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Outdoor Editor and writer, Wes Smalling, has produced an important piece
about the ways in which modern hunting it is being hyped by interests that
either know nothing, or care nothing, or have forgotten everything they might
have known, about traditional outdoor ethics.
Smalling's article appears below, sandwiched between several short quotes
from Aldo Leopold and one longer quote from Joseph L. Sax.
I'd like to remind folks that what Smalling writes about hunting can,
should and needs to be applied to a wider range of outdoor-related issues.
Scott
--- begin quoted ---
Quotes from the writings of Aldo Leopold:
- "Then came the gadgeteer, otherwise known
as the sporting-goods dealer. He has draped the American outdoors man with an
infinity of contraptions, all offered as aids to self-reliance, hardihood,
woodcraft, or marksmanship, but too often functioning as substitutes for them.
Gadgets fill the pockets, they dangle from neck and belt. The overflow fills the
auto-trunk, and also the trailer. Each item of outdoor equipment grows lighter
and often better, but the aggregate poundage becomes
tonnage.
- "The prime purpose of [wilderness
preservation] is to take care of the citizen who cannot afford to travel far or
expensively. The superficial thinker cannot disassociate a wilderness trip from
expensive guides and park outfits. He concludes that the wilderness areas are
for the idle rich. We must kill this conclusion or it will kill the wilderness
idea."
- "The tourist who buys access to his scenery
misses it all together...."
- "To him who seeks in the woods and
mountains only those things obtainable from travel or golf, the present
situation is tolerable. But to him who seeks something more, recreation has
become a self-destructive process of seeking but never quite finding; a major
frustration of mechanized society."
- "Very intensive game or fish management
lowers the unit value of the trophy by artificializing it. ... Artificialized
management has, in effect, bought fishing at the expense of another and perhaps
higher recreation: it has paid dividends to one citizen out of capital stock
belonging to all."
- "the recreational value of a head of game
is inverse to the artificiality of its origin, and hence in a broad way to the
intensiveness of the system of game management which produced it"
----begin quoted ----
This ain't no country club
Wes Smalling - Outdoors
Editor
I told my guide to keep an eye out the window of our heated deer blind
for a minute while I checked the stock market on my BlackBerry. During
our helicopter-scouting trip the day before we'd seen how the deer herd
likes to move through this area in the afternoon, and our night-vision
video camera had captured a giant buck at the deer feeder right in
front of the blind last night.
I told my guide there's an extra grand in it for him if I get that big
buck and, sure enough, that monster mule deer came in to the feeder. I
lifted my rifle, the best gun $1,500 can buy, and dropped him dead from
15 yards -- wow, what a shot. I drove back to the four-star lodge on my
ATV to sip martinis, leaving my guide behind to field-dress the animal
and do all that yucky stuff.
I hope you know I'm kidding.
There's nothing wrong with ethically managed ranch hunting and guided
hunts; they contribute a lot to rural economies. But in recent years
money and technology have invaded the sport of hunting like never
before. It's out of control. And the outdoor media isn't helping by
promoting the easiest, most expensive hunts that look to me like a
violation of the traditions of fair chase.
I'm stunned by some TV shows on the outdoor channels and stories in
magazines. The so-called experts celebrate their kills that a guide led
them to on some fenced-in, private-land hunt that most people would
never be able to afford. Some would be too embarrased to go on such a
country club hunt.
I grew up reading "Field & Stream" and had the pleasure of getting
to know its former great editor Jack Samson for a short while before he
died about a year ago. One of the last conversations he and I had was
about how outdoor writing's gone downhill, that it's mostly just ads
for guides and private-land hunts.
Outdoor media has fallen into a money pit where every animal taken is a
trophy-sized freak stuffed full of protein-rich food from a landowner's
deer feeder and the pampered so-called hunter didn't even have to break
a sweat to shoot it. Then there's all the unnecessary gear the TV host
pushes on the viewer: remote-controlled mechanical decoys, underwater
video cameras, night-vision Superman X-ray goggles...
Other outdoor sports media also focus too much on ultra-expensive
technology and destinations. Fly fishing and biking come to mind.
"It shouldn't cost $5,000 to go on a (expletive) bike ride," Samson,
the feisty old wisecracker, said over our last cup of coffee together.
But as much fun as it is to blame the media, we can't. Hunting is
becoming tougher on the common guy for more reasons than that --
shrinking access to hunting grounds, the degradation of habitat on
public lands. That said, some outdoor writers aren't doing us any
favors by promoting lazy, rich man's hunts. It only gives fuel to the
anti-hunting crowd who see it on TV and think that's how hunting is --
easy, comfortable, expensive and only about trophies.
For most hunters, it's very different. We're out on public lands hiking
on our own two feet happily busting our butts in pursuit of
free-ranging wild game. It's a fair chase, challenging and always
rewarding, whether you bag that elusive big buck or not.
---begin quoted --
I have the impression that the American
sportsman is puzzled; he does not understand what is happening to him. Bigger
and better gadgets are good for industry, so why not for outdoor recreation? It
has not dawned on him that outdoor recreations are essentially primitive,
atavistic; that their value is a contrast-value; that excessive mechanization
destroys contrasts by moving the factory to the woods or to the
marsh.
The sportsman has no leaders to tell him
what is wrong. The sporting press no longer represents sport, it has turned
billboard for the gadgeteer. Wildlife administrators are too busy producing
something to shoot at to worry much about the cultural value of the shooting.
Because everybody from Xenophon to Teddy Roosevelt said sport has value, it is
assumed that this value must be indestructible.
It is easy enough, in this way, to
understand how a political constituency could have been brought together for the
Parks, noting in addition that many of the early parklands were remote and
thought to be of little value for economic development. But the more interesting
question is why the idea of parks should have made, and should continue to make,
such a strong appeal to such a large and diverse citizenry? The answer, I
suggest, is that there is something about the idea of an encounter with nature
that has a powerful hold on the American imagination-an idea of independence, of
self-reliance, self-sufficiency and autonomy. These are ideas that lie very
close to the heart of the culture values we prize most, and that seem peculiarly
to be threatened by the style of modern, urban, industrial society. The
opportunity for engagement with nature-of which the Parks are a physical
symbol-can be seen as an act of resistance against the threat. Rather than being
a symbol of escape from the harsh reality of the real world, the parklands can
be seen as a culture-bearing medium, a setting in which deeply held values can
be renewed, reaffirmed, and realized as a source of strength and confidence to
bring to bear on the pressures continually being exerted against them in the
workaday world.
-- Joseph L. Sax,
quoted from Recreation Policy on the Federal Lands
(1978)
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