News - Hunters Aim, Shoot Self in Foot


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	Hunters Aim, Shoot Self in Foot Published September 13, 2003, By Joel McNally, Columnist. Capitol Times Hunters Aim, Shoot Self in Foot Front-page photographs last week featured burly men in full-dress combat gear grinning broadly while holding up the limp, dead bodies of small birds. The large men were gleefully celebrating what they thought was a glorious victory. The state's first dove hunting season was a symbolic triumph, they proclaimed, against wimpy, anti-hunting forces in Wisconsin. It was symbolic, all right. Their beaming photographs made excellent recruiting posters for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Large beasts crashing around Wisconsin woods joyously blowing mourning doves out of the sky are like aging dinosaurs destroying their own habitat and hastening the day of their own extinction. Oversized bullies don't attract many friends. The Bush administration learned that when it ignored the feelings of the rest of the world to invade and occupy another country just because it could. Now it's having a tough time getting other countries to help clean up the mess. Shoving a dove hunt down the throats of Wisconsin just because the hunting lobby is big enough and crude enough to want one has the same effect of swelling the ranks of anti-hunters. No less a pro-hunting politician than former Gov. Tommy Thompson was smart enough to understand that. That is why Thompson opposed a dove hunt. He said hunters were going to need non-hunting friends and blowing away the bird of peace wasn't going to win them any. But when anti-hunting groups successfully stopped the launching of a dove hunt two years ago with a court injunction, hunters went a little crazy. Hunters had never been denied anything politically in the state of Wisconsin before. They'd successfully transformed the Department of Natural Resources into the Department of Nuts with Rifles. All they had to do to get the DNR to launch a new hunting season was for hunters themselves to vote for it in their annual "conservation" meetings. But now a court was actually telling hunters they couldn't shoot anything they wanted. The injunction infuriated hunters who otherwise wouldn't have bothered to hunt a small bird with about as much meat on its bones as a large, flying insect. Suddenly, hunters were determined to blow away every mourning dove in Wisconsin that so much as cooed. What really angers hunters isn't bird lovers. It's that bird lovers and other intellectuals who exalt the beauty of nature don't love hunters. Hunters resent being treated like they are old and embarrassing just because, well, they are old and embarrassing. L.L. Bean and other hip catalogs sell expensive designer outfits and gear for well-educated nature lovers to take into the unspoiled wilderness for some kind of spiritual communion. But none of those catalogs show anybody killing anything and gutting it. Communing with nature is far too refined and aesthetic an experience to be defiled with lowlife blood sports. There are laws against hunters firing guns within sight of a highway. Contrary to popular belief, this is not a safety regulation. Hunters are required to be much farther from traffic than a bullet could ever travel. The law is to protect motorists from the unpleasant sight of packs of grown men blowing away animals. Wisconsin hunters brag about introducing the next generation to the hunt just as their fathers did for them, but how many of those kids share with their college classmates the bloody killing grounds of their fathers and grandfathers? Dove slaughter is right up there with deer baiting as an ugly little activity that is not mentioned in polite society. The concept behind deer baiting is to take all that bothersome hunting out of hunting. All you have to do is lay out a lavish banquet for deer and invite a whole herd over for dinner. Then, at some point when everybody is feeling a little groggy after cocktails and a big feast, you jump out from behind a bush with a gun and massacre the whole party. Whenever you go into a bar and see a deer's head on the wall with Christmas lights strung through the antlers and a funny hat, you know some deer baiter plugged that deer while it was being the life of the party with a bunch of deer buddies. Most legislators pay a lot more attention to hunters than non-hunters. That's why they fought extending the ban on deer baiting that the DNR sought to impose to try to prevent the spread of chronic wasting disease. But the more hunters flex their political muscle and flaunt their most boorish behavior, the faster they are hastening the political backlash. Wisconsin's biggest anti-hunting movement has no connection to PETA. It's the action of private property owners all over the state to put undeveloped land off-limits to hunters. While all those dove hunters were gloating and proudly holding aloft their tiny prey, a lot more signs went up. *Joel McNally of Milwaukee writes a weekly column for The Capital Times.*

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