A HUNTER'S APOLOGIA

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Then there's the matter of image and public conduct. What of those obnoxious louts who dress like hunters but spend the majority of their time, not afield, but warming bar stools in the nearest town and making surly fools of themselves for all to see, hear, resent, remember and retell? And what of those heedless goons who turn their hunting camps on public lands into orgies of drunken mayhem, leaving behind them hard feelings and mountains of trash for others to clean up? There's no hiding the fact that there are some serious problem, in America today with what is loosely termed hunting. What can we, all of us who care—hunters, nonhunters and antihunters alike—do to improve the ethics and image of hunting while at the same time assuring our posterity of a plenitude and diversity of wildlife?

"Kill and then mourn. Maybe it's my only chance, as Thoreau said, to get this close to some `hard matter in its home,' so large and warm, smelling grand . . . ."

We who are hunters can examine our personal motives, as well as our actions both afield and in the public view. We can police our own ranks and work to excise the slobhunter cancer that taints and threatens to destroy our sport; we must make corrections where necessary, no matter how painful. We can support mandatory hunter safety and outdoor ethics education and help to make it more meaningful and effective. Overall, we can strive to shape a positive example for today's young people who will become the hunters, or antihunters, of tomorrow.

Nonhunters can keep open minds and try to understand that slob hunters in all their many perverted forms, while highly visible, neither speak nor act for the rest of us; believe me, ethical hunters dislike them even more intensely than you do. Antihunters, if their true interest is, as they profess, the welfare of wild creatures, can try to set aside their myopic disdain for the killing of individual wild animals in favor of helping wildlife as a whole, over the long run—for the financial and political support given by hunters is critical to the survival of wildlife in this economics-driven world. Again, there can be no escaping the hard fact that we must kill to eat. And killing is killing, whether it's done openly amidst nature's grandeur, or hidden within the blood-splattered walls of our slaughterhouses.

"I shot him [a big bull elk] at the base of the brain. He quivered, looking ahead wide eyed, straining, then slowly all the life force slid from those eyes, and his muscles lost their tension. He took one last, long, slow breath and died. I cried inside and out .... "I want to sit here another half an hour with the elk, as if at the bedside of an old friend. Just sit as I have done before and try to figure out why it is I do this. "Kill and then mourn. Maybe it's my only chance, as Thoreau said, to get this close to some `hard matter in its home,' so large and warm, smelling grand .... "Should I be sad? He lived better than most. He had the whole country to himself, had his own harem of eight cows—had lived five or six glorious years up here. He was certainly better off than the steers in my pasture.

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