"Just A Little Bit Sensitive"
Being passionate about something tends to make one predisposed to a heightened level of sensitivity to matters concerning that which fuels the passion. As an avid hunter and sportsman, I find myself hypersensitive to issues related to hunting and fishing, property rights and land use, conservation, environmental stewardship, and gun rights. I am therefore drawn on occasion to magazine articles and news stories dealing with these and related issues. Topics pertaining to hunting hit particularly close to home. Regardless whether I seek them out or not, articles discussing hunting and its legality, popularity, ethics, or future tend to jump right off the page at me.
Every now and then I get the unfortunate challenge of being confronted by an anti-hunter who wants to debate the propriety of hunting and, as is more often the case than not, why it is cruel, barbaric, and (most shockingly to anyone with the slightest sense of perspective) unnecessary. The most frequent argument I hear being made by the Antis is that hunting is abhorrently barbaric and indisputably obsolete. After all we are a civilized people who, thanks to Evolution Almighty, have used our opposable thumbs to invent and construct grocery stores, complete with their butcheries and meat markets where we are able to procure the neatly plastic-wrapped portions of formerly living animals for our dinner plates. It is simply, in their minds, wrong to kill a live animal that was moments before happily frolicking about the country side or flying through the air thinking of its family and its future (“Where shall I lead my doe-eyed children through this danger-free Utopia to bed down for the night?”), blithely oblivious to the presence of the evil hunter lying in wait to snuff out its life, while Disney music plays softly in the background. The human predator, don’t you know, is the only danger the animal would have faced in its life and if left alone the animal would have lived a long, happy, pain-free existence until it decided on its own to exercise its Animal Right to pass away and enter deer or duck heaven.
The all too salient point that the meat on their fast food sandwich, the slab of ribs on their barbecue grill, and the fish filet tumbling in their roiling canola oil was once attached to a living, breathing creature that had to be put to death – in the most ghoulish of fashions in many cases – in order to render the meal seems to be lost on most people who oppose hunting. I speak not of the lunatic fringe, pseudo-militant vegan animal rights activists; I expect more commitment from them. I speak rather of the soccer mom, the tee-ball coach, the suburban housewife, and the guy down the street who think nothing of excoriating hunting and all those who engage in the sport before taking another large bite out of a bacon double cheeseburger. Such upstanding and ordinary people tend to make up the base from which the greatest number of anti-hunters emerges, at least so far as I can tell. It was one of their number who tabled the most astonishing argument in support of banning hunting I have heard to date: Hunting wipes out the populations of those animals being hunted; if allowed to continue, hunting will bring about the extinction of whitetail deer, wild turkeys, ducks, and other game animals.
Please take all the time you need to absorb the enormity of that statement and to locate the nearest solid object upon which to rest yourself as you wait for your ears to stop ringing and the pressure behind your eyes to subside. All physical sensations to the contrary, your head’s not really going to explode.
The argument, as best I could glean, was that hunting threatens the animal population and if left unchecked will some day be responsible for the appearance of postage stamps commemorating the extinction of the whitetail deer and the replacement of folksy one-liners such as “Dead as a Dodo Bird” with “Gone like Bambi.”
I unwittingly broached the subject when I placed a hunting magazine on the check-out counter of a retail pharmacy years ago with the intention of buying it. The cashier looked at it, looked disgustedly at me, then read aloud the teaser from the cover, “Do whitetails dream?” She then said, “I don’t know how people sit there and shoot those innocent little things.” We were off and running.
Moments later when she made the comment, and I paraphrase, that modern hunting leads to extinction, I could not immediately discern whether she was stringently advocating a deeply held belief or simply floating a position to gauge its acceptability, the way political campaigns leak ideas and rumors to see how they’ll be received by the mongrel hordes that pull the levers in the voting booths before deciding whether the candidate should adopt them or oppose them. Either way, it was evident she did not know what the hell she was talking about. After she completed verbalizing her opinion – and it amounted to no more than an unsubstantiated opinion – I was immediately put in mind of that biting piece of dialogue from the Adam Sandler motion picture Billy Madison, “What you’ve just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points. May God have mercy on your soul.”
With a customer waiting behind me and a truck idling outside, I knew I had neither the time nor the stamina to invest in trying to convince this individual of all the good hunters have done for wildlife and its habitat throughout North America. I did, however, take the time to tell her that hunters were in fact the first conservationists, dating back to the early 20th Century when market hunting had nearly eradicated many game animal populations. It was hunters, I explained, that policed themselves and lobbied for legislation to limit and control the use of the natural resource that is wildlife so the resource could rebound, flourish, and thrive for generations to come. I referenced the untold millions of dollars generated in each state by the purchase of ammunition and hunting licenses, all of which go toward preserving and expanding habitat and natural resources thanks to the Pittman-Robinson Act. I may have found a chink in her armor when I mentioned the billions upon billions of dollars hunters and sporting enthusiasts pump into the national economy every year ($730 billion to be exact as of the date of this writing).
Next I chose to go the other way. I did my best to count up the total number of animals I had harvested in the five years previous as an attempt to illustrate my individual impact on the wild game population. At the time I had this conversation, I estimated that I had harvested a half-dozen or so deer, one wild turkey, one feral hog, and hundreds of fish of varying species. Such was my personal contribution to the destruction of the wild game population in North America at the time.
She was unimpressed and we politely completed our transaction. If someone invented a time machine and traveled back to collect the single-most inventive torturers from the Gestapo, the North Vietnamese Army, the Spanish Inquisitors, and the KGB, and brought them all into a cold, dank room to go to work on the individual who uttered this nonsense, they would all days later be sent back to their respective time periods in the unfamiliar position of having to explain the brand new “1” that had suddenly appeared in their loss columns. Stated more pointedly, there was no convincing her otherwise. She was not changing sides.
Since then, I have removed another half-dozen or so deer from the herd, four more feral hogs, a few more freshwater fish, a handful of bobwhite quail, eight mourning doves (I'm not the best wing shot), and no turkeys (I'm an even worse turkey hunter). I am incapable of coming up with a similar estimate of the numbers of hunts I have had where the only thing that ended up getting killed was time.
Most of the people with whom I socialize are sportsmen. None of them can boast garishly disparate numbers than those referenced above. In short, most hunters I know are in about the same bracket as I, which is to imply that the majority of hunters and fishers are responsible for a roughly equal amount of diminution in the numbers of wild game animals from season to season. Numbers which, by the way, replenish themselves every year through procreation. The phrase "a drop in the bucket" comes to mind but then again I am no statistician and cannot positively say whether this truly amounts to the mathematical equivalent of a single raindrop falling into a bucket full of water. Yet lo and behold, North America’s whitetail deer herd is bursting at the seams and wild turkey numbers are the highest they have ever been on this continent. I am capable of making such a statement thanks to the work, volunteerism, self-restraint and dollars of hunters, fishers, and other outdoor enthusiasts, as well as the tireless work of the separate and several states’ fish and game departments.
It occurs to me that perhaps the real lesson to be learned is sportsmen and women need to do a better job marketing, educating and recruiting in order that non-hunters and even anti-hunters may gain a better understanding of our contributions to wildlife, natural resources, and habitat for game and non-game alike. Regardless, you will have to forgive me for reacting so strongly to such attacks on sportsmen and the rich tradition of hunting in America. I’m just a little bit sensitive.
(c) Roger Guilian 2006
Every now and then I get the unfortunate challenge of being confronted by an anti-hunter who wants to debate the propriety of hunting and, as is more often the case than not, why it is cruel, barbaric, and (most shockingly to anyone with the slightest sense of perspective) unnecessary. The most frequent argument I hear being made by the Antis is that hunting is abhorrently barbaric and indisputably obsolete. After all we are a civilized people who, thanks to Evolution Almighty, have used our opposable thumbs to invent and construct grocery stores, complete with their butcheries and meat markets where we are able to procure the neatly plastic-wrapped portions of formerly living animals for our dinner plates. It is simply, in their minds, wrong to kill a live animal that was moments before happily frolicking about the country side or flying through the air thinking of its family and its future (“Where shall I lead my doe-eyed children through this danger-free Utopia to bed down for the night?”), blithely oblivious to the presence of the evil hunter lying in wait to snuff out its life, while Disney music plays softly in the background. The human predator, don’t you know, is the only danger the animal would have faced in its life and if left alone the animal would have lived a long, happy, pain-free existence until it decided on its own to exercise its Animal Right to pass away and enter deer or duck heaven.
The all too salient point that the meat on their fast food sandwich, the slab of ribs on their barbecue grill, and the fish filet tumbling in their roiling canola oil was once attached to a living, breathing creature that had to be put to death – in the most ghoulish of fashions in many cases – in order to render the meal seems to be lost on most people who oppose hunting. I speak not of the lunatic fringe, pseudo-militant vegan animal rights activists; I expect more commitment from them. I speak rather of the soccer mom, the tee-ball coach, the suburban housewife, and the guy down the street who think nothing of excoriating hunting and all those who engage in the sport before taking another large bite out of a bacon double cheeseburger. Such upstanding and ordinary people tend to make up the base from which the greatest number of anti-hunters emerges, at least so far as I can tell. It was one of their number who tabled the most astonishing argument in support of banning hunting I have heard to date: Hunting wipes out the populations of those animals being hunted; if allowed to continue, hunting will bring about the extinction of whitetail deer, wild turkeys, ducks, and other game animals.
Please take all the time you need to absorb the enormity of that statement and to locate the nearest solid object upon which to rest yourself as you wait for your ears to stop ringing and the pressure behind your eyes to subside. All physical sensations to the contrary, your head’s not really going to explode.
The argument, as best I could glean, was that hunting threatens the animal population and if left unchecked will some day be responsible for the appearance of postage stamps commemorating the extinction of the whitetail deer and the replacement of folksy one-liners such as “Dead as a Dodo Bird” with “Gone like Bambi.”
I unwittingly broached the subject when I placed a hunting magazine on the check-out counter of a retail pharmacy years ago with the intention of buying it. The cashier looked at it, looked disgustedly at me, then read aloud the teaser from the cover, “Do whitetails dream?” She then said, “I don’t know how people sit there and shoot those innocent little things.” We were off and running.
Moments later when she made the comment, and I paraphrase, that modern hunting leads to extinction, I could not immediately discern whether she was stringently advocating a deeply held belief or simply floating a position to gauge its acceptability, the way political campaigns leak ideas and rumors to see how they’ll be received by the mongrel hordes that pull the levers in the voting booths before deciding whether the candidate should adopt them or oppose them. Either way, it was evident she did not know what the hell she was talking about. After she completed verbalizing her opinion – and it amounted to no more than an unsubstantiated opinion – I was immediately put in mind of that biting piece of dialogue from the Adam Sandler motion picture Billy Madison, “What you’ve just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points. May God have mercy on your soul.”
With a customer waiting behind me and a truck idling outside, I knew I had neither the time nor the stamina to invest in trying to convince this individual of all the good hunters have done for wildlife and its habitat throughout North America. I did, however, take the time to tell her that hunters were in fact the first conservationists, dating back to the early 20th Century when market hunting had nearly eradicated many game animal populations. It was hunters, I explained, that policed themselves and lobbied for legislation to limit and control the use of the natural resource that is wildlife so the resource could rebound, flourish, and thrive for generations to come. I referenced the untold millions of dollars generated in each state by the purchase of ammunition and hunting licenses, all of which go toward preserving and expanding habitat and natural resources thanks to the Pittman-Robinson Act. I may have found a chink in her armor when I mentioned the billions upon billions of dollars hunters and sporting enthusiasts pump into the national economy every year ($730 billion to be exact as of the date of this writing).
Next I chose to go the other way. I did my best to count up the total number of animals I had harvested in the five years previous as an attempt to illustrate my individual impact on the wild game population. At the time I had this conversation, I estimated that I had harvested a half-dozen or so deer, one wild turkey, one feral hog, and hundreds of fish of varying species. Such was my personal contribution to the destruction of the wild game population in North America at the time.
She was unimpressed and we politely completed our transaction. If someone invented a time machine and traveled back to collect the single-most inventive torturers from the Gestapo, the North Vietnamese Army, the Spanish Inquisitors, and the KGB, and brought them all into a cold, dank room to go to work on the individual who uttered this nonsense, they would all days later be sent back to their respective time periods in the unfamiliar position of having to explain the brand new “1” that had suddenly appeared in their loss columns. Stated more pointedly, there was no convincing her otherwise. She was not changing sides.
Since then, I have removed another half-dozen or so deer from the herd, four more feral hogs, a few more freshwater fish, a handful of bobwhite quail, eight mourning doves (I'm not the best wing shot), and no turkeys (I'm an even worse turkey hunter). I am incapable of coming up with a similar estimate of the numbers of hunts I have had where the only thing that ended up getting killed was time.
Most of the people with whom I socialize are sportsmen. None of them can boast garishly disparate numbers than those referenced above. In short, most hunters I know are in about the same bracket as I, which is to imply that the majority of hunters and fishers are responsible for a roughly equal amount of diminution in the numbers of wild game animals from season to season. Numbers which, by the way, replenish themselves every year through procreation. The phrase "a drop in the bucket" comes to mind but then again I am no statistician and cannot positively say whether this truly amounts to the mathematical equivalent of a single raindrop falling into a bucket full of water. Yet lo and behold, North America’s whitetail deer herd is bursting at the seams and wild turkey numbers are the highest they have ever been on this continent. I am capable of making such a statement thanks to the work, volunteerism, self-restraint and dollars of hunters, fishers, and other outdoor enthusiasts, as well as the tireless work of the separate and several states’ fish and game departments.
It occurs to me that perhaps the real lesson to be learned is sportsmen and women need to do a better job marketing, educating and recruiting in order that non-hunters and even anti-hunters may gain a better understanding of our contributions to wildlife, natural resources, and habitat for game and non-game alike. Regardless, you will have to forgive me for reacting so strongly to such attacks on sportsmen and the rich tradition of hunting in America. I’m just a little bit sensitive.
(c) Roger Guilian 2006
posted by Days Afield Host | 2:39 PM
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