Here's my take.
I live in Arkansas. I'm a native Arkie. I own a safe full of guns. I'm a certified handgun instructor and certified rifle coach.
You know what?
I'm not really a hunter.
I might technically qualify as a hunter, but I'm by no means serious about it.
I'm not against hunting. I grew up around it. I even hunt from time to time.
For example, for this past Christmas, I took to my parents' house a big crockpot full of Brunswick stew made with squirrels I personally killed, skinned, cleaned, and cooked.
I've been deer hunting off and on since I was about 12.
But I've never, ever, ever killed a deer. I've never even shot at a deer.
I even lived in Wyoming for two years, and hunted mulies on my own, and saw several, but never actually fired at one.
Now that I'm back home in Arkansas, my deer hunting consists of sitting on a limestone overhang near my backyard for a couple of hours, watching the holler below. That's about all the time I can devote to hunting.
I go deer hunting. But to me it's just not worth the effort and time and expense to "live the hunting lifestyle" and plan my entire year around hunting season.
I don't have the time to spend a lot of effort on it. I don't have large chunks of change I want to devote to it.
In the past I have hunted ducks (once about 10 years ago, and then about five years ago) snow geese (about five years ago) even tried turkeys a couple of times in my youth.
Right now, the most constant hunting in my life is that three out of the last four years has found me in a public dove field on the opening day of dove season, but I just couldn't get up the moxie to go this year.
That and squirrels...but then I can hunt squirrels any time where I live.
Here are the reasons why I'm not a serious hunter.
1) Hunting is "big business" and has pretty much priced me out of the good hunting. When I lived in Wyoming, I failed to bag a single big game animal because as a poor slob restricted to public land hunting, I was priced out of the market to hunt the really good places.
Near Gillette, WY, in Campbell County, is prime antelope habitat. There are antelope everywhere. But unless you're willing to plunk down between $150 to $400 just to set foot on somebody's private land, you're S.O.L. when it comes to hunting antelope. It was just too expensive to hunt antelope for me when I was there.
Now, go price how much an antelope hunt would be if you are an out-of-state hunter, and have to first buy the Wyoming out-of-state antelope permit, and then pay to hunt on private land, and pay for the state-required guide, and for transportation to Wyoming, etc. etc.......
Because hunting has become such a big business, the small-time hunter is basically screwed. No big rolls of cash? Then you don't get access to the good hunting spots, bucko.
One more example....when I lived in Wyoming, I was poor, so I hunted on the public lands of the Thunder Basin National Grasslands. But you know what? During hunting season, I had to constantly watch out for the idiots in their big trucks with license plates from Minnesota or California who drove all the way to Wyoming so they could hunt the already-pressured Thunder Basin National Grassland.
Which leads me to reason number 2 why I don't hunt seriously.
2) I don't hunt seriously because of other hunters.
I've had plenty of bad experiences with knee-walking, drooling, beer-swilling morons even in my comparatively limited hunting experiences. As a result, I really don't enjoy hunting when I am constantly in contact with friggin' morons who are also armed.
I've had rifle fire go near me. I've had slob hunters spook game that I had carefully stalked and played the wind for.....in Wyoming, after working my way through a quarter mile of Black Hills forest on a mule buck, some numb-nuts tromped over the crest of the nearby hill, saw the buck I was stalking, and hollered back over his shoulder, "Hey Jim! THERE'S A BIG OLD BUCK RIGHT UP HERE!!!" Within 15 seconds, that big old buck was about 3 counties away.
I haven't been duck hunting seriously because I just didn't enjoy having my position showered with steel shot raining in from three different directions. But hey, that's what you put up with when you are hunting on public lands because you can't afford to go "millionaire duck hunting' on private land in Stuttgart, Arkansas.
Idiots with guns is why I wasn't in the dove field this year, either. I saw too much armed stupidity out there the year before, and I just didn't want to go back this time. It just didn't seem like a good time.
So, in a nutshell, here's what I see wrong with hunting right now.
1) It's so freakin' expensive, that only folks who consider hunting their primary religion or folks with lots of spare cash can afford to do it well any more. The casual hunter, who used to be a large section of the hunting populace, is pretty much screwed by the realities of the marketplace right now.
If you just kind of, sort of like hunting, and are not willing to earmark thousands of dollars to do it, you're pretty much screwed. You can hunt, but only in over-hunted, crowded "public lands." The only places that have the really good hunting are for-profit operations on private lands.
2) Lots of folks who hunt, especially in the over-crowded public lands, are inconsiderate idiots who don't know the most basic etiquette, or who dont' give a damn about etiquette, especially if they've driven from several states over to hunt on some little patch of public land. The attitude seems to be that I'm from out of state, and nobody knows me, and I don't live here, so to Hell with the locals. It's not much fun to hunt crowded public land with so many armed idiots.
Fix those problems somehow.
Or see the number of hunters continue to decline and for hunting to die off.
hillbilly
