Everyday I read about town after town across America seeking and/or hiring sharpshooters to go into town-owned areas like parks, to cull the deer herds down to more manageable and healthy sizes. The hiring of these sharpshooters are done in different ways. One way is to hire a company that provides its own trained hunters. Another is to work with local hunting clubs, particularly archery hunting clubs, to find ways of safely reducing the number of deer.

I understand every community’s concerns over safety and therefore the need to hire so-called “sharpshooters”. Nobody is really sure what a sharpshooter is and by whose standards they have been labeled as such.

For a town to hire a company to do the culling work, it can become very expensive. Much of the expense comes from not only salaries paid to the shooters but for processing the deer once it’s killed. It’s easy to visit a local coffee shop and hear evidence of how all that culling could be done for nothing if they just turn a few hunters loose.

Is there increased opportunity here for hunters? I believe there are isolated instances where town officials will hire commercial sharpshooters just to spite the regular hunter or working with hunting clubs, etc. because of personal beliefs on hunting. But for the most part I believe cities want to do what is best for its citizens using any and all available tools to get the job done.

With that said, there are now mounting questions. Is it time for each state to offer additional training through their hunter education classes in order for any hunters interested to become a “sharpshooter” – a properly trained hunter who can demonstrate knowledge of weapons, accuracy of shooting and respect for the animals and landowners?

Should hunting clubs get busy creating their own training programs? They could do this and work with the state and local governments so that all parties can easily recognize the programs put in place and that they will get the job done safely and efficiently.

I personally believe that most hunters who have some experience in the woods and have taken good hunter safety classes could safely accomplish the task of culling deer herds in areas where no hunting is allowed. The task that lay before us is to put together a program that will convince the powers who make the hunting ban decisions that “ordinary” hunters, trained through state sanctioned programs can buy a tag and take a deer.

Whether we agree with or disagree with towns shutting down land for safety reasons, it is what we are faced with. As communities grow and encroach into more and more deer habitat, more land will not be available for hunting. We can see that when this happens, property damage increases and in time deer are faced with starvation and overcome with disease. Some of those diseases are a threat to humans.

We have sat idly by and watched as anti-hunting groups, emotionally driven rhetoric and local and national media have painted a picture of hunters as being a danger to citizen’s. That we somehow go out and randomly shoot our guns in hopes that a stray bullet or two will land on some unsuspecting deer killing it is the norm. The truth is we are an extremely safe sporting activity but it is time to work toward doing a better job at convincing the general public.

If there are instances and I believe there are, where hunters are looking for opportunities to hunt more deer, then it is time to move forward with some kind of program that would easily and inexpensively qualify eager hunters to become useful tools for reducing deer populations in heavily populated areas. Programs exist today that seem to be working well and could be used as models.

Tom Remington

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