{"id":13072,"date":"2016-07-07T13:29:09","date_gmt":"2016-07-07T19:29:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=13072"},"modified":"2016-07-07T13:29:09","modified_gmt":"2016-07-07T19:29:09","slug":"late-convert-to-hunting-hoping-to-share-her-passion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2016\/07\/late-convert-to-hunting-hoping-to-share-her-passion\/","title":{"rendered":"Late convert to hunting hoping to share her passion"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Bead\"<\/a>

Ed Kemmick\/Last Best News<\/p>

Anna Kania gets a bead on a clay target outside her Shepherd-area home. She recently started a business that will have women teaching other women how to hunt.<\/p><\/div>\n

For most of her life, British-born Anne Kania had what she called a typical aversion to guns\u2014typical among opera-singing, liberal-minded Englishwomen, anyway.<\/p>\n

She thought that guns were a barbaric throwback and that hunting was only for rednecks.<\/p>\n

When she first visited Montana to see Bruce Kania<\/a>, the man she would eventually marry, her views began to change.<\/p>\n

Bruce lives near Shepherd, home to his business, Floating Islands International<\/a>, which creates and sells man-made wetlands that remove pollutants from bodies of water. She learned that he was a hunter, an avid hunter of birds and big game.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was appalled, and yet\u2014curious is not the right word\u2014but I was very curious about hunting,\u201d she said. \u201cI had to reconcile my prejudices with his reality.\u201d<\/p>\n

There was more to her curiosity than that, though. She had long felt guilty about being a meat eater who allowed others to provide her with meat, guilty about being so unconnected with the process of taking another life.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat was the pivot point for me to get involved in hunting,\u201d she said. \u201cThat and Bruce handing me a shotgun one day.\u201d<\/p>\n

She did some shooting during that first visit, then went out with Bruce when he hunted pheasants later that same year. Even after she learned how to shoot, she said, \u201cI didn\u2019t know at that point whether I had it in me to kill something.\u201d<\/p>\n

It turns out she did, as she discovered when she made her first kill, on a return visit to Bruce\u2019s place in 2006. It was a deer, killed at close range because she was using a shotgun loaded with buckshot.<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>Immediately, she said, she felt two warring emotions\u2014exhilaration and guilt. She still feels them, every time.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s like a guilt, or a sadness, or a shock at what I\u2019ve done, and then the excitement kicks in, the thrill and the pride and the gratitude,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Since marrying Bruce in 2007, hunting and fishing have been a big part of their lives together. Their honeymoon was a fishing trip to Alaska, and during the bird-hunting season they go out almost every day on their 340-acre property, which they have managed to make possibly the most productive pheasant habitat in Montana.<\/p>\n

\u201cSometimes at lunch we\u2019ll jump some ducks, or after work we\u2019ll just walk around the property,\u201d shotguns at the ready, she said. It\u2019s a great way of keeping an eye on the property, of getting exercise, of spending time together.<\/p>\n

Her passion for hunting is now so strong that Anne is making it another aspect of their business on the land near Shepherd. This winter she founded Joy of Hunting<\/a>, which will involve women teaching other women to hunt.<\/p>\n

As much as she loves to hunt with her husband, she said, she discovered that learning how to hunt from him was not entirely a pleasant experience. It\u2019s hard to be equal partners when one is the rookie and the other is the expert teacher.<\/p>\n

\"Kania\"<\/a>

Ed Kemmick\/Last Best News<\/p>

For much of her life, Anna Kania wouldn’t have dreamed of picking up a gun, much less going hunting.<\/p><\/div>\n

It didn\u2019t help, she said, that Bruce has to be \u201cvery intense\u201d at whatever he is doing. \u201cI learned by trial and error and being yelled at,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI thought, God, there\u2019s got to be a better way to learn to hunt.\u201d<\/p>\n

She elaborates on that point on the Joy of Hunting website: \u201cUp until now, pretty much the only option was to learn from the guy who maybe taught you to drive, or to ski or. … Remember? Or at an evening class, where you get told what to do but there’s no chance to practice. If you were lucky, your partner would thrust a gun in your hands and tell you to \u2018shoot this\u2019\u2014but it was so uncomfortable you quickly gave up. If you weren’t so lucky you simply got left behind while \u2018he\u2019 had all the fun. Or maybe you had no one to teach you.\u201d<\/p>\n

She also wanted to share with other women her own particular approach to hunting, a deliberate, reverent approach.<\/p>\n

She still doesn\u2019t care for trophy hunting and she never enjoys taking a life, not even the life of an insect, but if you eat what you kill, and kill cleanly and respectfully, she said, it can be very satisfying.<\/p>\n

\u201cI just think it\u2019s made me more conscious of life, of the value of life,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

With bird hunting, everything happens so quickly that you barely have time to think before you shoot. The time of respect comes when one of her dogs\u2014she and Bruce have three yellow labs\u2014delivers the bird to her hand.<\/p>\n

Even when she kills a diminutive snipe, she said, she always pauses to think about the animal, or especially in the case of pheasants, to admire their great beauty.<\/p>\n

\u201cI always try to look at it with a great reverence in mind,\u201d she said. \u201cYou need to develop a ritual to stop it becoming mundane and blas\u00e9.\u201d<\/p>\n

The experience is more intense with big game, not only because of the size of the animal but because of the nature of the hunt.<\/p>\n

Hunting big game, she said, \u201cyou\u2019re just watching and listening, watching and listening, being very still and just part of the landscape.\u201d<\/p>\n

And when you do see a deer, for instance, you take a long, hard look at it to determine what kind of deer it is, whether it is male or female, whether you\u2019ve got an opportunity for a clear, clean shot.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019ve got a lot more time to study it, to think about it,\u201d she said. \u201cYou build up more of a relationship with it,\u201d deepening the sense of reverence. As she says on her website: \u201cThis is how it is, for me: life-and-death, unadulterated realness that goes beyond justification or criticism. It is elemental.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Rooster\"<\/a>

Ed Kemmick\/Last Best News<\/p>

One thing Kania does to remain a respectful hunter is to consciously acknowledge the great beauty of the pheasants she kills. This mounted rooster was harvested on the Kanias’ property near Shepherd.<\/p><\/div>\n

Part of what she hopes to teach women interested in hunting is the value of the \u201cpaleo diet,\u201d which she and Bruce both follow. That means eating fresh, wild game and vegetables from your own garden, and generally avoiding anything that you couldn\u2019t eat raw if you had to.<\/p>\n

At 61, Anne knows she\u2019s getting to her second career as a hunting teacher a bit later than most people take up a calling. But she waited a good long while to get around to her first career, too.<\/p>\n

Born in Sunderland on the northeast coast of England, she learned to play the recorder as a child and later performed with a Baroque music group. She became interested in singing as a result of playing with that group, and when she was in her early 30s she took her first vocal lessons.<\/p>\n

Her teacher once told her she was a good natural singer, adding, \u201cyou could have had a professional career if you\u2019d started 10 years ago.\u201d But she stuck with it, becoming a professional singer in 1995 and moving to New Zealand, where she was a contralto soloist who performed across the country with choirs and orchestras.<\/p>\n

\u201cI got enough work to be happy,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

She met Bruce in 2003 at a \u201cMore to Life\u201d course put on near Atlanta. The life-training course helped people with their social, psychological and spiritual development. Two years later, Bruce invited Anne out to Shepherd, where she began her initiation into the world of hunting.<\/p>\n

She plans to offer her first hunting programs\u2014multi-day sessions during which attendees will live at Floating Islands International\u2014during the bird-hunting season this fall.<\/p>\n

As part of the course she will give instruction in land and water stewardship, drawing on the work they have done to restore and develop wetlands and waterways on their property. Part of their work has been the development of pheasant habitat.<\/p>\n

Through the refinement of planting and harvesting strategies, the proper use of pesticides and predator control, Bruce says his property might harbor more pheasants per acre than any other place in Montana.<\/p>\n

Anne said they have been documenting rooster kills on their property for the past seven years. In the first year there 17. By the seventh, that number had risen to 207. The land also attracts lots of geese, fair numbers of ducks and also snipes and doves.<\/p>\n

Their house sits on a bluff overlooking a big bend in the Yellowstone River. At the edge of their lawn they have an automated clay-target thrower. Anne thinks it must be one of the most picturesque clay-shooting spots anywhere.<\/p>\n

She will be getting some teaching help from a hunting partner of hers, Andrea Mahorney, who lives in Idaho. They are both going to Bismarck, N.D., this weekend to take a shooting course that will allow them to qualify as certified coaches.<\/p>\n

Their own courses, she promises, will involve \u201cwomen teaching women the way women want to be taught.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anne said she was recently speaking to an acquaintance who expressed interest in taking her classes. The woman said her husband didn\u2019t want to teach her how to hunt because he was afraid she\u2019d shoot their dog.<\/p>\n

Anne said she responded, \u201cYup! You\u2019re exactly the right client for me.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For most of her life, British-born Anne Kania had what she called a typical aversion to guns\u2014typical among opera-singing, liberal-minded Englishwomen, anyway. She thought that guns were a barbaric throwback and that hunting was only for rednecks. When she first visited Montana to see Bruce Kania, the man she would eventually marry, her views began […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13073,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,18,16],"tags":[4650,788,4652,4651,373],"class_list":["post-13072","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture","category-diversions","category-montana","tag-anne-kania","tag-bruce-kania","tag-floating-islands-international","tag-joy-of-hunting","tag-shepherd","prominence-top-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13072","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13072"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13072\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13073"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13072"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13072"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13072"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}