Many people have different opinions about women and hunting because it is still taboo in some societies. Brooke Jordan Dzara, the host of CRCS Outdoors, talks about the humble beginnings of the program. She shares her journey as a young woman exposed to hunting and how she coped with all the expectations and reactions that society has towards hunters and reached a common ground with them. Today, more women are entering the world of hunting mainly because of influencers like Eva Shockey. Brooke shares how Eva’s book, Taking Aim, is so relatable and influential to many women hunters hoping to make a mark in the hunting society, and offers some of the best lessons she has learned from life in general and from whitetail hunting specifically.
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CRCS Outdoors Educating Future Deer Hunters – Brooke Jordan Dzara
We’re going to Western New York. We’re going to Colorado because that’s where Brooke is. Brooke Jordan Dzara and her dad, Scott Jordan, are the hosts of CRCS Outdoors. Brooke, welcome to the show.
Thank you, Bruce. Thanks so much for having me.
If you caught the Facebook Live with Brooke, you know a lot about CRCS Outdoors, but we’re going to start the show right there because it’s a unique opportunity for people, school districts, school systems, to get involved and mentor kids about the outdoors. Brooke, let’s talk about the start of the program and where it is.
If you didn’t catch the Facebook Live, I’ll go over a little bit more about the beginning of the program. CRCS Outdoors began in 1993, the year I was born, when my dad started teaching at Cuba Rushford Central School in Western New York. He had a group of eighth-grade boys approach him. They loved his science class. He was teaching shark dissections. My dad asked what they would want to do extra outside of school. They said they wanted to do something big. Long story short, they have created a working fish hatchery, a wildlife center, a wetland facility, a manmade pond with a research facility, a whitetail deer research facility, all at a public high school.
My dad on top of that is still an eight-grade science teacher. He’s still doing shark dissections and all of the things that he did with the eighth-grade students continues. The Fish and Wildlife Program is offered two periods a day to all of the kids in high school. He is also still doing Envirothon. If you’ve ever heard of the Envirothon, it’s an environmental science exam competition. That’s something they do every year. We bring hunters, fishermen, into the classroom to teach hunting and fishing lessons in class at a public high school, which is pretty amazing. The last thing is the television show is run right out of our classroom. There are student editors that are able to do a lot of the work on our national television show.
To wrap your arms around it, their TV show is seen on Pursuit Channel. They get approximately 50,000 views on each show. They’re in seven seasons. It isn’t just the classroom because of your dad films all around the world.
Outside of the classroom, my dad since I remember, has been taking people on trips around the world. He’s never missed a summer. He’s been going to New Zealand since I was in fifth grade, Alaska earlier than that, and we have done Africa. During the year, we’ll do things in Florida. He’ll take kids gator hunting in Florida, places like that. We have been all over the world and that momentum isn’t stopping. The hard part is nothing is funded. Many of the things that they do, like the programs, they’ll write grants. A lot of times kids raise their own money to go on the trips. The trips are open to adults and children, but obviously, my dad can get the best deals for kids at cool places like that.
Is he in New Zealand right now or is he home?
He just got home. I’m going to sign him up for his own podcast as well. I run all of the social media. My dad is like, “You’ve got to set it up for me if you want to me to do something.” He’s been gone for ten days. They were with another television show, Bone Cold TV. If you’ve heard of them, they are mostly online now. They went together and took students with them.
We hear a lot of different chatter, social media about hunting, not hunting, anti-hunting. Is it good for kids, bad for kids, guns in school and all that? We find somebody like yourself and your dad that’s making a difference in a super positive way because, one, it’s a curriculum in high school. They get the journey, the experience. I had a guest. We were talking about hunting isn’t always about the kill. It’s about the journey. Let’s talk about your journey as a hunter, as a woman who hunted, grew up in a hunting family. You won some awards as a youth. Why did you win those awards?
The major award, which is the Safari Club and Cabela’s Youth Hunter of the Year to me felt like winning the Miss America of hunting. There are a couple of different qualifications for that award. One, you have to be a role model. Two, a part of that, you have to have community service and a lot of outdoor experiences as well. You’ve got to have the grades. It’s a well-rounded award is the point. Hunters are not just hunters. Hunters are changing the world in many different ways, but that hunting is at the forefront.
For me, my journey started very early. We have three girls in the family. My mom had asked my dad after I was born, “Do you want to try for one more and see if you get a boy?” Dad said, “No. They’ll be fine. She’ll do.” From the time I was little, there was deer hanging in the backyard. I was helping gut deer from the time I was tiny. It didn’t seem weird to me. I was a part of regular life. I’d go trapping with dad. Sometimes he’d take me with him, which was fun from a very young age. Where things started to change was when I was about six years old, dad set me up with a .22, asked me to target shoot and see how it went. He set up this mushroom and had me shoot it. He said if I got it, he’d get me an ice cream sundae. I was six. I was super excited about that. I took three shots and it didn’t seem like it did anything.
He was like, “Sweetie, that’s okay. We go up to it.” I had three holes in a pattern in the middle of the mushroom. We knew that was a good shot from the time I was little. It’s one of those things where it builds confidence in you as a kid when you’re being successful at something. For me, it was an interesting journey, particularly as a woman because as a woman, you’re bombarded with a lot of different messages throughout your life. I was very small as a child. I tried sports as a little kid. My dad always joked that he didn’t think I’d be an athlete because he didn’t think I could run. There were a lot of things that I wasn’t super great at from a young age.
Singing and shooting were things that I was natural at. You wouldn’t guess that because the blog that I have is a jack of all trades, master of some. The idea of, “I’m passionate about doing as many different activities as possible.” As I grew up, I became a three-sport athlete. I was in the theater. I was a dancer for seventeen years. I hunted. I fished. I did all these things. That confidence came after being good at shooting and being in the outdoors. I got a lot of messages through middle school all of a sudden that hunting was weird and hunting wasn’t cool, which was hard for a middle school girl that wants to fit in and be well liked.
If you can get inside a preteens brain, that’s the ultimate thing that you want. That was hard for me in the beginning. I’m also pretty feminine. I’ve always loved dresses. I have two sisters, mani-pedis and all those kinds of things I love, too. Growing up I was under this impression that you could only have one way. You couldn’t have both because I didn’t have female mentors that I felt showed me I could have both. I grew up conflicted between the camo life and the feminine parts of me as well. After my first big game hunt, which ended up wasn’t a whitetail because in New York State when I was growing up at the time you had to be sixteen to hunt a whitetail.
I hunted little things. After I got my hunter safety course, I got a turkey. My first big game animal was a red stag in New Zealand. That totally changed everything for me. We’ll talk about women in the outdoors, confidence and things like that, but to put it all in one space, I was still small and weak. At that age, I just turned thirteen. I went with other girls who were a lot bigger than me, a lot stronger than me, a lot tougher than me. I had exercise-induced asthma at the time. I thought that was a good excuse to be like, “I’m having a hard time on this mountain. I’ve got exercise-induced asthma.” My guide pulled out an inhaler and was like, “You don’t have an excuse,” like he was too.
How did you deal with that? That was in your face.
I was like, “Okay.” I had to toughen up. After I got the stag, I had to carry one of the whole legs down, which was practically my size at the time. I didn’t hit my growth spurt until I was fifteen. That whole experience made me so much tougher. I went and shot up a wild goat in the same trip. We got a little lost for a while and had to carry it fit style on a stick over our shoulders. I was miserable. I was like, “Dad, this is so hard. I can’t do it.” He was like, “You have to, there are no boys. Either you do it or you stay on the mountain.” Those two experiences culminated in one week and totally changed me. It made me so much tougher. I felt so confident when I accomplished them. I came home. I was a different kid.
Audience, you’re thinking about this and saying, “Brooke got put in a situation.” A lot of people would not get put in that situation. The same thing could happen in the backboard or at your grandparent’s farm in Western New York or it doesn’t matter. All of a sudden you realize, “If it’s to be, it’s up to me,” and you have to man up and you can say woman up, too. You have to man up to the situation. Some people never get that opportunity to put themselves in that place. Myself, I love athletics because I had to do it or I’d get run over. In football, it would hurt if I didn’t bring it. In track, I would lose. It was pretty cut and dry. There wasn’t any, “Better luck next time,” you either did it or you didn’t do it. What I’m trying to get across is hunting puts you in that place. It could be quicker than any other situation because some people wait until you get the work, get in a work situation. They either do it or don’t, they get fired. It’s easy. They lose their job.
It’s so refreshing to hear a young woman such as yourself that early on was exposed. That’s the journey of hunting. It exposes you to so many situations. Forget about traveling halfway around the world as a young person but getting out in the mountains because the mountains don’t care who you are. They don’t care how much money you have or how smart you are. They’re going to take the best you that you are at the time. You’re either going to let the mountain beat you or you’re going to at least become friends with the mountain because you never conquered the mountain. You can summit and I get that. You’re never going to conquer that mountain because at any time, if you travel enough, if you’ve been in mountain situations, mountains can flat kill you easily.
It’s refreshing to hear that story and to be able to share this with thousands and thousands of young women that question those whispers. You alluded to that. I want to camp on that because there are so many voices speaking into you. We know families are fractured in the United States. We know school systems have their own agenda. We know your peer groups. We know social media is ripe with people that try to rip each other apart, especially women. Guys not so much. If I have a grip and grin, I don’t get too much grief. If you go with a grip and grin with a stag from New Zealand, somebody may say, “You killed that? You’ve got to be the lowest person in life.” Has that ever happened to you?
Yes, I’m lucky. Our social media has had to grow super organically because I made a mistake when I created it many years ago. We can’t pay to advertise on our Facebook. Otherwise, we have to start all over and I’m not willing to do that. We remained in this safe kind of bubble. There were a few times I had to make my Instagram private because of some nasty people on social media. I am afraid of that. At the same time, I’ve grown tough skin about it because I live in that world of social media. I understand how many people are trolls, how many people don’t care, how many people who get on there and say something rude but don’t even have a profile so you can’t even go see what they’re all about.
I have defended my way of life since probably sixth grade. I remember the first time somebody mentioned to me, it was a good friend of mine, and she was like, “I don’t like that you do that.” I was like, “What?” Especially because where I grew up, it was pretty accepted. It was more when I went to college and have grown up that I’ve had to defend myself. Part of the whole package for me and with my husband, we’re both young working professionals. We’re educated. We’ve been all over the world. We can speak to the lifestyle without ruining it because one thing that we do as hunters sometimes is hurt ourselves if we don’t use those opportunities to educate. If you only use it as an opportunity to hate back and forth with someone, you’re not going to get anywhere. It doesn’t make us look good. By taking the time to educate people, Mike and I have flipped a lot of people who were anti-hunters at least into non-hunters who don’t hate hunting.
How do you reach common ground? How do you do that?
What works for me is I am a huge foodie, as I messaged you about, and I am a huge advocate for eating organic. That has been great for the movement. This idea of knowing where your meat comes from, going and harvesting it yourself. Most of the time, most people that I find nowadays that I encounter who don’t eat meat are against factory farming. I have quite a few friends who are vegetarian or Vegan because they are not okay with the idea of factory farming. Now that’s not to say that farming is bad. A lot of messages about what goes into McDonald’s and what goes into Tyson chicken nuggets and things like that has turned people away or at least turn people to be like, “Where is that coming from? I want to know.”
It’s the same with even our vegetables and things like that. People want to know where their food comes from and that they’re sourcing things in an environmentally friendly way. I have reached a lot of common ground. My roommate is a vegetarian, was raised vegetarian her entire life. She eats meat that we bring home. I’ve had a couple of experiences like that. The people that I’ve not been able to reach a common ground with. I’m like, “I understand why you wouldn’t be okay with it if you’ve never been a part of it.” It’s hard for some of us to imagine, but there are places where hunting is not even a conversation. All they’re going to hear is, “People kill animals for fun. That’s terrible. Why would you do that?”
If you can take the time to educate people like that and say, “This is why we do what we do. This is how money is used for conservation.” You have to know everything. You need to know the whole circle of information instead of being probably my least favorite, hunter’s commenting back at anti-hunters would be like, “Your brain isn’t as big as mine because you don’t eat meat,” or something silly like that. I’ll be like, “That’s not helping” because we do have the opportunity to change people’s minds if you take the time, do your research, explain to people and don’t be a jerk about it either. That’s the hard part because sometimes it makes us angry. I used to get mad at first because I felt so attacked. If I was able to harness that anger and make it an educational moment, it would be better for everyone.
The key thing that I talk about all the time is common ground and to talk about sharing knowledge, or if the person is open, the transfer of knowledge and communicate in such a way that we’re not threatened. Many times, I remember people say, “Do you hunt?” I used to respond, “Yeah. I kill stuff.” That’s probably not the best way to make friends and influence your neighbors. It definitely isn’t. Now I say, “Yeah, I hunt and I travel a lot. I’ve traveled all over North America and visited so many different cultures. Plus, I got some great organic meat.” I never bought any meat at all. I love meat. The buzzword, I have a friend, Sam Ayres, Living Country in the City. He’s a podcaster. He’s right in the LA, Hollywood. He works in Hollywood. He talks to people all the time about, “I have my own organic places to go. I get it all. I prep it. I can tell you to the square foot where that animal came from and what it’s been eating on.”
People go, “How does that work?” He’s got a conversation going. We’re our own worst enemy. We get testosteroned up where we shouldn’t. We should say, “That’s an interesting thing. Have you ever hunted? Did anybody in your family ever hunt?” Get some background. You don’t know where they’re coming from. People only know what they know. It sounds simple, but that’s all they know is what their whole culture is. If they never had the culture of hunting in their family, they need somebody to say, “Let’s talk about it. Let’s have a cup of coffee or better yet, why don’t you come over and I’ve got some great steaks I’m going to cook on Saturday. This is venison. This is elk. This is moose. This is a bear.” Whatever it is and you go, “This is pretty good. That’s what I eat and I don’t go to the store.” Your thoughts on that?
I have for years, especially my college girlfriends, we all lived together. Whenever I cooked, I fed them venison. After a while, they were like, “I don’t even notice the difference.” It was so interesting to see a couple of them go from apprehensive about it to being supportive of our program and sharing the joys. Now I send them pictures when I get something. They’re excited about it genuinely because I’ve taught them why they should care through conversation. I only had probably one or two people that I’ve walked away from the conversation, be angry and they were unreasonable. Anti-hunters that word is so nasty, but you can make anti hunters non-hunters through education. Non-hunters who are supportive because you need that as much as you need people hunting. You need people to support you.
It’s the common ground that we know we’ve shared enough campfires with the other people. It doesn’t matter who you are or where you came from. If you’re around that campfire someplace in the world, it’s common ground. It’s an unbelievable community. You think about one of the things you want to talk about and we’ll talk about women in the outdoors, but you mentioned there you were a young girl at six years old, the dad gives her .22 and says, “See that mushroom, take some shots and we’ll have an ice cream cone or sundae after it.” You did it. It created confidence because you achieved something.
That is dad’s whole mission. I talked to him on the phone because I always ask him how did the kids do and how did they change? This whole thing with the trips is that they are worldwide and they are for at least a week to ten days. He said the greatest change in the kids is confidence. This kid who went on the New Zealand trip, dad was like, “He’s a different kid. I can’t believe the confidence that this kid has in himself,” because you are accomplishing something. Some older hunters will say, “The kid can’t get something on the first try. They need to work hard for it.” Dad agrees but at the same time believes that if you make it too hard from the beginning, kids will lose interest and will go find something else.
There are too many other things to compete with. If you want to get kids into hunting, you need to make it a good experience. Not set them up, not tie something up and set it up for them. The idea is that hopefully, you do work with them to make it a good experience that they enjoyed and that they felt successful at. They build that confidence in themselves. They aren’t going out twenty times and sitting through the cold. They don’t ever even see anything. They feel like a bit of a failure or that they’re unlucky or whatever it is. Confidence is the number one thing that kids can achieve through hunting, and for me personally. I was mediocre at a lot of things before hunting. I became good at a lot of things after hunting for a variety of reasons.
I got to travel the world, see different cultures and understand how other people live. I was successful at something. I was always good at shooting. I aim to only ever shoot an animal once. My hope is always that I can take them down with one shot for many reasons. I feel my success can be feel contingent on that sometimes. When you work hard for some things, you’ve got confidence built. You’ve started in the hunting community. Maybe you’ve gone after some small game and been successful, now you’re willing to put in the work for something greater and bigger, put the time and the effort to be successful. When you are successful, it feels so much greater because you have worked so hard. You have to build that foundation with kids first. You can’t be like “Life is hard. This is going to be hard and you’re going to like it.”
You said a lot right there because it is the situation. We mentioned it about putting yourself into the place to succeed at something. Life is steps of building blocks. Think of all the famous football athletes. It doesn’t have to be football but any athlete. They didn’t start being the number one person in the world. You watch a great golfer. They didn’t start doing that. They did a repetition. Success builds on success. That’s why so many athletic programs, especially in high school and college, they have a formula for success because it’s bred into expectation. They have it down. There’s the school in Denver that has won so many championships. It’s a private school.
When you go there, you’re expected to win. Sometimes that’s good. Sometimes that can blow up in your face because if you don’t meet the expectations, then hard things come. If the expectations are set in the right way, hunting is a pure endeavor. It’s you in the mountains, you in the plains, you someplace and trying to figure out, how to outwit this buck that lives on 40 acres and that can take a lifetime to do. It’s the challenge. I’d like to ask this of all my guests. You’re a young woman and you know a lot. You’ve traveled a lot. What would you say is the one big thing that you wish you knew five years ago that you know now in regard to hunting?
Before five years ago, that’s a good number because it was around that time five years ago that I got my award. The year I got my award was around the same time that the Sandy Hook School shooting happened. After that happened and I knew that I was going to get my award in January, my dad was like, “You need to step up your knowledge base in regard to understanding why we hunt.” It’s one of those things that when you’re lucky enough to grow up with it, things are ingrained, things make sense naturally. That’s when I had to kick it into gear and say, “This is why I do what I do because my way of life is going to be threatened.”
I would’ve told myself long ago to begin to understand that at a younger age because it took through my early twenties to understand the whole circle of knowledge. I would encourage younger people, younger hunters, if you want to see this way of life continue, you need to educate yourself in our world whether that be understanding the economy, understanding conservation, things like that. You need to know your stuff because otherwise, you won’t be able to use those educational moments. You’ll be another person in the crowd screaming insults at people who don’t know why you do what you do.
Let’s talk about your favorite hunt up until age fifteen. We’ll do until age twenty. We’ll do until age 25, three favorite hunts.
I wasn’t able to get a whitetail deer until I was sixteen. One of my favorite hunts I was in eighth grade. This was the year following the red stag hunting that we talked about. I called in a turkey by myself and shot it. It was so exciting. You know how turkeys are like, it gets you so riled up when you’re calling back and forth. I could use a mouth call at the time pretty well. This bird came into view. I was sitting on a tree. It was a beautiful day. It was this opening in the forest and dad was behind me filming. All I ever wanted when growing up was to impress dad by doing it all by myself. It’s hard because hunting is a group effort sometimes especially when you’re on such large tracks of land like at home. This bird comes in, it’s gobbling. The gobble sounds younger. It didn’t sound like a beastly old Tom. I’m so excited. I can’t believe that I’ve called it in myself. I shoot it. It turns out it was a bearded hen that was gobbling. You would never know. It was absolutely insane. She had two beards.
That’s legal.
It’s a bearded bird. That’s why I shot it because I saw, I was like, “It’s got a great beard.” It wasn’t in a full puffy strut when it came in. It was walking. I was smoothed down. It has a beard, but it had two beards. That was a funny one.
You had that on film too.
Unfortunately, the film has changed so much since then. A lot of our stuff that we filmed back, you couldn’t put on TV. That was probably one of my favorites when I was young. The big game stuff I was absolutely in love with.
Let’s talk about your first whitetail.
I’d like to talk about two whitetails. My first whitetail, I had to go around the world to shoot big game because at the time you had to be sixteen. They moved it maybe to fifteen like I was on the cusp there. Now it’s fourteen if I’m correct in New York State. It’s still higher than a lot of other states. It was a cool short hunt. I have put in the hours. I have done thirteen-hour days in a blind, freezing cold, numb toes, things like that. This was one of those pleasant, short hunts after school. My dad came rushing home after school. He was like, “Get your gear, there’s a buck right out in the open on our property.” I was like, “Okay.” We got all geared up.
We went. We put on a stalk and he was still there. It was one of those it felt like it was meant to be because he waited an hour from the time we got gear, came and got me, we came back. We did a stalk. He’s still there. He gave me a perfect broadside shot. I knocked it right down right there, one shot. He was a five-point buck. He was injured, which is why he was hanging around that spot. He had like an arrow through the back leg. He wasn’t totally crippled. He couldn’t walk. He probably would’ve struggled through the winter. We were super excited about that. That was my first whitetail. I was very proud of that.
Was that with a rifle?
Yes. I used a 7mm-08 Savage for everything. We can rifle hunt deer at home, but there are a lot of places around us. You have to use a shotgun. I’ve always loved rifle hunting because I feel it doesn’t pressure the deer in the same way, but some people have no choice. There are some counties you can’t. My husband grew up where you could only use a shotgun. We were lucky to gain access to the land near us, a friend’s property who lets us hunt. They have big deer every year. It’s big for us especially. My whole thing was I want to take a nice eight-point because we want to practice quality deer management. It was my junior year of college. I’ve had gotten great eight points, great for me, but they weren’t a special class or anything. The deer picture I sent you is the deer I’m speaking of. We called it the Mammoth. We were in a huge blind, putting in the hours and snow. It was freezing. It was always a magic time.
Right around when the deer are coming out in the field and we had multiple windows to open and close that had pictures of human shadows on them. They always think that there’s a person standing. It looks like a person’s always standing in the windows so they’re not confused. We saw this eight-point come into view. He was a decent looking eight-point. We were super excited. We had to close this window and open the other window. While I was in the process of opening the second window, the deer switched places and this giant deer comes into view. He was 140 class. I stopped looking at the antlers so I wouldn’t be so nervous. I had no idea they had switched in between the windows. I shot this gigantic deer. I had no idea because I was not looking at the antlers. Dad was like, “It’s a great eight-point. It’s going to be awesome.” We walked up to the deer. He went right inside the woods. We were like, “I have never encountered a deer this big in my life.” I had no idea because I was trying to put a good shot on it. I could sit between the antlers. It was the widest deer I’d ever seen.
Let me get this straight. You’re in the blind, is it a box blind or a pop-up?
It’s a box.
You’re in a box blind and you see this deer and say, “We’re going to kill this one, but we’ve got to shut this one and I’ll go here.” Between the time of opening and closing windows, Mr. Wonderful walks out. You don’t even know it’s Mr. Wonderful, and you drill him.
I become a different human being when I am centered in on that rifle. I am still practiced in my breathing, almost meditating, trying to be calm because if it looks big, I’m going to probably start to hyperventilate and not be able to deal with it. I was like, “We know he’s good. We checked he’s an eight-points. I’m going to focus on my shot.” Dad was on the camera. He could see a deer but not see how giant he was. We’d already seen him so we were focused on doing our thing.
For the last couple of years, my friend, Kirstie Pike started Prois. For the last several years, women have been the fastest growing segment in the outdoor industry. It could be from kayaking to free climbing, mountaineering, hunting and fishing. Why is that? Why do you think women have overshadowed? It’s not even close. They’re kicking butt.
I finished Eva Shockey’s book. She talks about this. There was a huge surge particularly in archery for females because of Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games. There was this national excitement about the idea of hunting being in a blockbuster film. It is a normal, understandable part of life. Eva was talking about how Katniss inspired a lot of girls in a big way at the time. Also, I feel like women are much more encouraged now to do what is considered masculine activities in a big way. That has changed a lot, female empowerment, those kinds of things. Whereas when I was growing up, I didn’t know a lot of female hunting mentors. There are a lot out there for young girls.
There’s Eva’s book.
It’s Taking Aim.
Ladies, it’s worth the read. Guys, it’s worth the read. It’s not because her name is Eva Shockey, but there are some good nuggets in here, talk about sharing knowledge and the hunting experience. It’s a great book.
I loved reading her book because so much of the experience felt similar between her and me, and her dad and my dad. Eva and I met multiple times. Jim presented me my award back in 2013. I didn’t even know who Eva was yet. I was star struck meeting Jim and Eva popped up and was like, “We should go hunting sometime.” We emailed back and forth for about a week. Not long after that, I remember both of our grandfathers died. She blew up right after that. She went through the grieving phase there, blew up, and became super popular after that. We never made it happen. I have watched her grow ever since I didn’t know who she was. She’s the biggest female in the industry, which has been amazing. I’m excited that little girls have someone on that level who teaches girls that they can be feminine and they can be hunters. It’s not a mutually exclusive thing.
Like Kirstie Pike when she started with Prois, she was sick and tired of wearing men’s clothes. That was the drill. Steve, her husband, she would get stuff from him or whatever. It was like, “Stop, it’s not cut right. It doesn’t fit me right. If I’m going to hunt hard all day, I need something that’s going to work for my body.” It’s a huge industry. Not only that but the TV shows, Lee & Tiffany, husband and wife. More and more TV shows where women are the star of the show. You get a lot of film time on your own show. What advice do you give to ladies when they reach out to you and say, “I’m not a hunter, but I want to be a hunter by lifestyle?” What do you tell them?
Through our program, we also do focus on women on getting women in the outdoors. I’ve had the privilege to be on some of those hunts and have taken one of my college girlfriends to take her first animal. I’ve had a couple of girls be like, “How can I do this without a mentor?” A lot of the women that I know or that I’ve helped have had the mentors through our program to help them become hunters. If you’re in the middle of the city, it’s not so easy. A lot of the times what I will direct people to first and foremost is if you are serious about it, you’ve got to get your hunter safety because there’s nothing I can do before that.
I’ve sent a lot of people that way. At home, we have women, female leaders who run our hunter safety courses. A lot of them are interested in archery. I’ll talk to them about hunter safety first, “Let’s go to a range. Let’s go to an archery club and do that first.” I’ve got friends here right now asking me to do that. We have plans to take them to a rifle range and the Archery Club to see would you even be comfortable. A lot of people who that you’re talking about in this light probably have never shot a gun or a bow and arrow, to begin with. As far as women, in particular, wanting to be a part of the lifestyle, I would want to tell them that you can be both. You can be a huntress. People will look at me sometimes and say, “You don’t look like a hunter.” I’m like, “What do you think a hunter looks like?” It’s probably the first thing I’ll ask. “What do you think a hunter is supposed to look like? Do you think they look like cave people?” That always cracks me up. The idea that ladies, you can live an outdoor lifestyle and still be a girl. It’s okay.
We’re going to wrap up and talk about some of the lessons learned. We touched briefly on a lot of them. If you had to take three that you’ve learned and that will summarize the show, let’s share that.
I wrote down life lessons through hunting in general but also whitetail specifically. Number one is endurance. I feel like in our ever-changing world, we have the ability to change our minds a lot and to do lots of different activities. If something is too hard or something is going too slow, we’ll move on to something else. This idea through hunting that it teaches you endurance of your mind and endurance of your body is something is important for the kids that are going to be growing up in this very technologically advanced world where we’re moving so fast.
If you want to think about it mentally and physically, hunting makes you sometimes cold like colder than you’ve ever been in your life. You might have to sit in it for thirteen hours. It can make you bored if you do not see anything and you have to sit. It can also be extremely grueling. If you are spot and stalk hunting somewhere, that’s tough. My favorite hunt to talk about was my tahr hunt in New Zealand in 2014. I hiked twenty miles on the side of a mountain and had to carry him on my back. I wanted to give up most of the time. I wanted to cry. At one point, I always joke, “We made it down this valley.” We were probably 30 yards from camp.
I have this goat on my back. I have hiked twenty miles. I was so spent. I have all this weight on my back and I fell in the water. I told my dad to leave me there. I was very serious. Tears, everything, and I was like, “Kill me. Leave me here.” My dad was like, “Brooke, it is 30 yards that way.” I was like, “I don’t care. I’m not getting up one more time,” because I was so spent. I had been stuck in a scree field. I almost went down a mountain on a scree field because I had to crawl sideways across the scree field. I’d never been more terrified. At the end of the day, when we finished it up, I felt so accomplished.
Our guides in New Zealand that we absolutely love were like, “You become so mentally tough that you can handle it because you’re going to have to get up and do this all again,” which made me want to cry even more. That was an amazing lesson for me that you have to endure. You have to mentally and physically endure things that other people don’t. That’s okay because it makes you a better person. That would be one. Two would be, respect for life. One of the things that I’ve had within me since I was young is I did struggle with the killing aspect of hunting. I am a super empathetic person. I go fishing all the time and I still sometimes feel sad when I have to hook through a worm and see him like writhe in pain.
I know it’s a worm. For me, I’ve always had this intense respect for life. My dad taught me through hunting how to honor an animal that has given its body to sustain you in a very spiritual way. Dad used to make us do a Native American tradition of eating a piece of raw liver or heart from big game animals on site. I’ve done that six times. It is awful. To basically be like, you need to suffer too because you’ve taken this life and you need to appreciate it. I have walked away. I have missed opportunities to kill an animal because I didn’t feel it was an ethical situation. Therefore, I have let some things walk. I don’t have a black bear yet. I hunted hard backpack hunting in Alaska with my dad.
The only shots I had was a small bear, which I said, “Absolutely not to,” and a bear who only presented me basically across Adam’s apple, which could have been okay. I felt that I couldn’t make a great shot. Therefore, I wasn’t going to try on that shot because it was not only would it probably wound and hurt the animal. Now I’ve got an angry bear that I shot. I’m in the middle of the wilderness I’m going to have to deal with. I’ve had multiple occasions with that. That’s why most of the time I shoot an animal with one shot because I refuse to take something too risky if it’s going to harm an animal who I’m trying to ethically take out essentially. I respect their life so much.
Let’s end with your third one.
That’s going right off of what I said. I believe that you should put 100% in your first shot. That can be applied to your entire life. Why would you do anything if you’re not going to do it 100%? It has been my dad’s motto my entire life. Don’t just half-ass anything, always try your best to do your very best in whatever activity it is, whether it’s sports, music or a job interview. Always put 100% in your first shot because you have no idea what opportunities could open for you. In the case of hunting, hopefully, put your animal on the ground so that you don’t have to spend the next day chasing it around or chasing a blood trail.
Brooke, this has been a joy. You’ve laid a lot of content, great information. We’ve touched on a lot of places that I can’t wait to get your dad on the show. With that, on behalf of hundreds of thousands of followers in North America, thank you so much for being a guest on Whitetail Rendezvous.
Thank you for having me.
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Ever wondered what education could do? Brooke Dzara and her dad, Scott Jordan, has figured out over the last couple of years that students want to be outdoors. They want to be engaged and they want to have projects. They want to go big or go home. It’s all this pointing to was a special project out at CRCS. That’s a secondary school where students came to Dr. Scott Jordan and said, “We want to do something.” They created a trout pond. “We want to do something.” They created a deer observation area. They wanted to do something so they went and traveled the world and looked at environment impact, especially in the hunting and the outdoors. That’s a very special program for her dad. They are well-known throughout the world for the work they are doing. With mentoring and educating kids, that’s what it’s all about. That’s our recruitment and they are doing it.
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About CRCS Outdoors
If you were ever wondering who we are and what we do, here is a brief report. CRCS stands for Cuba-Rushford Central School and the outdoor program is an extension of our Fisheries and Wildlife Technology classes. Our motto is making a difference “one young hunter (fisherman or student) at a time. “
In 2011-12, the school’s environmental programs were featured in national magazines and television. CRCS Outdoors was featured every Saturday morning on the Pursuit Channel with 26 original shows produced right at CRCS and highlighted graduating film editor Cody Card. However, the programming would not have made it on air without support from our outstanding sponsors KA-BAR Knives, Western & Central New York Chapter of SCI, and the TRI State Chapter of SCI!
As we all know the future of our hunting and fishing heritage rests in the hands of our nation’s youth. If we do not do our part and get them out there early, research says all may be lost. New York State has been slowly doing its part by lowering the hunting age and providing youth seasons. CRCS Outdoors has been making a conscious effort to do our part by providing area youth with opportunities that they may not get elsewhere.
CRCS Outdoors hopes to expand nationally and bring the study of fisheries and wildlife/ hunting and fishing into the mainstream of the nation’s educational platform, and to promote student-centered scientific research, studying natural resource conservation, aquatics, wildlife, forestry, land stewardship, biology/ management and conservation, Math/ Science and Technology, GIS, satellite images, remote sensing, radio telemetry, data collection and analysis. Through these opportunities, students are also exposed to numerous career development opportunities as well as gaining ownership in what they do through choice in what they learn and gaining responsibility.
CRCS Outdoors has traveled to South Africa to hunt, as well as annual trips to Alaska, New Zealand, Texas, and locally around NYS and PA. Students enrolled at Cuba-Rushford have the first option to participate on trips and opportunities, after that, these projects and trips are open to any student, anywhere!