The future of hunting? –Elitism or shopping or grassroots?
Reading about all the driving around that people do and all
the fancy things they’re involved with these days in hunting
and with dogs, it makes me wonder if we’ve left our roots
and traded hunting for shopping.
Can one really know the land in all the areas I read about
people driving to and ‘hunting’? (More like ‘visiting’.) Can one
have roots in these places? Hard to imagine people even having
serious friends in such places.
For the most part, I imagine most folks who do all this driving for hunting
are involved with preserves and guides.
Basically it seems like they buy their hunting.
I just don’t like the sounds of it.
And even local hunting, of course, is turning into this,
what with the DNR playing up all the tourism angles and the
license fees going up up up.
I hunt because I’m alive. I ain’t no steenking ‘consumer’.
Not anyone’s ‘customer’. No tourist. I need to eat and
hunting is the culture that has built up around that.
It can never be allowed to make a JOKE of that.
I read about the huge expenses people put out for
hunting. Those quail end up costing $1000 apiece.
It’s a joke.
Basically right now I’m a bit stuck, a bit stymied.
What I do is every season I go out for the game which
is in season and I get a little of it. I’m not a fisherman
or a hunter. Not a quail person or a pheasant type.
I’m a person. It all has its season, it all fits, for me.
Anyway, to get licenses for all the natural normal
outdoor food activities I do in a year now costs me
$100. It about stops me in my tracks. In fact, I haven’t
bought this year’s license yet. And I’ve hunted my whole life.
Is this what they have in mind for me? I say it costs me $100 and
I call it one license, because I do one thing. I live. I can’t separate the ducks from the
trout from the bluegill. They can sell them as 1000 licenses if
they want, but it’s all one to me. They can sell them for
$1000 if they want: it’s a ‘market’ to them; if they see they
can make more with a $1000 license, maybe that’s what they’ll do.
Maybe there will be so many poachers that we’ll need 3X the
rangers, maybe the rangers will strike for better wages and benefits, driving up
license fees even more. Then maybe we’d get yet another nifty career where the civil servant
earns more than the average person who pays his salary. And
maybe people will stop hunting and each remaining sportsman
will have to pay that much more to finance the new DNR office
building at the capitol.
What will the person living the way his ancestors lived do?
–Someone using the old gear passed down, reaping a little of
the bounty of the land around him. You think that MANY hunters
and outdoorsmen STILL don’t live just like their ancestors did?
Canning meat, working bees, running hounds, heading off to
the river with a pole. There are millions of these people still out
there! What will such people do with $100 license
fees? With rulebooks 200 pages thick? With all land posted and
the only land available locked inside elite preserves?
A normal person is responsible first off. Never
does anything that doesn’t make sense. A real hunter would
never spend more on licensing than he would save in meat costs.
A hunter is natural. The animals he hunts would never exert
themselves more than what they hoped to gain from it in a
tangible way. Hunters respect animals and hope to learn from
them. That’s the first lesson we learn from animals: they’re
not stupid. We try to live up to their standards. We learn to
make do, to do it ourselves, to do things the right way.
We don’t learn to shop.
A real hunter when faced with license fees that outpace what
he saves by hunting may well stop hunting. Or he will go underground.
Did you ever hear about how the people became criminals when the king outlawed
hunting on his lands in ye olde England? Did you ever hear about how all the real
culture that ever occured in the Former Soviet Union happened UNDERGROUND?
And we kicked their butts. We’re the real pros at making officialness kick the butt of
reality. They were just pikers. How many great cultural figures have stated that the market
poses more risk to freedom than a dictatorship could ever hope to? If the hunter
drops off the radar, but keeps doing what a hunter does, he is
no less of a hunter. He might be the only hunter left. If what
the others are doing is shopping.
In reply to my essay,
Aspenskyy wrote:
>
> I cant really agree with you on the shopping thing but I do think that alot of
> I was always taught that
> you have to work hard for something instead of just paying a large hunting fee.
We’re not used to thinking of our actions, hobbies, heritage in terms of
‘shopping’, which is why it seems so grating. But your own quote seems like
you actually do agree with me. ‘Paying a large hunting fee’ is shopping.
The thing is that freedom, or anything good, is easily lost. Our
heritage is not a gimme. Turning it into something you get by spending
is NOT the answer. In fact, it helps the snowball roll faster downhill.
We should resist the notion that ‘if you want to play you have to pay.’
Or ‘you have to fight for your rights.’ You play those games, you lose.
Those in charge of rigging the prices and the fights will kick our butts
if we play them on their turf. It’s a stage fight: we win one, they win 1000.
We put in some public land and improve a river a little: they turn America
into minimalls, pavement, TV and debt. 1:1000. Nice odds for them.
Remember, they make their money from screwing you every way imaginable.
Which part of your life do you think they’re content to let you have in peace?
They will not let up either. If we ever got away from high taxes or long
commutes, they’d boost home electricity rates 10X. If we got off the grid,
they’d boost something else, they’d do something to turn neighbor against
neighbor—Maybe they’d encourage lawsuits? Extreme posting of property?
Maybe insurance would go up 10X? (Oh, right, that all already happened.)
They make their money off of bleeding our heritage dry. And making us
think it was natural.
The thing is the enemy is us. We’re our own worst enemy. Greed, lotteries,
overtime. No one made us raise our hand. We’re all in the stock market.
Maximized profit means destruction. A weak culture is the greatest
success for those who exploit weakness. But almost everyone is making
money off of weakness these days. It’s called ‘the service economy.’
service on your debt, that is, on your desert.
Have we sold our birthright for a mess of potage?
capt. h. patterson ,therapy charters wrote:
>
> I have a lot of people”shop” for fish on my boat. not everybody has
> acsess to good hunting and fishing places. I don’t know many farmers
> that let people hunt. So get off your high and mighty stance!
I wish I could. Actually, it’s not high and mighty, darn it.
It’s American. The shopping mentality is what has killed
our culture and killed the ability of folks to go out and hunt.
(Liability and shopping go hand in hand.) Farmers used to
let people hunt. People used to have access. —Near to
very crowded cities! I won’t even say ‘even’. We used to
be Americans. Now we’re shoppers. You used to be able to
have good relations with landowners. Now the land is chopped
up, the owners absentee and turning over yearly.
We’re as bad as the Euro’s without the culture they have
as a stopgap. I.e., their land is as fully developed as ours
is fast becoming, but they also have a public culture
which allows people to enjoy a lot of that land anyway. We have
no public culture. As our land gets chopped up, people are
moved OFF it. Replaced by frigging NOTHING. It’s not like
anyone is ON any of all this land people are now kept off
of here in the US. It’s just a travesty. The more we ‘fight’
such loss, and the more we ‘pay to play’, the FASTER we
lose.
*****
I wonder what the costs and demographics of hunting have
been up to today compared to previous decades.
What with arable land being developed faster than an eye can blink
and leasing, clubs, reserves and such arising as a big access option,
what’s happening to the meat for the table hunter? How about
license fees in constant dollars?
Any changes of note hereabouts that anyone sees?
I myself am finding the Sportsman’s License (to do all
outdoor activities one naturally does) cost of ~$100 here
in Michigan to be somewhat prohibitive anymore.
I do outdoor sport harvests for about a dozen dinners a year, ave.
(Fur, fish, feather.) Just like I do my garden for a lot more food.
—But you need to keep an eye on gardening, too, or else fancy seed and
accessory costs will outstrip gains. To me, these activities are ACTUALLY
connected to cultural roots, not store-bought imitations. I do my
best to PROVIDE by way of field, stream and garden, not to shop
that way.
Also, the seasons and regs are seeming to make it all more of a
bureaucracy than a way to PROVIDE. I find that I need a filing
system to keep my hunts in order. And more and more often when
I go out for geese I see pheasants but I find that seasons don’t
seem to overlap as much anymore. So I see game but feel stumped
by the regs. Is this aspect getting any worse or more complex lately?
The regs handbook has sure grown into a nice paperback from the
flier it used to be.
It is interesting to me that my approach to outdoor sport culture
has ended up with me operating a lot more like the tribes
I read about in Natl Geo than any hunters I currently run into.
—I don’t buy stuff or drive anywhere, often use my gramp’s beatup
old wired-up singleshot, and a box of shells lasts a long time,
what with oneshot kills.
Most everywhere else I look I seem to a see a more money-based
approach, even among what appear to be poorer people.
When I was growing up it seemed that the integration of outdoor sports
into everyday life was a little more seamless. Plentiful game and
low costs seemed to let us keep the Hunting Provider culture alive.
Anyway, a person hunting for the table has to get a lot before
they cover these $100 fees. Is this anything new? —It’s possible
that in constant dollars what we paid out ‘back then’ was about
the same. But it didn’t feel like it.
*****
I’m getting a bit discouraged.
N. Am. arable land will shortly be fully developed and double
in population.
Public lands will be under heavy hunting pressure and will be
considered less than desireable, contributing to further
decline in hunting.
I heard a lady clerk at a local hardware store say that
she hears of fewer and fewer people who are hunters. She said it used
to be that school would about close down for opening week—for
pheasant and deer, around here. The thing is that people aren’t
farmers anymore. They aren’t locals either. They are transient.
Hunting is the first thing that goes. Even though we have more rabbits,
deer, turkeys and coon than ever before.
Private land will be almost all small-lot. Farmers and large
property owners will sell their hunting rights to the highest bidder.
These large lot owners will carefully cultivate their game and hunting areas
and create nice longterm blinds which hunters and clubs will carefully
reserve ahead of time.
The most money wins.
Like today’s Euro hunting scene.
Dog hunting, especially trailing, will greatly decline in the US/N. Am.
as room to run declines.
All property boundaries will be greatly enforced and disputed.
(I wouldn’t be surprised if this didn’t extend to FISHING also!
We might be surprised at Brit/Euro style of ‘private waters’ today,
but it’s coming our way, I bet.)
The new small lot face of America is basically an urban setting.
Most arable land will have no bigger than 10-acre parcels.
This creates lots of hunting problems, but one of them is noise,
another is tracking. It seems like the modern, camo archery approach
is best suited for not being visible to offend the easily offended.
(Which is everyone—that’s why they move to the country, dislike of
fellow man due to an overall lack of N. Am. culture, inability
to get along, so flee if you can is the rule.) But archery makes for
longer tracking quite often, which is untoward in a small lot milieu.
Quieter firearms, treestands (shooting downwards) and shoulderbone
shots to reduce tracking might all be part of the answer.
Corporate farmers will do the farming, and the people in the vehicles in
the field (one per 1000 acres) will simply be under company policy
as to how to handle anyone they see. But for the small lot
property, it is purchased to function as the owner’s larger toilet space:
private area to be kept clean of human presence. A place to depressurize.
To know is empty. It will have no other function. Your job creates so much
stress from treating people inhumanely that when you come home the sight
of a human, or even potential sight of one, is a shock to the conscience.
So even though you will rarely walk your own land (you will watch TV)
the thought that someone is out there will be unbearable. A human on
the land will represent the greatest most embarrassing intrusion and will
be met by screeching, mayhem, the law and lawsuits. Hunter landowners
will behave the same as anyone: screeching.
Of course, I mainly mean strangers on your land. But in today’s mobile
society everyone is a stranger. Those you get to know you will tend
to leave in a few years. So the best you hope for is that they
come to understand that you want to be left alone. Most folks wouldn’t
ask a friend if they could even picnic on their 10-acre parcel, which
is thus trod by no one.
What’s hilarious is that I’ve hunted, hiked and fished this local
area for 30 years. I’m not a stranger to any piece of it. But every
couple years I’m a stranger to the new owner. I can’t keep up.
The fact is that there IS NO MORE COUNTRYSIDE.
Poor man’s hunting was only ever a sign of the times anyway.
And the times were strictly as follows: People worked the land and
were neighbors for generations. No one moved. Allowing people on your
land was good for neighborly relations and helped protect crops, nor
was it any kind of possible deficit: in a true culture the presence of humans
out in the open air cannot take away from anything: you weren’t
invading anyone’s space, no one was stressed out against people
to begin with, and there was no such thing as a liability lawsuit.
The cultural aspects that promoted democratic hunting are largely
gone now. Basically, it would be like hunting in a city in a lot of places.
TODAY THE ‘NO TRESPASSING’ SIGN IS LIKE THE NEW STATE FLAG,
is all I’m saying. It’s almost laughable. I like the idea of dueling signs.
—Two ‘neighbors’ posting each lot facing the other. Post it every 5 feet
or so.
I note that Michigan outdoor sports media is encouraging
this trend. They’re trying to train hunters to realize that their best
hope is in simply buying the rights to hunt. Buying land to hunt on.
No more sharing the venison or rabbit pie with the farmer. Ha.
That’s a joke. People appreciating some fresh meat? Ha again.
No, it’s cash. And you know where that leads. Fat cats and lawyers.
