04/01© Ronald L. Moody (2001)
All rights reserved.
Reprinted here with permission.

It Takes a Village to Sustain a Way of Life

A frosty dawn brightened to golden morning. The new spring sun set rim rock ablaze as cottonwoods along the Yellowstone River thawed from gray to budding green.

The instant the sunlight touched the first treetop, a profundo gobble boomed through the grove. A big tom turkey was claiming ownership of everything he could whip in a fair fight. More gobbles echoed down the grove as other tough guys cautioned the first tom against excess ambition.

Huddled in brush, I heard strong wings, and briefly saw dark forms silhouetted near the river. Then nothing. Gone.

The moment was no more. Briefly, however, I had been the privileged audience of a brilliant stanza of the Earth's wild concert. I could go home knowing I was one of a tiny exclusive club of the world's teeming masses who have heard the music of elk, wolf, eagle or geese.

Exclusivity is a reward that is widely valued by people; too much of it can be a bad thing, however. Picture yourself attending a performance by a great orchestra and finding yourself sitting in a huge concert hall virtually empty of audience.

The extra elbow room is nice, but you wonder if you alone can afford the musicians' wage. How long will the music last with too few listeners?

Perceptive hunters have worried for many years that too few new listeners are joining veteran hunters at the wild concert. Until 1999, hunter numbers had steadily declined each year for more than a decade. Apparently, increased game populations and promotions by state agencies recently have produced a small upturn in numbers of adult hunters in the U.S.

But the down ticking numbers of 12-year-olds buying their first hunting license makes cultural extinction of the American hunter an eventual certainty unless something changes.

It's hard to attend a gathering of hunters in which somebody doesn't speak up to worry that "somebody needs to do something to get more kids into hunting." Rather than join in the worrying, I'm going to make a couple of observations about the problem and offer a modest proposal for progress.

First, young people are not the problem. True, they come of age today in a rich entertainment environment with many new activities and alternatives. But more true is that adventures into the real, wild world through the hunt, particularly when enveloped with supportive adult relationships, are still hugely appealing to young people. Only when youths are presented hunting as nothing more than another form of recreation or entertainment does hunting have trouble competing with glitzier modern pasttimes.

It is easy to beat up on adult hunters since their absence from the opportunities available to youths is the most conspicuous gap in the creation of new hunters. This doesn't really get at the root of the problem, however.

Something else is missing in the lives of both adults and youths. Something the lack of which drains our motivation for involvement in the lives of other people. The name I will give this "something" is community. The African saying that "it takes a village to raise a child" is much abused in American public speech. But the stunning, elemental truth of the statement cannot be defied. Youngsters who grow up in a village (community) become adult members of that village. Take away the village and children just grow up -- an outcome that Peter Pan warned all kids against.

Hunting certainly is not the only village being abandoned in an America where people are now identified individually as "consumers" and collectively as "markets." In the new America, the only "real" value of anything stems from the number of dollars of revenue it produces for an "industry." Is this beginning to sound familiar? If not, then ask yourself how many dollars it will cost you, for instance, to buy enough antler trophy points to put your name in the hunting book of success.

Professor Robert Putnam in his recent book "BOWLING ALONE . . ." gave definition to what many people were already worrying about: communities are dying out in our society and going extinct with them are the peculiar moral and esthetic values those communities have sustained across generations of time.

Hunting will survive another generation only if enough adult hunters hold values beyond their own personal "success" to revive a community that has endured since the beginning of humanity.

If the loss of community is stopped. If the shared identity of fraternal membership is saved for the benefit of future generations. It will be the result of what a few people do in their own, home town. It will not happen because of any initiative of the political elite in state and national capitals.

A couple of things have to happen. First, individual hunters must reject the consumerism that has become a cancer to community. We must reserve our respect and acclaim for those who achieve for the benefit of the people, the wildlife, the land.

The second thing that must happen is that individual hunters do "something" in their own, home town. Many ideas are good. What a person does is much less important than that some activity of hunting community happens close to home so like-minded neighbors have a new front porch on which to gather.
I suggest that hunters need not re-invent their community. The pieces are still present and alive, awaiting only a new breeze to fan flames. A volunteer Hunter Education program is present in virtually every town. So is a 4-H program, a Scouting program, an organization for adult sportsmen such as a Rod and Gun Club or a Ducks Unlimited Chapter.

It wouldn't take a rocket scientist to assemble such pieces into the infrastructure of a whole hunting community.

But, realistically, local Nimrods are not likely to make the effort as long as respect and honor among hunters is reserved only for big antlers or heavy game bags.

This recalls that the path to honor begins with conscience.