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March 29, 2024 1:37 am
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Tall Tales From The Great Outdoors: Standing Together

By GERRY SWANSON

I was arguing with a hunting buddy, Joe, about the long range hunting craze, where people buy rifle shooting systems and snipe animals at a thousand yards. I told him that it’s bad for the sport. It results in wounded animals. It makes us look bad. Most of all, I said, it’s just not fair chase when an elk or deer are so far away they cant see, hear, or smell you.
Joe’s reply was “none of it is fair chase!” We are humans and they are animals. Nothing is fair. Your compound bow: that’s not fair.
”You’re a human with a human brain and they’re animals,” he said. “It’s all unfair!”

My reply was long range hunting takes no skill. I know guys who kill elk over the seat of a four wheeler who know nothing about the animals. How can you compare that with archery hunting pressured bulls?
IIt’s like shooting ducks on the water or geese with a rifle,” I said.

Joe is very smart, and his point was absurd, and that was his point. I realized I was splitting hairs. I was sounded like waterfowlers who use dogs, elaborate blinds, skilled calling and water sets to kill ducks, when they disparage the field hunters as not having any skill other than to stick a Mojo in the ground. Or in turn the field hunters who attack water hunters as a group of roost busters who scare all the birds out of the area. And how about those poor jump-shooters. We all pick on them. That’s probably just how the classic double gun guys sounded when the semi-auto was invented, or the recurve bow crowd when compounds took over.

We are a passionate bunch. It is very easy to fall into criticizing other people’s methods. Long distance shooting is fun, but it’s not real hunting, it’s shooting!
Animals are more than targets to me. Yet I am learning quickly that I need to support people’s right to hunt however they chose.

I joined a Sportsmen’s Alliance last year. Well funded animal rights groups, I learned, had attacked bear hunting with hounds and bait in Maine, but lost because baiting is fairly popular. And so the ‘bears are people too’ crowd is regrouping to attack hound hunters and trappers.

Dog men are a much smaller group, and the antis will win on this emotional issue as they have in so many states.
If trappers and hound hunters pull together this won’t happen. We better pull together, people.
Just think of the different ways animal rights groups can attack waterfowling. They could characterize any field hunting as hunting over bait. Or any water hunting as attacking birds in their refuge. And they are already attacking the use of hunting dogs including retrievers.

While blowing away animals at a 1,000 yards is not my cup of tea and I don’t consider it fair chase, I need to defend another hunter’s right to hunt how he wants. They buy a tag, they get a crack at one animal, just like me. The same with their seven ducks.

Spirited arguing is a healthy form of self-policing. But when it comes to the front line and the future of this sport, we absolutely have to stand together united; or we are all gonna lose.

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