30 Mar 2008

Take a Young Person Hunting

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or fishing, before it’s too late.

If America’s increasingly aging sportsmen don’t make more of an effort to recruit members of the younger generation, in the years to come, hunters and anglers will become a smaller minority increasingly outnumbered and out-voted by anti-field sports advocates and gun control supporters. Britain’s ban on hunting with hounds is a sample of what we can look forward to here.

AP:

Sales of Vermont hunting and fishing licenses have dropped more than 20 percent over the last 20 years, leaving the Fish and Wildlife Department pleading with lawmakers for extra funding.

Other states report similar drop-offs:

—Arkansas hunting license sales dropped from about 345,000 in 1999 to about 319,000 in 2003.

—Pennsylvania sold about 946,000 hunting licenses in 2006, down from just over a million in 1999, and a peak of 1.3 million in 1981.

—Oregon had 100,000 fewer licensed anglers last year than in 1987, and 70,000 fewer licensed hunters.

—West Virginia sold 154,763 resident hunting permits in 2006, a 17 percent decrease from 1997.

The nature of the problem can be seen in the ignorance, bigoted animosity toward field sports, and implicitly Disneyfied perspective of Drew Curtis’s 3/29 link to the story on Fark.com:

Interest in hunting and fishing dropping among Americans, who are finding other things to do than inflict pain and death on nature’s beautiful, innocent creatures.

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One Feedback on "Take a Young Person Hunting"

Dominique R. Poirier

As I have been gunsmith for sometimes, I believe that hunting has more chance to be a lasting activity or sport if handed on from generation to generation. From personal experience, I believe also that it is not that obvious for a young man, or woman, to spontaneously buy a gun and then decide to chase the rabbit or else; unless there is an obvious need to hunt for survival purpose, of course.

That’s something that has to be taught, I think; and that claims some affective closeness between the student and his teacher.

Well, it’s a personal opinion that certainly claims further discussion.

Now, the last sentence of your post somehow calls for a joke that spontaneously got through my mind as I read it.
Perhaps hunting and fishing would win hearts easier if it consisted in inflicting pain and death on nature’s ugly and guilty creatures.
Say, perhaps would this make the step more compelling, or spontaneous…



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