Yes....and its easyer to acompish when removing or minimalizing hasards .always the first point in an on sight saftey meating.
Exactly.
First question before starting work: is the thing we’re doing unsafe?
If yes, do we have to do it?
….
Yes.
Yes, we HAVE to climb trees to be really good at killing really big or really lots of deer really efficiently. So show me how to do that safely.
The above is the reason that the internet isn’t the appropriate forum to discuss the risks of climbing trees to hunt deer.
If we treated hunting like an industrial facility or job site, the answer would be a resounding YES, followed by a resounding NO.
But we don’t. We ignore or paper over reality, because it feels better to do it. It helps with the cognitive dissonance.
Being honest with yourself about why you hunt, and being honest with yourself about why you climb trees to hunt, is the first step to treating your hobby appropriately from a risk perspective. It’s fundamental to these types of conversations.
If your answer to that is “dude it’s my free time, I just want to go hunt and not listen to your big words or do calculus to figure out if I might die when I’m more likely to die in my car”… I get it. My response is, if you want to be lazy about one aspect of huntjng (risk and safety management) and that’s what you’re doing - being lazy…if you want to be lazy about one - how about be lazy about not climbing trees all the time. You just might find that you kill more deer, and don’t get hurt in the process, and don’t waste a bunch of time and money in the process.
The whole logic falls apart. Unless you’re not being honest with yourself about why you hunt. Because the behavior makes way more sense if you hunt to make people like you. If that’s your North Star, climbing trees unsafely to do it might be worth it. I can’t do that math for you.
What I can do is say that I hunt to make people like me. And being unsafe to do that isn’t worth it. And I kill over half my deer from the ground, on private and public. In La, Ms, Ar, Tx, Al, Mo, Fl, Co. In thick cover and open woods. In early season and late season. In rut and not rut.
This isn’t a plug for ground huntjng. It’s framing.
You don’t have to climb trees to hunt.
And if you do, the absolute worst place to get your climbing techniques and advice from is the internet.