Commentary: Sportsmen no strangers to eating locally

Hunters and anglers are the ultimate in eating locally, and most probably don’t realize they are pretty trendy.

Their meat isn’t shipped from thousands of miles away by tractor-trailer or plane. Their fish don’t come from Asia. Their meat hasn’t been locked up in crowded pens and filled with hormones and antibiotics.

I know the grouse we had this fall came from the Boise Front 16 miles away. I know the upland game bird had been free-ranging in the mountains eating organic berries and leaves and nothing else.

I knew the birds I saw were healthy by the way they were flying and how I was missing shots. I know the chukars we ate along the banks of the Salmon River were as organic as you can get. Talk about super delicious.

The ducks and geese we eat aren’t from a meat packing plant near Chicago. They’re fresh from the Snake River about 60 miles away.

Although the northern ducks and geese are from about 1,000 miles away, they come here under their own power while migrating south, not in a big rig burning fossil fuels.

The steelhead leave our hatchery to the free-range pasture in the ocean and make the return trip on their own several hundred miles up the Columbia and Snake Rivers to where sportsmen can enjoy all the healthy flesh the fish have put on their bones.

We’ve gotten to know local meat processors and how they run their operations. Many sportsmen do their own butchering. Hunters really know where their meat comes from because they’ve looked it right in the eyes.

You can’t help but knowing its quality because you shoot it, dress it out, cut it up, wrap it and freeze it. It doesn’t get any more personal than that.

It’s not like unwrapping a burger at a drive-in and having no idea about where the food came from. You have no idea what that animal was like, where it was raised and how it was cared for.

Hunters and anglers have been going green for centuries. And when you go hunting and fishing, you respect what you shoot, hook and consume.