Melissa Bachman

Early life

Bachman was raised in Paynesville, Minnesota. Her parents, Dale and Karen Bachman, were both avid hunters who took her on their hunting trips since she was five years old. She was not able to actually hunt until she was twelve, and had to do push-ups for over a year to develop the muscles to pull her 40-pound (18 kg) bow. Later her parents would sign a work permit so she could start high school at 10 a.m., after hunting in the mornings.

She attended Paynesville Area High School where she competed in pole vault for the track team, setting school and section 5A records. She served as student representative to the Chamber of Commerce board, winning an Outstanding Young Person award, played saxophone in the concert, pep, and marching bands, was homecoming queen, student council treasurer, a member of the National Honor Society, captain of track and speech teams, a lector in her Catholic church, and won the Girl Scouts Gold Award for organizing younger girl scouts to interact with the elderly.

Bachman graduated Paynesville Area High School magna cum laude in 2002, and attended St. Cloud State University with a double major in Spanish and Broadcast Journalism. She survived a likely bout with viral meningitis during a 2004 summer Spanish immersion program in Costa Rica. While pole vaulting in high school and college, Bachman would wrap her pole in camouflage to symbolize her passion for hunting.

Career

After graduating in 2006, Bachman sent out 76 video resumes without finding work, and had to take an unpaid internship with North American Media Group's North American Hunter Television in Minnetonka, driving 150 miles (240 km) round trip each day, and working nights as a waitress at a nightclub. Four months later she was hired as a full time producer for the show. She progressed to camera work, first by giving on-camera archery tips that other hunters were unwilling to, and later by filming and editing many of her own hunts to be aired for free, including a bow hunt of a 202 inch Illinois White-tailed deer. "Nobody turns down free work, I learned," she says. As a camera professional, she shot, produced, and edited the first season of Mark Kayser's Extreme Pursuits program.

In 2010, Bachman left NAMG to found her own production company named Deadly Passion Productions. She edited and did post-production work for hunting television shows including Dangerous Game, created online and instructional videos, led seminars on hunting at sports shows, managed social media sites, and wrote magazine articles. In January 2012, she returned to North American Hunter as a host. Among her work for NAH was a five-day-a-week video series called "My Take" with Melissa Bachman, that ran from February to August.

In March 2012, Bachman took the world record for a red stag shot by a female archer in a New Zealand hunt. The hunt was aired both on "My Take" and on Winchester Deadly Passion.

The Winchester Deadly Passion program, also produced by North American Media Group, began airing in July 2012 on the Pursuit Channel, and was picked up by the Sportsman Channel for its third season, July 2014. It is named after and sponsored by Winchester Ammunition. In it, Melissa Bachman is filmed traveling the world to hunt animals using rifle, bow, or shotgun. Bachman stars in, produces, and edits the program herself. She works around 200 days a year in the field, switching between two cameramen who need more time off. In 2014, the program came out with a clothing line, and in 2015, Bachman sponsored an ammunition based jewelry line.

Bachman struggles for an answer when asked about her life outside TV programs and hunting. "I can't even keep a plant alive — that's how little I'm home," she says.

Controversies over trophy hunting

On August 30, 2012, the National Geographic Channel were planning Bachman to be one of their contestants for the show that would become Ultimate Survival Alaska, until a Change.org petition to exclude her because of her hunting background received 13,000 signatures in under 24 hours. National Geographic's statement, in three Twitter posts, said she was eliminated because hunting was not the focus of the show. Conservationist Tim Martell, who launched the petition, had previously launched a Facebook campaign against Rosie O'Donnell for appearing with a hammerhead shark she had caught. Martell stated he did not oppose all hunting, primarily trophy hunting, which he considered wasteful.

In November 2013, Bachman posted a photograph of herself smiling by the body of a lion, captioned "An incredible day hunting in South Africa! Stalked inside 60-yards on this beautiful male lion... what a hunt!" to her Twitter and Facebook accounts. The photo quickly drew Internet outrage, including multiple wishes for her death, comedian and animal welfare activist Ricky Gervais re-tweeting Bachman's message while adding "spot the typo", and an online petition from a Cape Town resident calling on the South African government to eject her from the country, which gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures. In reaction, Bachman temporarily deactivated her public Facebook and Twitter accounts. Many of the death threats instead went to an unrelated person with a similar name. The Maroi Conservancy, which facilitated the hunt through another outfitter in Zeerust, defended the hunt, stating it was both legal and ethical, and that food and funds from these kinds of hunts go to the struggling local community. International commentators claimed that the online anger directed at Bachman was extraordinary, sexist, and misogynist, and that evidence showed that banning hunting drives species extinct much more than controlled hunts do. At the time of the hunt, African lions were not listed as endangered under the United States Endangered Species Act, though their status was under reassessment and debate.

Bachman did not directly comment in response to the controversies, though she has said that hate mail from anti-hunters was one thing she "could do without". In 2015, she stated, "No response at all seems to be the best. It doesn’t matter what you say, or how you say it, some people will always disagree and attack."