Poking around down here in the Hill Country, I’ve been trying to read up on local newspapers and magazines. It’s a great way to learn about the issues that are important to the locals, especially if you plan to spend any amount of time (or even relocate, as in my case) in an area. If you’ve never stopped to read one of the little, hometown newspapers in any rural area, you really should. It can be a real treat. Or,at the risk of sounding mean, it can be a real nightmare for the journalism or English major. But I enjoy them all for the look inside rural Americana that you just aren’t going to get from USA Today or the New York Times.
One such paper that I picked up at Oasis Outback (a really cool micr0-Cabelas kind of place in Uvalde, TX) was the Lone Star Outdoor News. In amidst the fluff stories about a grandfather who taught his grandson to flyfish, and the general, monster buck stories, there was this piece about Diamond Poole, a Dallas fitness model who went from anti-hunter to hunter over the space of a year or so (Note: The full article isn’t available online yet. This link opens a photo spread.).
According to the article, Diamond’s conversion came about after she met and fell in love with a hunter. Through conversations about wildlife management, the realities of life for wild animals (the real world is not like Bambi), and hunter-based charities such as Hunters for the Hungry, he helped her see that hunters weren’t the “demented rednecks” she’d imagined.
After easing into hunting through sharing a blind on hunts, skeet shooting, and then dove hunts, Diamond took up the gun herself and has since killed a couple of really nice Texas whitetails, feral hogs, and some exotics… almost all in the space of a year. I’d say the conversion is fairly complete… and all because a hunter was willing to talk to an anti-hunter and share his passion for the sport.
Why’d I share this? Well, partly because I’m a little short on manageable ideas right now. And yeah, those who might accuse me of bias because she’s kind of easy on the eyes… well, I’ll plead no contest.
But I also thought her story is sort of relevant to an ongoing topic amongst us outdoor bloggers.
In blog “conversations”, many of us have talked about meeting anti-hunters and helping to change their minds about hunters and our sport. Some of us, like Tovar and Holly actually spend a lot of time doing exactly that, and both of them come from a past where their own opinions of hunters weren’t very positive. As a result of these meetings, by chance or otherwise, we may not have converted the anti-hunters into hunters, but we’ve changed their attitudes. While I don’t think this one-on-one approach is going to resolve the larger challenges to the image of hunting and hunters, it certainly doesn’t hurt.
Albert Quackenbush
Art
Diamond Poole…with looks like that…c’mon, that’s gotta be a stage name. I kid, I kid.