I’m Indigenous Canadian and I grew up in a traditional lifestyle of hunting and trapping. I was about 8 when my hunter/trapper father taught me how to use a shotgun to shoot geese. No ear protection and spent a month out in the bush every spring and a week in the fall shooting at animals. I was about 12 when he took me out for my first moose hunt with a high powered rifle. No one knew that we were destroying our hearing with every shotgun or rifle blast without ear protection. I can remember shooting my single shot shotgun and then listening to my brothers on either side of me ring out shots on their pump action or semi automatics right next to me … and then talking to everyone in that muffled deep tone and everyone’s distorted voices for an hour after. Then the high pitched ringing that would last a day or two after. Didn’t know it at the time but I had destroyed my hearing. The ringing subsided after the hunt and I never knew I had done permanent damage, not until years later. I was about 25 when I noticed a constant high pitched ringing and it has grown louder since then. I’m almost 50 now and the ringing sometimes drives me nuts but I just live with it now.