Caroline Pruitt has been around hunting her entire life.
"Growing up here," she said last week, looking around the living room of her parents' Nacogdoches farm, "I'd go on white-tail deer (hunts) with my family."
Michele Marcotte/The Daily Sentinel |
Caroline Pruitt, 15, poses with a Namibia leopard she shot with a 30.06 Remington model rifle. Pruitt is one of two hunters worldwide to receive the 2010 Safari Club International and Cabela?s Young Hunter Award.
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But in 2007, Pruitt and her family traveled to Zimbabwe where she learned she had a natural skill for hunting more than just deer. The discovery led her to other hunts and eventually to apply to one the most prestigious youth hunting awards in the world, the Safari Club International and Cabela's Young Hunter Award.
The award requires applicants to produce letters of recommendation from both school administrators and SCI chapters, compose an essay and demonstrate conservation and community work, as well as exhibit stellar hunting and outdoor experience and skill.
"Most people don't get it on their first try, and they work forever on it," Pruitt said.
But that wasn't the case with Pruitt. Following a two-year application process that included trips all over the world, the completion of several conservation projects and more than one adventure requiring snake boots, Pruitt received word earlier this year that she had been selected as one of two 2010 award recipients worldwide.
"I didn't believe it at first," she said. "It hit me a couple days later."
Pruitt noted that for quite some time, hunting has been a predominately male sport, but the increase in female participation has made it an exciting time to be a hunter.
She said she feels she's a role model to other young girls, many of whom might be more inclined to try hunting themselves because they see someone their age doing it.
Over the course of the past two years, Pruitt has taken on many adventures as a hunter, many of which enabled her to witness other cultures and ways of life.
"There are so many experiences ... so many things I've learned," she said.
Among those experiences was a trip this past May to Vancouver Island, British Columbia, to film a hunt with celebrity hunter Jim Shockey.
Pruitt said during the trip, she took a bear at 20 feet with a bow and arrow, one of the "most exciting adrenaline rushes" she's had.
"It's really rare that you drop an animal with a bow shot," she said. "... Sometimes you have you shoot them (with another weapon), but he ran for about 30 yards and the he went down because, I hit him in the lower part of the jugular."
Pruitt said Shockey told her that out of the 12 bear hunts he's had with bows, nine of them had to be backed up with rifles.
"Mine just went straight through," she said. "It was crazy. I was like 'did that just happen?' Seeing a bear when you're a little kid at the zoo is just completely different than seeing it up close and it actually wanting to eat you. It's incredible."
In addition to the Canadian hunting experience, Pruitt's hunting travels have taken her to Cameroon, where she was named a princess by a local tribe, as well as to Namibia, New Zealand, Argentina and South Africa. When she's not taking on animals twice her size, Pruitt works with the Pineywoods chapter of Safari Club International to promote conservation and humanitarian efforts.
Currently, Pruitt is working on a project called Sportsmen Against Hunger, which encourages individuals to donate any extra harvested wild game meat to hunger relief organizations.
"We're talking to game processors and people in Nacogdoches, saying 'if you have extra meat, give it to us," she said, adding they in turn will donate it to the needy,
In addition, the day before the Safari Club International January convention in Reno, Nev., where Pruitt will formally accept her award, the entire Pruitt family has agreed to volunteer with the Salvation Army to serve homeless.
"A lot of the outfitters donate the meat, and the Salvation Army cooks it the night before the convention, and we're going to go up there and serve those dinners," said Pruitt's mother, Lori. Her father is Kerry Pruitt.
She said some of her daughter's previous humanitarian work included having blind students from Stephen F. Austin State University be brought to the farm for her daughter to introduce them to different animals that had been donated by the local taxidermist.
"We let them touch them and become familiar with the animals and then we were also able to give them horseback rides," she said.
Lori said the entire family is overwhelmed by the places they've been in the last two years and where this hobby has taken her daughter.
When asked about future goals or aspirations as a hunter, Pruitt shrugged.
"There are so many directions that I could take this, and I'm just excited to see where it takes me," she said.
