Letters to the Editor and Others
Number of Hunters on the Decline
9/13/03
LTE, Syracuse Post-Standard http://www.syracuse.com/contactus/
In J. Michael Kelly’s recent column about the declining number of hunters (Fewer hunters head into the woods, 9/12), Jim Zumbo of Outdoor Life magazine says “We've gone from being a rural country to an increasingly urbanized society." While this is undoubtedly true, we suspect that a major contributor to the decline of hunters in America is that young people no longer see violence and killing as a “cool” hobby. Inflicting immeasurable amounts of pain and suffering upon harmless and helpless animals is no longer seen as a responsible activity for parents to lure their children into.
In recent years, wildlife protection organizations have taken the side of the weak against the oppression of the strong, and have exposed the truth about the barbarity of hunting to a public that had previously been fed only a greatly sanitized, romanticized view of this atrocious sport.
Wildlife management agencies and local gun clubs fail tell the truth about the cruel and dangerous nature of hunting. The Associated Press reported that on September 4, an Ohio man was found to have bled to death after piercing a major artery in his leg with an arrow while hunting. Sheriff's deputy John Jacobs said of the accident ''It's a typical bowhunting injury.'' On September 5, the AP also reported on the death of a teenager who was fatally shot while hunting geese in Pennsylvania.
In addition to the hunters who are maimed and killed every year, countless numbers of animals are viciously slaughtered for fun by hunters in all fifty states. The details of the horrific violence of hunting are sometimes revealed in hunting-oriented publications. When speaking of bow hunting, "The rule of thumb has long been that we should wait 30 to 45 minutes on heart and lung hits, an hour or more on a suspected liver hit, eight to 12 hours on paunch hits, and that we should follow up immediately on hindquarter and other muscle hits, to keep the wound open and bleeding," wrote Glenn Helgeland in the winter 1987 issue of “Fins and Feathers.” "For a bow hunter to easily recover a wounded deer, the blood loss must be extensive," wrote Rob Wegner in the August, 1991 issue of “Deer and Deer Hunting.”
It is because the disgraceful nature of sport hunting – killing for kicks – is being made public in a way that it never has before, hunters are losing access to areas where they had previously set up their tree stands. We welcome the continuation of this positive trend. For more information on the true nature of hunting, please contact the Committee to Abolish Sport Hunting at (845) 255-4227 or visit our website at http://www.all-creatures.org/cash/
Joe Miele
CASH
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