I was reading a story out of Washington State about landowners shutting off their land to hunters and fishermen because of the shenanigans of a few.
For years, he put up with the thousands of dollars of vandalism, the relentless garbage-dumping, the all-hours gunfire and poaching, not to mention the dangers created by irresponsible hunters who didn’t seem to care that the Williamson family’s homes might be in the line of fire.
Once, Williamson’s son David — who has a home on the property — heard shots just up the road during a
non-hunting season and went up to investigate and found himself almost in the line of fire of several apparently inebriated individuals who had decided to kill a bighorn sheep.
First off calling individuals that exhibit behaviors like this “hunters” I think is wrong but like it or not many in the non hunting community have this view of us. This behavior seems to happens everywhere and if you don’t believe me just take some rides in rural parts of this country and see how many road signs are shot up.
I’ve talked about illegal dumping in the past and although it’s not necessarily associated with hunting like the shooting of road signs is it does often impact relationships with landowners and access to land.
Drinking and guns just like drinking and driving doesn’t mix. The clubs I’m in have a rule that says as soon as you start drinking your done handling a gun for the day. We really don’t have an issue with this but it’s good to know that as a group of hunters we take this issue very seriously and we want to keep all of us safe.
We as hunters need to use our influence over others to make sure things like this don’t happen. We need to work with landowners and law enforcement to keep everyone safe and to protect private property. Poaching of game I would hope is something we would never view as acceptable behavior no matter what the rationalization is for this crime.
Lastly we need to be a mentor to the young hunters coming up in our ranks. It is not enough to just take a kid hunting or fishing once in a while but we must teach by example what it means to be a sportsman. It is an awesome responsibility but as you can see the opportunities to access prime habitat to enjoy are sport could be one thoughtless act away from being lost. We all need to be good sportsman to ensure our heritage can continue.
