identity and a character; there are thousands of ways it can be enjoyed. The same deer may provide peppery oven-dried jerky, butter-broiled loin medallions, slow-cooked cubed stew meat, smoked hams, garlic sausage and . . . well, you get the idea. Sure, we cook it differently but, then again, we cook bacon and chicken differently, too.

Cattle have been bred to store fat, called marbling, between their muscle fibres. Deer store their fat between skin and muscle, much like chickens, so it is easily trimmed to provide a very healthy, low-fat meat. Venison also contains approximately twice as much iron as beef, and iron is one of the most common nutrient deficiencies in North America. This is all natural, organic meat that was born, raised and killed quickly in its own unfenced living space -- the ultimate free-range production system.

Despite all the rational, logical, social, health-related and culinary reasons to hunt, most hunters go out because it is so meaningful, personally rewarding, and fun. Our modern world consists of contrivances and conveniences, synthetics and climate control; many people deeply crave the elemental and basic process of re-connecting to the earth.

We hunters find it gratifying in a spiritual realm to take responsibility for our food. Approaching the steaming carcass of a freshly killed white-tailed deer on a snowy hillside reinforces the profound realization that other things must die for us to live. Hunters do not live in a state of denial or belief that our bacon, broccoli and bullion just come from IGA.

A deer's death at our hand provides a lesson in reality, mortality, and validates that we are vividly alive and connected to the earth again. This is a rare and precious gift that can fundamentally change the way we see our world.

This gift contains the seeds of an environmental ethic. Hunters carry some of the strongest commitments toward protecting the land that produces the deer and associated creatures so that deer descendants may thrive and bring life and meaning to future generations of hunters in wild native habitats.