Let me preface this by saying that I am not a hunter, although I do enjoy recreational shooting, and I fully realize that the song about Davy Crockett is part of the American mythos and not a historical account of actual events.
That being said, seems we’ve got our very own pint sized Anne Oakley here in Maryland. The first bear hunting season in half a century opened here in Maryland yesterday, and who should bag the first bear of the season? Why, none other than 8 year old Sierra Stiles, who brought down a 211lb black bear yesterday morning. Good for her! She had applied for and received a hunting license, scoring a very impressive 98 on the written portion of the test. Yesterday morning, she went out with her father to the far reaches of the family farm, and in the pre-dawn twilight, she shot her bear, reloaded, and shot it again, bringing it down for good.
Nice story, huh? This little girl has an unforgettable morning with her dad, in the great outdoors, performing well when the chips are down and doing something that will giver her a memento that the will carry with her, along with her memories of a special day with her father, for the rest of her life (She wants to have a bearskin rug made. Who knows? Years from now maybe her own children will be conceived on that very rug). The problem is that The Usual Suspects™ are up in arms this morning. Michael Markarian, executive vice president of the Humane Society of the United States, called it “terrible cruelty”. It was mentioned on the sports radio show I was listening to, so I dialed away to talk radio to see if they were talking about it. They were. One lady was incensed that a father would pull his daughter out of school for something so senseless. There are more places to learn life’s lesions than the classroom, sweety. Another sent an email deploring the fact that this child had been indoctrinated to “murder a bear”. Uh, no, murder involves people, not bears. Someone else bemoaned this as an example of the “pervasive gun culture that permeates America leading to so many murders and accidental shootings”. I’ll bet you a million dollars that this girl will never point a gun at another person, will never discover a gun in a closet and accidentally shoot a friend, will never treat a weapon as anything other than the serious tool that it is. There were plenty of hunters who called in with an opposing viewpoint, but it just makes me mad that a good segment of the population feels that they have the right to attack a father and daughter who did something together, something all too fathers do nowadays, to criticize a special bonding moment between parent and child, just because hunting is not an activity that they personally enjoy. It makes me sick that rather than recognizing that what they did together is part of a ritual as old as mankind, they would seek to condemn it, and if given their druthers, likely they would outlaw hunting altogether. I also feel sorry for the 9 year old girl who got a bear yesterday too, but is not being talked about because she’s a year older. Poor girl.
I am not against hunting in general.
That said, I read a story over the weekend about a hunter who made a special trip up to the northern reaches of Canada somewhere and shot a 465-pound bear, which disgusted me. The story about the 8-year-old disgusts me too.
Now if either of them had shot a deer somewhere in my part of the world, fine and dandy. Deer are overpopulated here, pest creatures that tear up my young trees and pose a hazard of death on the roads. Hunting helps bring the population under control and limits death due to starvation. Bear don’t bother me, are rarer and more interesting. I won’t applaud the shooting of bears, even if they are not endangered.
This may not be fully logical, but on the other hand it is not entirely logical to be so bugged about disdain for hunting on the part of many people. If it is legal, you enjoy it, and no one is threatening to take your hunting privileges away, why be in a sweat about reactions to it?
One other question: is it a more special bonding experience in your opinion for father and daughter to go out and shoot a bear with a rifle, than it would be for them to go out and shoot it with a camera?
And I can think of few places better for a young child to pick up said lesions than sitting in some bug infested brush for hours waiting for an animal to wander by so she can pick it off from a safe distance.
Jack, the bear season was re-opened in Maryland precisely because the bear population has rebounded to the point where they are posing a threat to the human population of western Maryland. There have been any number of incidents of bears coming down into areas inhabited by humans.
If you’re trying for sarcasm, it’s best to include some type of exaggeration for effect or obvious untruth. The statement that you’ve made above seems to me to be factually true on all levels. I learned plenty in “bug infested brush” when I was younger. (camping, rock climbing, fishing and hiking, not hunting)
I believe the reason the MD is having a bear hunting season is that they are overpopulated too. I will applaud this young girl and say congratulations on the kill.
Do have you a cite for any significant threat posed to humans in Maryland by bears? All the linked article says is that bears are no longer considered endangered there (500 for the whole state doesn’t exactly sound like they’re marching on suburbia and holding up traffic at the mall).
It’s a long way from Davy Crockett protecting the homestead.
So what about the relative bonding potentials of rifles vs. cameras?
I like this being said with a sttraight face… “If it is legal, you enjoy it, and no one is threatening to take your hunting privileges away, why be in a sweat about reactions to it?” … Bawahahahaha Oh yeah they are…
There is no safe distance when you are in the same patch of woods as a bear… gun or not.
Heh, j/k. Seriously, I’ve read articles in the local papers and heard about bear incidents on the news over the past few years, nothing to link to at the moment, sorry. And those 500 bears all live in just one or 2 of the extreme western counties of Maryland. It’s not like they’re spread over the whole state. As for the rifles vs cameras question, I would think that either one would create an bonding experience, and both are equally acceptable. If the story had been “8 YO girl takes Pulitzer Prize winning photo of her unarmed dad being mauled by a bear (joke)”, I would have thought it a neat thing too.
Dave, you’re right about the area. There are bears in Garrett and Allegany counties only, and they have become a nuisance and a danger at Swallow Falls State Park.
I’m not against hunting, though I don’t partake myself, but I don’t see any reason why this should be admired any more than it should be despised. It’s certainly not child abuse or murder, but neither is it worthy of a ticker-tape parade.
Hmm, I seem to be coming down with one foot firmly on each side of the fence. Ouch.
I’m a Bush-bashing non-gun-owning Shodan-arguing-with abortion-rights-promoting liberal… and I have no problem with this girl and/or or her actions.
If nothing else, she’s helping stave off that all-too-plausible vision of an apocalyptic nightmare from Saturday Night Live: Bear City.
Sarcasm? Nope. I actually love the outdoors, including all you mentioned except fishing. Fishing bores the snot out of me. Probably hunting, too, since from everything I’ve heard, hunting is like fishing but without all the action.
I was making a joke based on you typing out “lesions” instead of “lessons” as I think you meant. So getting lesions from sitting in bug infested brush.
That’s an excellent point. It has nothing to do with the morality of hunting – he also had no business pulling her out of school so she could play hop-scotch all day, glue her eyeballs to the Cartoon Network, or otherwise amuse herself instead of getting edumacated.
Now this I disagree with. There are any number of reasons a parent might want to pull a child from school for a day or two. Perfectly valid reasons. To paraphrase weirddave, there is more to education than the classroom.
Why not? He isn’t pulling her out forever, for goodness sakes. Kids get pulled out of school all the time for vacations and such, why should this be any different? Do you really think missing a couple of days of 4th grade is going to set her back?
