The NYT ran a piece yesterday about the decline in hunting and a movement to revitalize the sport by encouraging participation by children. Link. Excerpt:
"Forty years from now our kids will be learning about this as history," said Larry Gauthier . . . "Hunters should be included as an extinct species because we're falling away so fast, we need to be protected." . . .
This year, three pro-hunting groups - the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the U.S. Sportsmen's Alliance and the National Wild Turkey Federation - started Families Afield, a program to lobby states to lower the age at which children can hunt or to loosen the requirements for a child to accompany a parent on a hunt.
"We're trying to take down some legal barriers so kids can get involved earlier," said Steve Wagner, a spokesman for the shooting sports foundation, who said bills to those ends were being introduced in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The group says the 20 most restrictive states set 12 as the minimum hunting age and do not let a child accompany an adult on a hunt without completing hunter education training.
I've never shot anything in my life, except a few targets, a friend's mailbox, and a frog in a capricious moment of teenage malevolence. I find it hard to believe that hunting is dying out, but I read about its decline every where. In Michigan, if you don't hunt, your sexuality is questioned (which is one reason I've spawned seven children). There are dozens of hunting magazines, most of which pay their writers extremely well for articles that typically begin, "I spied the buck." The magazines have either wide circulations or profitable advertisers or both.
I like hunting and hope it continues as a vibrant part of American culture. But if it's going extinct, it has a long way to go.
