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Bow hunting or bowhunting is one of those sports that you either love or you hate – a little like fox hunting in the United Kingdom. Town people hate it and anybody concerned with it and country people see it essential to cull wild animals that could otherwise become a pest.

Despite its macho image, which was encouraged by the film the Deer Hunter, there are growing numbers of women who go bowhunting. The big distinction between hunting with a rifle and hunting with a bow is distance. A hunting rifle with telescopic sights can deliver enough punch at 600 yards to take down a deer with a single shot almost wherever it is hit in the chest.

On the other hand, a hunter using a bow with a fifty pound draw weight will have to be within about forty yards to be able to deliver the same sort of lethal punch, if the shot is accurate to the heart.

This means that if you severely wound an animal from 600 yards, it will most likely be dead by the time you get there, climbing over fallen trees and rocks, but if you severely wound a deer from forty yards you see its anguish.

This has a sobering effect on most bow hunters. The overwhelming majority of bow hunters do not want to see this and they do not want the animal to suffer either, so they wait for the perfect shot. If it is not there, they do not shoot.

A hunting bow has to have a draw weight of at least fifty pounds to hunt large game and that used to mean quite a hefty recurve or longbow, but the compound bow was developed in 1966.

A compound bow makes use of pulleys to assist with the draw, which permits less beefy people to accomplish a draw weight of fifty pounds, which has opened up bowhunting to women and adolescents.

Large wild animals are dangerous and some will attack without warning if they feel threatened. This leads to a danger zone around wild animals. Every sort of animal has a danger zone, for a lion, that could be pretty large and for a deer less so. This danger zone is an locale outside of which you are fairly safe.

If you are hunting with a gun, you can stay outside that danger zone without difficulty, but with a bow and arrow, well, you often have to go within it. This enlarged danger supplies a greater rush for bow hunters – a bigger thrill. Especially if they are hunting bears or mountain lions.

In contrast to the Deer Hunter, most bow hunters go on organized trips these days. The hunting trip is organized with the aid of a specialized firm which will present guided excursions into areas known to have large numbers of the animals you want to hunt.

These expert guides know how to bait areas to lure your prey; they can advise on safety aspects and they carry a big gun in case a hunter is too stupid to take their advice. Regrettably, the gun is to use on the animal, not the idiot.

Owen Jones, the author of this article writes on several topics, but is presently involved with compound hunting bows. If you would like to know more or for special deals, please go to our website at Kids Archery Set.

Archers have played a key part in warfare and hunting for thousands of years. Primitive bows were made of a single piece of wood, but composite recurve bows were being manufactured from Greece to China as far back as the second millennium BC.

Recurve bows, those with the ends facing the ‘wrong way’ when unstrung, are more powerful inch for inch in length than one piece wooden bows, which made them more suitable to confined conditions such as on horseback, in a chariot or in wooded areas.

Bits of composite recurve bows, usually made from horn, have been discovered in many parts of the world. Early arrows were made from naturally straight twigs or pine needles with napped flint tips attached. Wooden bows did not keep so well and examples are scarce.

It appears that archery was being developed in the early Mesolithic or late Paleolithic Age. Archery was particularly well developed in some Islamic countries and in Asia, where Zen Buddhist monks utilized archery as an element of their meditation techniques.

In the early days of archery, there were mixed sentiments about archers. In those days, people fought hand to hand with swords and spears and some of the traditionalists thought that archers were cowards because they attacked from a distance out of direct danger. This point is made very obvious in ‘The Iliad’, Homer’s account to the siege of Troy.

There are or were many types of bows made to suit different fighting or hunting conditions. Some varieties of bow are the; long bow, short bow, recurve bow, composite recurve bow, reflex bow, decurve bow, deflex bow and crossbow among others.

The longbow was extremely hard to learn to use and the archer needed massive upper-body strength. The bow was often six feet long with a weighty three foot long arrow. The draw weight for maximum power was around a hundred pounds and the function of the bow on a battlefield was as long-range artillery.

The heavy arrows and vicious armour-piercing arrow head would rain down on the enemy from a hundred yards or more and penetrate shields and armour as if they did not exist. Shot horizontally, the three-foot arrow could pass through a couple of people.

In fact, the longbow was so essential to the triumph of Great Britain that a law was passed making it obligatory for men over a certain age to practice with their longbows every Sunday on the village green in order to develop the required skills and upper-body strength in case war came.

The arrows are made to suit the different kinds of bows and the different bows and their specific arrows are suited to different kinds of hunting – whether you are hunting men or animals.

There are essentially two types of shooting: instinctive shooting, which is very difficult as the archer does not take his eyes off the target, but does not sight down the arrow; and sight shooting where the archer makes use of sights to align the arrow with its target. The majority of people find sight shooting simpler.

Owen Jones, the author of this piece writes on several topics, but is presently involved with archery recurve bows. If you would like to know more or for special offers, please go to our website at Kids Archery Set.