Senseless seasons on animals doesn’t justify hunting
http://stillwatergazette.com/2012/11/02/senseless-seasons-on-animals-doesnt-justify-hunting/
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I now live in semi-wilderness not far from the St. Croix River. I grew up in the 1940s and 1950s on the North Hill in Stillwater in a familial culture where hunting and trapping was an annual tradition. One learned the trade early on, imbued with the belief that one had to learn to hunt and kill as a sacred right of masculine passage. Returning home with the slain was proof of your skill, and a trophy kill a badge of personal honor and achievement.
I stopped hunting and trapping long ago. For years, I was ambivalent about speaking out because I accepted the cultural and psychological influences motivating those who grew up considering unnecessary killing a sport. I’ve come to recognize how superficial, shallow, fleeting and self-destructive is this violent indulgence.
I’ve come 180 degrees. For me, it is the senseless open seasons on wolves, bears, and in Wisconsin, even mourning doves.
The hunting of deer, upland birds and waterfowl once seemed justified to put food on the family table. Today, the cost of a box of ammunition exceeds the price of meat at the grocery store. In my area, one could easily survive indefinitely on fresh road kill.
Statistically, wolves and bears present no significant threat to people, domestic animals or human habitat if reasonable precautions are taken to discourage their incursions into our domain. The idea of hunting mourning doves is obscenely ludicrous.
What I’ve witnessed in the 12 years at the small Northwoods lake where I live is a dramatic decline of lower -end food chain wildlife, birds and the creatures that sustain the natural infrastructure — dam building, weed control and water quality, erosion mitigation, fish reproduction, small mammal and amphibian shoreline character. This comes from trapping, over hunting and mindless pollution. We now see accounts of dogs killed by increasingly sophisticated traps planted in the woods. This is insane.
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