Experience Counts: The Ashley Game Knife – By Steven Dick
Honest evaluations of “hunting knives” have their own special challenges. Many so called “sporting blades” are really general purpose outdoor cutlery created by people that never venture afield. Serious hunting knives, on the other hand, are designed for outdoorsmen (and women) to field process game with everything else being secondary. As such, they are not necessarily ideal for camping, bushcraft, survival, whittling or “EDC” utility tasks. Trying to evaluate them by using them for any of those other duties is “dry labbing.” You need to shoot something to make a real story of a hunting knife!
Of course, the first problem for me personally is both deer and elk seasons are fairly short and limited to a narrow window in the fall and early winter. As I said earlier, there is also the fact you actually need to bag something if you are going to use the knife (I have occasionally solved this problem by volunteering to field dress and skin a friend’s kill).
This article originally appeared in the May 2020 issue of Knife Magazine. Premium Online Members can read the whole thing by clicking the blue box below.