The following article is written by Guest Blogger Phillip Loughlin author of the Hog Blog and Pro Staff/Editor for Jesse’s Hunting and Outdoors.

A Question of Ethics

The mature, eight-point buck steps from the mesquite brush only 35 yards from your well-concealed blind. His antlers spread wide beyond his ears, and you can easily count five points on each side. You shiver a bit in anticipation as he lowers his head to feed, then slowly raise your bow and come to full draw. The buck looks up, briefly, his mouth dripping corn kernels back onto the yellow pile around his feet. When he lowers his head again, you finger the release and your carbon-shafted missile carries death to the majestic animal.

Now that sounds like a pretty exciting moment, doesn’t it? For many hunters, it’s the climactic point in a successful hunt.

Yet for many other hunters, the whole series of events would constitute a let down, or even a total breach of hunting ethics. That animal was shot from ambush, using bait to lure him away from his natural habits. “Where’s the sport in that,” they would ask?

It raises the question…where do we draw the line between personal ethics, which are based on our own values, and setting a standard that should be followed by all hunters?

It’s not a new question, although it is seldom raised in such general terms. Instead, it seems to rear its head amongst specific groups. Bow hunters, for example, are often divided over the issue of using crossbows. Hunters who use front-stuffers are battling it out over the “modern” versions of these weapons. Stand hunters are often at odds with dog hunters, and spot-and-stalk hunters seem to think that sitting in a treestand over a pile of bait shouldn’t be considered hunting at all!

The debates get pretty heated, and a lot of emotion is packed into the exchange. But when it breaks right down, that’s really all most of it is…emotion. Emotions are a personal thing, and they vary as much from person to person as fingerprints. The problem with pursuing any argument based on emotion is that there aren’t usually any facts to support the position…or if there are, they’re usually pretty flimsy. When you boil down most of these arguments, it comes down to the way the proponents and opponents “feel” about the issue…that it is or is not “right”. You can’t prove an emotional point.

And when you try to do so, or you try to force that opinion on someone else, you create an impasse that can turn ugly. If Jim Zumbo had kept his personal feelings about “assault rifles” to himself, he’d still be the shooting editor for Outdoor Life. He doesn’t have to like them, but he sure screwed up by suggesting that no hunter should use them.

There’s nothing wrong, of course, with holding tight to your personal values. Without them, we’d be pretty sorry examples of individuality, bending to the whim of our surroundings and refusing to take a stand on our own. But it would behoove us all to remember that our personal tastes vary, and what may be distasteful to one may be the next best thing to sliced bread for someone else. Just because you don’t think a certain way of hunting would be satisfying to you, it doesn’t mean it can’t be satisfactory to another hunter. Would you really expect the entire hunting community to experience the sport through your eyes only?

With this in mind, I’d propose that folks consider a more open-minded approach when it comes to judging hunter ethics. First of all, stick to your own standards. Then, before you start to judge someone else, set some realistic parameters around what constitutes “ethical” behavior, and what is “unethical”. In a general way, you might consider “good” activities to be those that don’t harm the resource, don’t break any game laws, and don’t reflect so poorly on sportsmen that they jeopardize the future of our sport. (This last one, of course, is a tricky one in itself…but it’s too much for me to deal with in one blog post.)

Situations and incidents may arise and challenge those parameters, but in general, they’re a safe rule to keep us from unfairly judging other hunters. Our community needs unity, more now than ever in the face of ongoing assaults on both our rights to own firearms and our hunting and shooting privileges.

So let’s hear it. Where do YOU draw the line?

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