CHULA VISTA, Calif. — The three-bedroom apartment Brady Ellison shares with two fellow archers near the U.S. Olympic training center has three floors, with one bedroom off the garage, a kitchen and living area on the middle level and two bedrooms on the top. It isn’t fancy. There are two decorative touches, however, that make Ellison stand out from most every other Olympian.
A deer head and a Corsican (long-horned) sheep head mounted on his bedroom wall.
The trophies are just two of the many animals Ellison has hunted, either with a rifle or his preferred weapon, the bow and arrow. “It’s much harder with a bow because you have to get so much closer,” he said. “With a gun, you can shoot stuff from a thousand yards. I’ve killed animals at 92 or 93 yards with a bow, but most people aren’t going to do it from more than 40 or 50 yards.”
PETA members, start your engines.
“It’s something humans have done forever, so there’s that whole side of it. But it’s also fun. It’s exciting. You get to be outside,” Ellison said of hunting’s allure. “You have to be smarter than the animals, which sounds a lot easier than it is because they smell and hear so much better than we do. You’re trying to outsmart them and getting close is just fun. The adrenaline rush I get is better than shooting in tournaments. And the animals taste better.”