Commentary: Dismayed about the changing face of big-game hunting – Outdoor News
I’m not sure what happened to deer hunting and I’m also not sure I like it. I’m an old deer hunter right now, but I started deer hunting when I was 16 or 17 years old.
I was born and raised in the city of Newark, N.J. … not exactly a frontier town. No one in my family was a hunter, so I started out on my own, through the world of outdoor magazines. If someone told me back then that I would ultimately end up as editor-in-chief of Outdoor Life, I would have said they were totally nuts.
Now I have to make a confession, I hunted whitetails in New Jersey for seven hunting seasons before I finally got to drop a fork horn in Chester. I probably made a mess of field dressing that small buck. I did not have a mentor, except for a cousin who knew even less than me about deer hunting.
It took many seasons before I knew about deer trails and rubs and scrapes. I did my deer hunting sitting on the ground without camouflage clothing. If the place looked good, I’d find a stump. During those early years, I was a charter member of the “Stumpsitters.”
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It wasn’t long before I joined a couple of hunting clubs and starting hunting with older hunters and I started to learn about whitetails. One of my clubs was the Over The Hill Gang and we had a cabin in Sullivan County, New York.
We took our deer hunting seriously, but it was the camaraderie that we looked forward to every season. I’ll never forget the smell of bacon and eggs on the morning of opening day.
It was our hunting camp in New York where I built my first treestand. I was perfectly happy collecting my share of whitetails sitting on the ground and I know that hunting 30 feet off the ground would give me a definite advantage, but I just didn’t like it.
But almost suddenly, the world of treestands dominated the way we hunted deer. Treestands now come in all forms from climbers to fancy ladder affairs. It’s now the standard way we hunt deer.
Over the years, I hunted at some fancy hunting lodges and nearly always I was driven to a fancy treestand, where I would sit comfortably waiting for a buck to show up along a long road or over a machine cranking out deer feed. Did I enjoy it? Of course, I did. But I didn’t really have to work at getting a buck … not like the old days.
Age has taken away some of my gait, so my hunting these days is limited. There’s not much more I can experience about big-game hunting. I’ve hunted big game from caribou at the Arctic Circle to Cape buffalo in Africa to elk in several Western states. Yes, I am an old, very-experienced big-game hunter. So grant me my opinions.
I watch a lot of hunting shows on television these days and many of them are good, but some scare me about hunting today. If you’re like me, you often have to tolerate the absurdity of the anti-hunting cult. These are the people who hear goose music and never look skyward. They just don’t get it. They weren’t born with our awareness of the woods and waters around them. Sad for them.
Now try to imagine a deer hunt staged for television. Forget about treestands. Some of these hunts start in a blind built for several hunters, including cameras and voice recorders. Shooting is from windows over a food plot.
These hunters are never cold or tired. Most of the time, their rifles are rattle-trap AR guns with not a piece of wood on them. My favorite deer rifle is a Ruger .243 with a beautiful burled full Mannlicher stock that runs right up to the muzzle.
Some TV shows also depict hunters taking game a half-mile away, which I cringe whenever I see or hear about it. On such long shots, I hope the hunter cleanly misses. When I hunt deer, I want that buck to be close enough to smell it. Big-game animals deserve better than to be dropped by a bullet nearly 10 football fields away.
A recent TV hunting show depicted someone shooting a mountain goat across a canyon 902 yards away. In my mind, this is not hunting. Want to test your skill as a marksman … shoot paper or a tin can.
Technology has certainly changed the face of hunting and most of it is good. Hunting today is safer, thanks to GPS, cellphones and much more.
But let’s not forget the reason we love to hunt. It’s in our nature. Just remember the way we used to hunt, watching a deer run and sitting on a frozen stump. Most of our technology today is good, but don’t let gadgetry make you forget why we’re out there.
And when geese fly over, enjoy the music.
(This commentary is from a column that is also included in Vin Sparano’s book, “Wit and Wisdom of An Old Outdoor Guy,” which is available on Amazon.)
