The Thrill of the Hunt

Go fish and hunt far and wide day by day -- farther and wider -- and rest thee by many brooks and hearth-sides without misgiving. Remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth. Rise free from care before the dawn, and seek adventures. Let the noon find thee by other lakes, and the night overtake thee everywhere at home. There are no larger fields than these, no worthier games than may here be played.

-Henry David Thoreau

One of my acquaintances was making a reference to my holiday caching, and he said something about "I guess it was just about whatever trinkets you found." I didn't correct him on that one, but you geocachers out there know what it is that makes this game so darn addictive, and it has nothing to do with the trinkets.
I have decided that the reason so many people like geocaching (1000 new members a day, currently at about 1.5 million players) is because most people like to hunt things. I think this goes back to our early years, before the domestication of animals and the development of crops, back in the hunter-gatherer times. We still have an urge to hunt, but that urge has no outlet.

I know from working with animals for so long that the best way to entertain an animal over the course of the day is to provide it with food items for it to "hunt", or "forage", or to sniff out. Before we started domesticated animals and changing their environment to suit our purposes, they, like us, had to hunt for their food, whether it be smaller prey animals or fruits and berries, certain plants, areas of grasslands. Animals developed special abilities over time that aided them in finding their food or avoiding being food themselves: the acute sense of smell in a dog, the wide-spaced eyes in herbivores (in order to scan the horizon for threats), the prehensile tongues and tails on some of our "exotics" (e.i. the long tongue on a giraffe that enables them to reach further for food). Engaging an animal in the hunt for food is the best prevention for behavior abnormalities.

Like our animal friends, we are wired for the hunt ourselves. Geocaching provides an outlet for those of us who would like the thrill of the hunt without the kill of the find. Hunting game is still a popular outlet for many people, and although there are people out there who still hunt for food (my in-laws), we have the convience of grocery stores now that kill and dress our meat for us and have our berries and fruits washed and cleaned and put in nice little packages for us. It will never stop "hunting" from being a pasttime of some people, and certainly there are other reasons for legitimate hunting of animals (such as conservation), but the point is that that not every person enjoys the killing aspect of hunting. Even so, we are still wired to hunt.

The finding of a geocache satisfies this urge, and for most players, this is what it is all about. Sure, there is usually "swag" in the containers (low cost trading items), but for most people, these trinkets are not what the game is about. This is why the most common abbreviation in most logs, besides TFTC, is TNLNSL - short for "Took nothing, left nothing, signed log."

Recently I checked on one of my caches that was hidden in October of 2006. It had been out for fifteen months and 23 people had found it since I had hidden it, and almost all the swag that I had originally stocked it with was still intact. The common thought on swag in the Groundspeak forums is that it is there for the children, who enjoy opening up a container full of "booty" - without the swag, children quickly lose interest. My children enjoy trading items from the containers, and for them that is what keeps them motivated to cache with me. Most adults, however, leave the swag alone and simply sign the log and move on.

For me, and I suspect for most of us, it is about the thrill of the hunt. It is that certain excitement I get as I see the distance on my GPSr counting down, as I get within 40 ft and begin my search, the feeling of accomplishment I get from finding something hidden from the uninformed, the spotting of a camoflaged container. Of course, we all still love shiny things, which is why trackable items are so popular, and I will discuss those in another post. If it was only about geocoins and travel bugs, though, we would not waste our time hunting caches that don't have the cool icon next to them.

It is the feeling of excitement of walking through the wilderness searching for something that is difficult to find that keeps most of us going out, over and over again, to search for ammo cans in the woods and film canisters in the urban environment. It is a search that takes us back to our roots, that makes use of our over 400,000 years of human involvement in hunting and the special skills we have developed as a result. It is the thrill of the hunt, and the fun in the find, that keeps us going.