02/05© Ronald L. Moody (2005)
All rights reserved.
Reprinted here with permission.

21st Century Nimrods Go to Hunt
Thru School House Door

With permission slip in pocket the truckload of hunters pull through the farm field gate headed for the deer woods on the other side. They take a shortcut across the grass to get there quicker.

Next season the farm is ringed with ‘No Trespassing’ signs. Turns out the ‘grass’ was newly sprouted wheat and the hunters had driven down the farmer’s cash income for the year.

A successful deer huntress returning to her suburban home is observed by her neighbor as she unloads her big buck in the drive. The neighbor storms over to call the huntress a ‘murderer’ who is killing all the wild animals and making them extinct. The huntress doesn’t know what else to say except that she has “a legal right to kill the deer.”

The neighbor later signs a petition to ban hunting and mails a big check to an anti-hunting group.

A 16-year-old boy on his first real pheasant hunting trip with his father is eating lunch as he reflects on a morning of wonders. He has seen a hawk dive on a cottontail, and was stunned by the liquid brilliance of a cock pheasant bursting into the air among cattail and cottonwood before a warm autumn sun. A new way of seeing his own, mostly synthetic, world is shaped by the experience of real and natural wild life. The dead rooster in his coat testifies to the shortness of the circle between life and death.

That afternoon he observes another group of hunters as they use ATV vehicles to drive pheasant out of cornfields and talk to each other with radios to get into position to kill more birds. The youth is quiet on the way home as he thinks he will only be a hiker in the future. Life in the city is full of loud, greedy behavior; he doesn’t need to make himself the enemy of the hawk to find more of it. If that is the hunters’ way, he will be a non-hunter.

While none of these events were safety hazards, all of the affected people in the stories would have been helped by a little more education.

Generations of rod & gun writers have told vivid tales of youngsters pining away at their school desks dreaming of hunting adventures while the autumn season drifted away outside.

School always is portrayed as a frustrating barrier to a hunter’s freedom to enjoy the outdoors. But life has changed for would-be hunters; attitudes and opportunities have become challenges. Once a person learned all they needed to become a hunter simply by living in the same house with older hunters. The complexities demonstrated in the stories above raise the kind of real barriers that persuade most people not to be hunters. Urban people live far from hunting opportunities, and they have no rural lifestyle to guide their decision-making. Today, they need more and better formal education in order to become hunters who enjoy a lifetime of both the hunting experience and the respect of their friends and neighbors.

The schoolhouse dream wheel is turning full circle in the 21st Century, as formal hunter education becomes an integral and continuing part of the hunting identity and experience.

The popular image of hunter education is the state-operated training course designed to teach basic safety skills and hunter responsibilities to new young hunters. These courses have been mandatory for enough years now that the vast majority of active hunters have been through one.

The central legacy of more than 50 years of Hunter Education in the U.S. and Canada is that hunting today is, statistically, the safest outdoor sport.

Safety training obviously is successful. But objectionable hunter behavior is becoming more of an issue, not less, as conflicts grow between landowners, non-hunting outdoor recreationists, and the general public. The individual hunter’s role as advocate and teacher of his or her heritage is becoming central to survival of the hunting tradition. This role demands knowledge of history and ethics.

Some bad behavior always can be assigned to willful misconduct. But much of the problem stems from hunters who have never been taught how to deal with challenges. Either the challenge did not exist for their parent’s generation or new, urban lifestyles deny the would-be hunter the learning experiences that once were a normal part of growing up in a hunting family.

Hunter Education leaders are considering a host of ideas. The computer age offers the opportunity for people to learn at home online. At the same time, the value mentoring and community building function of the traditional Hunter Ed class continues to be vital. A real challenge is to make the state Hunter Ed course mandatory for all new hunters but not make the initiation requirement so intimidating that would-be new hunters are discouraged from trying.

An idea I’ve heard many times in discussions of hunting problems is that Hunter Education is now only a one-time event that occurs in adolescence and loses its influence on people as they age and evolve in their personal values. Hunters should be required to take periodic re-training or testing over the course of their lives, according to advocates. Interval of five years to ten years is usually suggested.

Another concept is for state agencies to offer online training on specific hunter responsibilities with the course designed for adults as they encounter the responsibility. Completion of such training could be made mandatory for some responsibilities and voluntary for others. Montana already offers one such course: The Bear Species Identification Course, which is mandatory for obtaining a bear permit.

I have suggested a topic for a course to teach the responsibilities and courtesies assumed by a hunter when they receive permission to hunt on private property. Private landowners even could ask hunters if they have completed the course before granting permission.

Whatever ideas actually bear fruit; Hunter Ed will no longer be a one-time event for 12 year-olds. I believe hunters of the 21st Century will engage in an ongoing formal education process as an integral part of the hunting experience.

Unless we invent a time machine to re-create the past, the 21st Century hunting community is going to have to devise new means for hunters to learn how to keep the hunter’s path clean in a brave new world.

Ron can be reached by email at couleeking@hotmail.com.

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