Jonathon L. Kibler was born in Mesa, Arizona in 1947. He grew up on a dairy farm, a family business his grandfather Kibler had established in 1908, in the Salt River Valley agricultural belt, in the heart of the Sonora Desert in the Southwest of the United States. At age fourteen, Jon paid a neighbor boy five dollars for two hound pups, Sampson and Mike, and started hunting feral house cats on his father's farm. His next hunting adventure with hounds took him after raccoon and bobcat along the local desert rivers and lakes, and by the time he was twenty he had expanded his hunting horizons to