Deer Hunting Opening Day

This is the week firearms deer season opens in many northern states. I went for years and years to a hunting lodge in upper MI. It was the real thing, built around 1900 as a rich guys hunting lodge, its been in the same family since then. 5 bedrooms, huge 'great room' with a walk-in fireplace, 10 of us used to go up for a whole week every year in Nov. Things got stupid about 15 years ago, and I quit going. Many of the guys became more interested in closing the bar every night and getting up 5 hours later and staggering around the woods still drunk, and tired, carrying a loaded gun. From what I hear, this is par for the course in many places. Most men use deer season to get away from their wives anyway, might as well get drunk and party too. And more and more you've got college aged girls hooking in motor homes and making more money in 2 weeks than they could all year in a regular job. This kind of thing has always gone on to some degree, but as the hunters get younger and younger, they act like its an extension of Spring Break. No thanks.

It's the problem of hanging around guys who aren't real hunters. The older men who should be making the rules perhaps have become alcoholics themselves. As far as the younger men, it is a well known phenom. that younger hunters are actually not sufficiently replacing the older ones in the population, making some people project that the in the future hunting will be quite a rarity, perhaps banned due to the trend. To buck this trend, and perhaps to make hunters clean up their act in general, there is a movement afoot to encourage daughters to hunt these days.

I predict this thread gets hijacked by pro-hunting, anti-hunting debate.

Quote: odiousgambit

It's the problem of hanging around guys who aren't real hunters. The older men who should be making the rules perhaps have become alcoholics themselves. As far as the younger men, it is a well known phenom. that younger hunters are actually not sufficiently replacing the older ones in the population, making some people project that the in the future hunting will be quite a rarity, perhaps banned due to the trend. To buck this trend, and perhaps to make hunters clean up their act in general, there is a movement afoot to encourage daughters to hunt these days.

I predict this thread gets hijacked by pro-hunting, anti-hunting debate.

I have heard about that hunting is dying out. Here in PA that could take 1,000 years. Heck, GEW closes a plant they have here for maintainence because not enough workers show up Monday after Thanksgiving when we open. Schools close that day. They didn't film "The Deer Hunter" here for nothing.

But it is logical. Few people decide to learn to hunt unless they grew into it. Few turn 18, 21, or whatever and just decie to start. Few of those that do will bag anything since it is an art that takes years to learn. Guys have fewer kids so the pool shrinks. For myself I support hunting and most (real) hunters. But do I have a desire to go, and use the deer meat all winter? Sorry, I'd rather play craps or poker.

Lost female motorist walks into hunting lodge to ask directions and happens to inquire of the clerk why everyone is wearing orange. He replies, its a state law ma'am. Oh, I think that is wonderful. Drunks everywhere should be required to wear orange. Okay, so the joke is decades old. It only shows that for a long time hunters have indeed been perceived as being on a bender.

Some men drink more, hunt less and avail themselves of the pleasures offered by young college girls? Happens in Deer Country apparently. Happens elsewhere too. Even happens in Vegas. Hunting trips, fishing trips, gambling trips ... often involve alcohol and young ladies wishing to earn their tuition or rent money quickly and simply.

It is probably more dangerous to guzzle Bourbon if you have a shotgun than if you have a fishing pole or fingers that are calloused from setting a pair of dice, and it might affect the Rate of Attrition too. I'm told that insufficient numbers of hunters and insufficient appreciation for the role played by hunters is what brought us Lyme Disease and other chronic fatigue syndromes as overly numerous deer invaded residential areas and distributed various pathogen-bearing ticks. America used to be rural, now it is largely urban. Experiences change. We no longer all hunt for survival. We no longer wear home sewn buckskins.

In some areas of Sagebrush America, girls grow up knowing stick shifts and automobile repair, but in many areas of this country even guys no longer learn to drive a manual transmission or perform major repair jobs. Do we lament the decline in auto mechanics as much as we lament the decline in hunters? Or are lobbyists involved in this issue? At the Marianas Turkey Shoot 90 percent of the kills were made by only 10 percent of the pilots. They were the pilots who had grown up hunting and knew displacement shooting. The most decorated soldier of WW Two, Audie Murphy, grew up dirt poor and if he didn't hunt successfully his family didn't eat. So when war came, of course he knew how to shoot. Does this make the decline of hunting a vital issue? Not really.

Frankly, if your friends become more interested in Bourbon and Broads than in Bagging a Buck, dissociating yourself from them seems sensible. That hunting lodge will eventually become the Condominium Association's clubhouse anyway. And wives in the housing development will hire teenage girls as nannies and also will see to it that the nannies get utilized in other ways because letting their husbands go to a Hunting Camp allows them too much time away from earning money for the wives to spend.