CCE Summer Internship: A New Orion – Locavore, Hipster, Hunger Games Survivor? Who are the next generation of hunters?

As a part of ongoing research on changing demographics among hunters and anglers in the US, I recently worked with an intern via the Cornell Cooperative Extension Summer Internship Program to conduct a popular media literature search using the internet. Not surprisingly, we found quite a large conversation on the World Wide Web regarding the topic of the next generation of hunters and anglers and their relationships with local food movements. Thanks to summer intern Lauren Poindexter and the efforts of CCE Educator Moira Tidball of the Wild Harvest Table, a better understanding was gained regarding the way the world is talking about the next generation of hunters and anglers and the various social movements of our time.

Lauren Poindexter, CCE Summer Intern explaining our research to Cornell U. President Garrett

Our internet Google search produced some interesting results.

 Note that the inclusion of search terms “fishing” or “angling” dramatically increased search result hits. Also note that the proportionally larger search result for “women hunting for food,” likely a result of imprecise and/or multiple search terms, does not appear in the pie chart.

We found that there are overlapping yet distinct categories of what we might think of as the next generation of hunters (and anglers); (1) new levels of female participation; (2) the growing trend of hunting among so-called “hipsters” and “millennials” (undefined herein, intentionally); and (3) the expanding locavore, food/environment issues driven hunting trend.  Academics, myself among them, are busy attempting to understand this complex mosaic representing the New Orion- the Next Generation of Hunters. Stay tuned for the results of that work.  

Meanwhile, we've compiled a reading list of 15 articles found in the popular press dealing with these issues within the last ten years  There are 5 from each of the categories mentioned above, organized and color-coded for easy reference.  They are hyper-linked under the heading “Source”.  

Title	Source	Date
Wisconsin aims to put more female fingers on the triggers	Wisconsin State Journal	2013
More Women Give Hunting a Shot	National Geographic	2013
The Professional Women Who Hunt, Shoot and Gut Their Dinners	New York Times	2013
ICYMI: All The Cool Girls Go Hunting For Food	Organic Authority	2013
All the Cool Girls Hunt Their Own Food	Jezebel	2013
The Rise of the Hipster Hunters	Sporting Classics	2015
Hipsters Who Hunt: More Liberals are Shooting Their Own Supper	Slate	2012
On Hipsters and Hunting	Field & Stream	2015
Hipster’s are Going Hunting	Maclean’s	2014
A Profile of a Hipster Hunter, the Next Generation of Conservationists	Outdoorhub	2015
The Changing Culture of Killing for Food	The Texas Observer	2014
Locavore movement takes to deer hunting across US	Yahoo News/Assoc. Press	2014
The Meat-Eater Revolution	Petersen’s Hunting	2014
Locavore, Get Your Gun	NY Times	2007
The Hunt to Table Movement	Isthmus	2015

There are many articles to explore this further, as our search results described above confirm.  These, however, seem to most completely capture the complexities of the issues, and preserve the nuance of each category, while providing a reasonably comprehensive lay understanding. For a more academic treatment of this subject, see here. 

In an effort to further understand, from a textual analytic standpoint, what the popular press is saying about the next generation of hunters and the links between local food movements, I entered all 15 of the above articles into a textual content analytical tool and generated the below word cloud.

The words that seem most prominent are Hunter, Food, Meat, Hunt, About, People, Deer, Women, More, and New. Though mostly what one would expect, the word About is unusual, perhaps alluding to the difficult-to-meet need of the New Hunter seeking More Food in the form of Meat to learn About hunting and how to process and prepare Meat. Stay tuned for a forthcoming paper addressing this and other salient topics.