hunting shows and the competitive atmosphere it creates are what is killing hunting. add in there horrible mismanagement by the state government (i am not going to single out any one state-WISCONSIN! oops!) and there you go. growing populations dont help either, when every tree has a hunter behind it and people are trespassing like it doesnt matter.
in less than ten years time, i have watched hunting spiral right down the tubes and i sometimes doubt if i will even teach it to my kids. it has become a rat race and a perversion of what it used to be.
I don't own a television. I haven't owned one since I got married eleven years ago. This lack of television isn't part of some broad-reaching social agenda, though. It started out that we were both too busy with other things -work, other hobbies and interests, and didn't have time for it. I reckon we still don't. We might buy one someday, but it hasn't been a high priority and probably won't be for the forseeable future.
My kids have got along just fine, so far, without having a television in the house. One of the fringe benefits is that I don't have to undo any influence that could be done by what they might otherwise see on the tube. I don't have to argue about why this program or that one isn't appropriate for kids to view, because there is nothing in the house to view it on.
My kids aren't constantly nagging me to buy a television, either. By now, they've become used to not having one around. They've become so used to it, in fact, that a few days ago, my daughter went off to a neighbor kid's house to play and was back home in less than 30 minutes, complaining that all her pal wanted to do was sit around and watch T.V. -an activity my 8 year old daughter described as "supremely boring." My son is a little older, and understands that money spent on a cable bill is money that wouldn't be available to buy .22 LR ammo at $20.00 a brick. And in spite of the fact that he's still shooting a single shot Cricket bolt action, he can go through four of them in an average month. He'd rather shoot his .22 rifle than watch T.V. any day of the week. (Actually, lately, he'd rather shoot MY 10/22 than watch T.V.....)
My wife and I are both avid quail hunters. From the time that our youngest was old enough to walk with us, we've taken our kids in the field with us. They know what the reality of fair chase hunting is like, because they've seen it plenty of times.
The quail hunting that we did in California -and still do, though to a far lesser extent since we live so far away now- was never a "rat race" and still isn't. Here in Oklahoma, when I take my kids for a walk in the woods with me on what is billed as a squirrel hunt, it isn't a "rat race," either, and we're walking public land woods in a state that doesn't have anywhere near the amount of public land acreage in terms of a percentage of land base that California does. You'd think we'd see at least one other squirrel hunter in the woods, but we haven't yet in the two-plus years we've lived here.
Now, deer hunting on public land out here can be a zoo from what I've seen on some Wildlife Management Areas (WMAs). That said, my son and I hunted a public WMA just ten minutes from home during the modern gun deer season and only saw one other hunter during the time we hunted it. I hunted it every day during the modern gun season and had the place to myself, aside from a few college kids out for a stroll and a smattering of elderly dog-walkers.
So, my experience differs. Hunting to me isn't a "perversion of what it used to be." It is what it always has been. An opportunity to commune with nature and share quality time with family and maybe -just maybe- an expereince that ultimately ends with some tasty delicacy on the dinner table. That seems to be the way my kids view the thing, too, and they're 8 and 10 years of age, respectively. We don't always come home with game every time we go out, but we always have a good time and see plenty of things that we wouldn't have seen if we'd have wasted the day indoors at home.
-JP
