Eva Shockey, one of the most recognizable women in outdoor television, says she has faced criticism throughout her career for refusing to fit a particular mold of what a hunter is supposed to look like.
Shockey told OutKick’s Tomi Lahren on “Tomi Lahren is Fearless” that pushback has followed nearly everything she’s done since entering the hunting world.
“Pretty much everything I’ve done in the hunting community, there’s been pushback since day one,” Shockey said. “It’s never been where everyone’s like, ‘Yeah, she’s doing it right.’ Like, it’s just never been like that.”
Shockey is the daughter of well-known outdoorsman Jim Shockey, but she didn’t take up hunting right away. She has said that one reason she stayed away from it growing up was that she didn’t see women who looked or lived like her participating in it.
When she did start hunting, she decided she wasn’t going to give up other parts of her identity to do it.
“I didn’t hunt because I didn’t know you could be this — have hair and makeup and care about your nails being done — and also love to hunt,” she said. “I love being in the mountains. I love hiking. I love wearing camo, but I also like still looking feminine.”
Her approach was straightforward.
“If I’m gonna hunt, I’m still me,” Shockey said. “I’m not gonna change who I am because I want to go hunting.”
A Changing Industry
Shockey began her career in outdoor television alongside her father at a time when hunting media was dominated by men. Social media later opened doors for more women and new personalities to enter the space and find audiences who looked more like themselves.
She’s careful not to take credit for that shift on her own.
“I got to really ride the wave of a big change in more women starting to hunt,” Shockey said. “It wasn’t me personally. Like, no, I’m not going to take all that credit. There was a bunch of other women before me. I just got to be a bit of a face of it and represent a lot of women through those last 15 years or so.”
She credits social media with making hunting more visible and accessible to girls who might otherwise never see anyone like themselves doing it.
“If young girls want to see someone shooting a bow or they live out in the country and they’ve never seen a girl hunt — which was little Eva back in the day — they can open social and see people doing what they want to do,” she said.
She’s also clear that her own style isn’t meant to be the standard.
“I’m by no means everybody’s style,” Shockey said. “Not everyone wants to see someone with, like, hair and makeup done. But there’s lots.”
Messages From Fans
Shockey said thousands of young women have told her over the years that her message gave them permission to hunt without changing who they are.
“I had a lot of girls, thousands and thousands of girls over the years, come up to me with basically relaying that to me,” Shockey said. “Like, ‘I’m so glad you said that we could hunt and not be embarrassed of who we are or what we look like or where we’re from or whatever that looks like.'”
She said the point isn’t limited to appearance.
“Maybe it’s not hair and makeup,” she said. “It’s just you want to be who you are and still enjoy hunting. You don’t have to transition into a hunter and leave everything else out. Like, we all have more elements than that.”
A Broader Shift Toward Self-Sufficiency
Shockey said she’s also noticed growing public interest in gardening, sourcing food and other elements of the outdoor lifestyle over the past several years.
“It’s changed a lot in the last five years,” she said. “I think people are very interested in that lifestyle, and they’re very interested in growing things themselves, hunting things themselves.”
Rather than expecting people to go all in, she said she’d rather see any level of engagement encouraged.
“The things that I believe so strongly in — like the outdoor life, the hunting, the gardens, the healthy food for your family, the fresh air, all that — I believe it’s such a great thing,” she said. “Even if they’re doing 10% of it, that’s 10% better than not doing it.”
