Shauna Mayben Pickin went from being vegetarian to hunting her own meat in what she describes as an honest way of sourcing food.

"I do believe I'm an environmentalist," she told Ryk Goddard on 936 ABC Hobart.

"I'm very concerned about where meat comes from, how it's sourced. At least I know [as a hunter] it's ethically sourced as best I possibly could.

"I take responsibility. I can tell you it's much easier to go the supermarket and pick up a package."

Ms Pickin most often hunts for rabbits with the help of ferrets.

"[Ferreting is] a very old English tradition, it's been around since the medieval times," she said.

"You put the ferrets down the holes ... and you place nets over the holes and the ferrets go down and they kind of spook the rabbits out.

"Then we humanely dispatch them and I cook them up."

Loading...

Ms Pickin said some people cringe when she tells them she eats rabbit, as the meat has fallen out of fashion.

"You can actually do quite a lot with it," she said.

"I make them into kebabs as well so you can just throw them onto a BBQ; you don't just have to chuck everything into the slow cooker."

Hunting is 'hard work'

Ms Pickin said ferreting was often the best method for hunting rabbits, because in Australia you cannot use a silencer and the sound of a gunshot targeting one rabbit will scatter the rest of them.

Ferreting also means she can catch rabbits in suburban areas where shooting is not allowed.

Ms Pickin has also tried her hand at deer hunting.

"That's a huge challenge," she said.

Ms Pickin said she knows many people find the idea of hunting off-putting or even disgusting.

"A lot of people find it intimidating to see photos of me or someone with a deer," she said.

"I have cried in the past [after shooting a deer] ... I've sat down and said: 'thanks very much'.

"I think that hunting plays an important role in conservation."

Ms Pickin said she would rather hunt and eat animals such as deer, rabbits and wallaby than just have them culled and dumped to protect farm crops.

"If I can go out there and take some of these animals and use them and eat them — that's better than them just being pushed aside," she said.

"It's hard work, I'm not going to lie. But it's honest."