Manly Men Can Hunt

The Jackal may follow the Tiger, but cub, when thy whiskers are grown.

Remember the wolf is a hunter - go forth and get food of thine own

—Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Books

The male counterpart of Feminine Women Can Cook.

Men who have become white collar workers and achieved success lose the ability to fix cars, hunt, fish, plumb, or perform carpentry. It's not so much focused on how a specific ability makes you manly, and is more about how the lack of it makes you wimpy. Or how being "civilized" makes you lose your manly edge.

When they attempt to do so they fail spectacularly.

Compare A Real Man Is a Killer. In fact if a white collar Unlucky Everydude does show that he actually has manliness despite being unable to repair a car, it's likely to be because A Real Man Is a Killer and he showed it by becoming an Action Survivor. Also compare Real Men Eat Meat as hunting often acquires said meat.

Examples of Manly Men Can Hunt include:

Anime & Manga

• Used for humor in Code Geass. Lelouch may be a Magnificent Bastard Chessmaster who can single-handedly win a battle thanks to his strategy... but stuck in the wilderness, he attempts to dig a deadfall in order to catch an animal...and exhausts himself before it's even two feet deep, forcing him to eat the fruits his half-sister Euphemia found with an embarrassed expression on his face the whole time. This ties in with his being a Non-Action Guy. In contrast, his much more athletic friend-slash-rival Suzaku is shown fishing bare-handed and produces more than enough food for himself and Kallen.

Film

• Brought to an infamous extreme in Deliverance, where only by going back to their "primal" selves were they able to last.
• The men in Fight Club fight as a means of returning to their primal nature instead of living in an emasculating consumer culture.
• Subverted in the 1964 film Man's Favorite Sport? wherein Rock Hudson plays a fishing expert at Abercrombie and Fitch (this was back in the days when it was still just a world famous outdoor sports emporium) who can't fish. Entered into a fishing tournament by a publicity agent who doesn't know his secret, Hudson is forced to hire an Indian guide to catch his fish for him. And, yes, fishing is not the same as hunting, but it is the principle that counts.
• In Harry and the Hendersons, the father takes the son on a hunting trip as a rite of passage, but the boy is reluctant and doesn't want to kill anything, which upsets the father. By the end, the father has taken learned an anti-hunting lesson.

Literature

• This trope is a central element of Ernest Hemingway's "Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," in which the wealthy title character takes his wife on a hunting trip and finds himself upstaged by the hunting guide, Robert Wilson. Macomber struggles to prove himself a competent hunter as his wife flirts openly with the more confident and masculine Wilson: he eventually succeeds in shooting a buffalo, but shortly after he is shot by his own wife. Hemingway leaves it open whether this second shooting is accidental or intentional.
• Robert A. Heinlein decried this trope in one novel by having a character note: "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
• Subverted in Romance of the Three Kingdoms: When the emperor announces a royal hunt, Cao Pi has all of his quarries captured alive and is praised for his mercy.
• Played straight by Rudyard Kipling in the Jungle Books, at least if you count anthromorphic wolves as "men".
  • Played definitely straight in Captains Courageous. After all, fishing is a form of hunting, isn't it?
• Donald Hamilton's character Matt Helm hunts in his off time. Actually, that's what he does for a living since he's a government assassin. Hamilton was actually somewhat of an expert on hunting.
• The Gale-sympathetic portion of the The Hunger Games fandom often declares that Gale, as a hunter, is manlier than Peeta, a baker's son who mostly survives by employing defensive methods.
• In The Walking Dead, the tougher men are more rural and know how to do things like hunt and track. More urban men like Glenn are wimpier.
• Robert Baratheon in A Song of Ice and Fire is a warrior king who is shown constantly whoring, drinking, and hunting. A combination of the last two are what get him killed.
• In King Solomon's Mines the expedition stops for no purpose but to have an adventure-of-the-month shooting lots of elephant, gorging themselves on the meat and burying the ivory to pick up on the way home. Both the English and the native hirelings(including a Homerically awesome warrior prince in disguise )enjoy it tremendously.

Live Action TV

• Supernatural. Obviously Sam and Dean share a background, and they both "hunt" (demons). But manly Dean who accepts his blue-collar roots can not merely fix but rebuild cars, while Sam who went to college and wanted to be a lawyer (and whose masculinity Dean likes to make fun of) is barely allowed even to drive any more and does not know how to do anything similar.
• Arthur from Merlin goes hunting all the time. At least two episodes revolve entirely around his fondness for the sport. Interestingly, the show does not necessarily approve of his hobby, as many of his hunting expeditions end in disaster, and Merlin explicitly states that he does not like the sport.
• On That '70s Show Red takes Eric hunting, then berates him for half of the episode when Eric misses a shot at a buck at close range. Eventually Eric reveals that he's actually a great shot and missed because he didn't want to kill the buck; interestingly, Red says that he can respect that a lot more than Eric just being a lousy shot.
• Like his Literature version, Robert Baratheon in Game of Thrones is an enthusiastic hunter. His wife Cersi claims this was his way of avoiding having to deal with his family.

Cersi: Whenever I came close to bringing a baby into the world, Robert would run off into the woods to hunt. On his return, I would present him with a child. He would present me with the head of some dead beast.

Video Games

• John Marston is a man and he hunts. So does his son

Web Original

• This is repeatedly brought up in The Alphabet of Manliness and The Retrosexual Revolution.

Western Animation

• Bart from The Simpsons is initially sent to a steel factory on account of Homer fearing he might become gay. It backfired, as the factory was full of Camp Gays, so Homer decides to go hunting with him.
• In Moral Orel, this trope is why Orel's father takes him hunting.
• A Looney Tunes short featured Sylvester and his son as house cats. When Junior told his Dad the other cats claim all that easy life spoiled what used to be the greatest mouser around. To show them wrong, Sylvester took his son to a place where he hoped to catch some mice. His failure cannot be solely blamed on the "giant mouse".
• Gaston seems to think so.
• On King of the Hill, Hank believes that Bobby needs to successfully kill something in order to be a real man. Bobby reluctantly agrees to go through with it at a special hunting camp, but both of them decide that bagging a captive, farm-raised deer just for the sake of killing one isn't all that sporting and they decide not to go through with it. Then Hank lets Bobby drive the truck home, where the younger Hill accidentally hits and kills a deer.

Real Life

• In the past hunting was almost universally considered a way for aristocrats to party and to show off their badassery to each other and to the hapless proles. Hawking and pigsticking (chasing boar from horseback with a lance) were among the more common variants. Arab nobles interestingly enough went in for using tame cheetahs. Among the Mongols there was a customary hunt that was so large and required so much organization that it might be classed more as seasonal military maneuvers with animals as convenient stand ins for the enemy.
  • Fox hunts which seem an absurd way to hunt fox(which seem more like an animal to chase with a shotgun or small caliber rifle)are actually descendant from boar hunts when the boar had played out in England. When English got to India to their delight they found real boars there again and found also they had at least one thing in common with the native nobility.