Rather than being consistent with people’s need to stay home and stay safe, hunting is being billed as an essential (if not sacred) activity that hardware, grocery stores and gas stations should stay open to supply.
It must be hard to stay socially distant when your favorite social
activity is huntin’. Sure, being in the great outdoors is good for
one’s soul or spirit, or whatever, but why does it have to include
taking an innocent life. Well, the fact is, it doesn’t. You can get
a lot more in touch with Nature or your inner self without focusing
or fixating on trying to kill an animal (unless, of course, you
happen to be a psychopath).
But, rather than encouraging folks to get out there and take a hike
in the woods or wilderness, most state game departments (possibly
fearing their cushy—nonessential—jobs would dry up otherwise)
encouraged folks to go out and hunt turkey or trap otter or whomever
else they’d created a nonessential season on.
But, it’s hard for sport hunters to keep their social distance, as evidenced by how many turkey hunters shot each other (in the face or the back of the heads) just this spring, when they should have been on lock-down. Some of the hunting accidents hit two victims at once (you can’t be too socially distant if that happens) and some were fatal, involving 11 year old boys. (That’s just off the top of my head—there were so many to keep track of…). [Visit the C.A.S.H. website our reported accidents.
Some hunters may have been fearing a meat shortage, since so many
workers in slaughterhouses and packing plants were coming down with
Coronavirus, but that has never translated to empty shelves at the
grocery stores. If anything, the price for flesh-foods went down
during the crisis. Far be it from the federal government to
subsidize Beyond Meat or some other plant-based, high protein “meat”
items out there that hungry people could learn to eat.
But, rather than being consistent with people’s need to stay home
and stay safe, hunting is being billed as an essential (if not
sacred) activity that hardware, grocery stores and gas stations
should stay open to supply. The often inaccurate tests take time and
Covid-19 takes 2 weeks for symptoms to show, so we don’t yet know
how many people caught it while on hunting or fishing forays. But
one thing is certain—no-one needs to get sprayed with lead from a
recreational shotgun blast at a time like this, when so many others
are taking up necessary hospital beds.
Jim Robertson is the President of C.A.S.H. and the author of Exposing the Big Game: Living Targets of a Dying Sport.