To hunt in Texas, you must pass the Texas Park and Wildlife’s Hunter Education course. It tends to be only offered prior to Fall hunting seasons, so to hunt like I did I had to get my license with the course deferment then ensure I took the course within a year. So, that’s all now out of the way. All done, don’t have to take it again.

I wanted to give a review of things, both of the course and my experiences.

The Course

I took the course as offered by the Austin Rifle Club. It consisted of two days: Friday evening and all day Saturday. Most of the material is classroom, and there is a live-fire event.

I took the class with Daughter. I asked Oldest if he wanted to take it, but let’s just say that he’s learning about priorities. It so happened that foo.c was also in the class too. A good number of students were minors; probably a slight majority.

The course itself is overall a good one. It discusses a wide range of topics related to hunting. From firearm basics (e.g. types of rifles), to safety (gun safety, hunting safety, rudimentary first aid), hunting ethics, game identification, and even things like how to field dress a deer. I think the material covered is useful because they can’t know what level of experience people will have coming into this, so they have to start at the beginning. The problem of that however is it then requires a lot of material to be covered. There’s only so much time in the course, thus to be so broad it cannot go very deep. If any topic was explored in-depth, it was hunter ethics, and I think that was a worthwhile thing. Another problem with such a wide amount of topic coverage is if you already know the stuff, it makes the class boring. While I understand some aspects here, it’d be nice if there was a way to place out of this. For instance, me being an NRA Certified Rifle Instructor, it’d be nice if I would have been able to bypass a fair portion of the course material. But again, I understand the course construction and it’s generally fine how they do things.

After a lot of classroom instruction, there is a 50 question multiple choice knowledge test (closed book). Then there’s a short round on the gun range, which appears to be more about evaluating safe gun handling than it does marksmanship or anything else. There is no instruction on the shooting portion… you need to know how to shoot. The only instruction given was if you borrowed one of their rifles, they of course showed you how it operated (e.g. safety here, magazine release here, etc.).

All in all, I thought it was a good course and, while it was long, I was glad that I took it. A lot of the information was stuff I already knew, but I know Daughter didn’t know a lot of the material so it was certainly good learning for her. For me, seeing the video on how to field dress the deer was probably the most informative. I wish that was on YouTube (went looking for it via my iPhone during a class break, couldn’t find it).

I will say, there is apparently a home-study option for this course. If you are a long-time hunter and shooter and know your stuff, you may be better off doing the knowledge portion via home study. For instance, to hunt via the lotteries of some states you must have an education certificate so some folks that normally don’t need to take the course may need to take the course so they can do such things. So if you’ve the long-term experience, that may be less painful for you to do; then just find a way to do the field course. If you have less hunting knowledge/experience, especially for all young people even if they have gone hunting, they certainly should take the classroom course. There’s a lot they will get from it.

Personal Experience

The hardest part for me in the course was just that it was long. The gentlemen teaching the course were very knowledgeable and friendly, but they weren’t the best teachers. They just weren’t that engaging, mostly reading from their notes or the handbook. Every so often they’d break off and talk about things, tell some stories, or some such, and that would be good. But they just didn’t feel like the most engaging of teachers, especially for all the young folk in the class. This isn’t to say they were terrible; they did just fine and obviously the kids got the needed information as I think most everyone passed the test. So, the job was done.

For Daughter, it was tougher. The first night went until 10:00 PM and that’s way past her bedtime. Then having to get up very early the next morning to head back was tough as well. I also wish they could have done the shooting portion first thing Saturday morning instead of at 2:00 PM, when it was 100º+ outside. But they did it how they did it, and thankfully the outdoor portion didn’t last too long in this oppressive heat.

What also made it tougher for Daughter was the test. I recall looking over at her and seeing her holding back tears. At the time I wasn’t 100% sure why she was breaking down, but I just put my arm around her and kept encouraging her to do her best, to go to the next question if that one was stumping her, and just trying to continue to encourage her and support her through the test. I spoke with her afterwards, and the main issue was just testing overload. She just wasn’t sure about some questions and that number of “I don’t know” seemed to stack up against her. She didn’t want to fail the test, so she built herself up a lot of pressure. I will say that was one tough thing about the course (especially for the kids). There was a great deal of information presented in a limited amount of time. Often times the answer to one question might have been covered in the span of 5 seconds and if you missed it you missed it and there’s just no way you could reason your way to the right answer. Furthermore, some questions would be things that were of questionable merit. Does she really need to know what a percussion cap looks like (not is, looks like)? It’s arguable, but I’d say questions about hunter safety and ethics were more important. I watched her mark her answers, and I noticed that the questions that really mattered she did just fine on; maybe not knowing the answer right off the bat, but was obviously able to reason it down and mark the correct answer. She had the most trouble on more esoteric knowledge. But, since you don’t need a perfect score to pass, such questions are able to be missed and still produce a passing score. Daughter did pass, so no real troubles. Once she found out she passed, all her stress over the test was gone. 🙂  In fact, the gentlemen running the course complemented her on her tests (hey, she shot a better group than I did…. she used our scoped Ruger 10/22, I used one of the club’s Winchester bolt action .22’s with open leaf sights).

As an aside, looking back on things, I realize that during our lunch break (written test was after lunch) I should have gone back over the course handbook with Daugther. Problem was simple: with the new iPhone we were both wanting to play around with it and so we did. I’m sure if we spent time reviewing prior to the test, she would have fared much better.

Anyway, long days, but good days. I learned something. Daughter learned something. We’re both certified. And Daddy and Daughter had a lot of good time together.