This past weekend I attended a state-sanctioned Hunter Safety Training course, a first step toward going on my first deer hunt next fall at Midewin. In some circles, this makes me a traitor. A Benedict Arnold. Hunters are the enemy. They’re not nature lovers. They’re killers.
The fact is, most everyone involved in natural areas restoration is a killer of some kind. While some may limit their activities to monitoring birds or butterflies or planting native plant plugs, many saw, chop and lop down invasive plants – including some aggressive native species such as gray dogwood – and treat the stumps with a heavy concentration of herbicide to kill the plants at their roots. Many participate in prescribed burns, setting controlled fire to natural areas, which kills off undesirable plant species along with a fair number of native insects and other critters that fail to escape the flames.
Many restorationists likewise understand that excess populations of native white-tailed deer must be killed in order to restore the health our woodlands. Drive by most forest preserves in Northeastern Illinois and you’ll see a distinct browse line, with deer having consumed virtually everything on the ground and on trees up to a height of about five feet. At Midewin, nine-foot chain link fences now surround the native plant seed beds to keep out deer that previously mowed through the beds like a plague of locusts. However, few restorationists actually take up a gun and do the deer killing themselves. But that often doesn’t stop them from looking down their noses at the hunters they rely upon to do the dirty work for them.
Of course, the hunting community is hardly short of individuals who return the favor by disparaging the entire environmental community as a bunch of “tree huggers” and “Bambi lovers.”
I didn’t have to attend hunter safety training in order to apply for a hunting license in the State of Illinois. Anyone born before 1984 is exempt. However, never having hunted before, it seemed to me the common sense thing to do, just as last fall I had enrolled in a course to be certified to assist with conducting controlled burns.
In truth, there was a significant degree in common between the two training courses. Both of them lasted about the same amount of time over two days. More importantly, both emphasized safety, safety, safety. Hunting and burning are activities that can have beneficial effects, but both involve no small amount of risk. To property. To human life.
For this reason, hunting and burning also share in common a fair amount of opposition. In part because some fundamentally oppose them, no matter their positive effects. Or for moral and ethical reasons. Or because they don’t understand the why’s and wherefore’s of each.
I’ve never hunted in my life. Never had the least desire to do so. The closest I’ve come is holding a trapped squirrel over a big bucket of water to drown it. Over the years, I’ve trapped a hundred or more squirrels in my backyard and transported them to various forest preserves. The main reason I do so is to keep squirrels from taking up residence in my attic as they have done on several occasions, repeatedly chewing through the wood soffits on my historic home. On one occasion, a squirrel some how got into my house while I was out of town and tried to get out by chewing through the sashes of my newly-installed historic replication windows. In the end, I couldn’t bring myself to drown even a squirrel that caused significant damage to my home. So it will be interesting to see if I can pull the trigger on a deer that causes significant damage to a treasured natural area.
The two-day hunting safety course was good. In addition to firearm safety, a great deal of emphasis was placed on being a responsible and ethical hunter. Quoting Aldo Leopold, “the father of wildlife management,” the instruction manual stressed “ethical behavior is doing the right thing when no one else is watching – even when doing the wrong thing is legal.” Doing the right thing includes respecting natural resources, landowners, hunters and non-hunters alike. It includes obeying the law, exercising good judgment, safe judgment. It includes the concept of “fair chase,” a concept first purportedly developed in the Middle Ages and formalized in this country by the Boone and Crockett Club (founded by the conservation president Teddy Roosevelt) and woven into the laws of many states.
For all the information about doing the right thing ethically, there ran through the comments and conversations of the 60 or so people taking the course, and even occasionally among the instructors, a polite but pointed undertone of “us” against “them:” we need to do the right thing because “environmentalists” want to take away our sport; the government wants to take away our rights. Or, as one camo-clad dad of two young kids preparing for their first hunt chimed in unapologetically, “Democrats suck.”
When I explained to a few folks why I was taking the course, they appreciated that someone from the “other side” would bother to walk in their shoes (or Gore-Tex hunting boots) for a change. “No one understands nature better than a hunter” was a common refrain. Come next November, I’ll see for myself. Between now and then, however, as I learned from the course, I’ve got a lot of practicing with a firearm to do so I can go into the field confident, prepared, safe and responsible.