Hunting Knives

Hunt­ing knives vary greatly by ap­pear­ance, which is de­term­ined by their dif­fer­ent func­tions. At the dawn of the his­tory of fire­arms, hunt­ing knives were full-fledged cold weapons and were cru­cial be­cause some­times it took too long to re­load guns. The blade size of early hunt­ing knives was much big­ger than the blade size of mod­ern hunt­ing knives. Bowie knives were used in Amer­ica, big dag­gers in Rus­sia, and spe­cial hunt­ing dirks in Europe. Today, a knife is more of a hunt­ing ac­cess­ory so its cut­ting char­ac­ter­ist­ics and di­men­sions dif­fer from the stand­ards of the pre­vi­ous cen­tury. A mod­ern hunt­ing knife is not a weapon, but a uni­ver­sal tool used to skin game and to dress a car­cass.

Hunt­ing knives dif­fer by types of design - from up-to-date ex­tra-port­able mod­els to large, middle ages style knives with massive guards and wide blades. Gen­er­ally, hunt­ing knives are di­vided in­to two large groups: fold­ing or all-in-one-piece knives. One of the most pop­u­lar knife types is a bowie knife; its blade can be 20-33 cm (8" to 13") long. Vari­ous stilet­tos and dag­gers are also very pop­u­lar and are de­signed for fin­ish­ing off wounded an­im­als or self-de­fense. Lead­ing cold weapon man­u­fac­tur­ers tend to pro­duce high-car­bon steel knives, which are very com­pact and handy.

All-pur­pose lock knives are gain­ing more and more in pop­ular­ity. These knives are equipped with ad­di­tion­al tools such as a fine saw, a dress­ing blade, a skin­ning hook or a screw­driver and they are avail­able in vari­ous com­bin­a­tion of tools. It is de­bat­able if it is more ef­fi­cient to buy an all-pur­pose knife, or if it is more prac­tic­al to carry a toolkit be­cause a screw­driver, a file, and an awl are more us­able as sep­ar­ate tools.