Reprinted from my Land Ethics column in the International Hunter Education Assoc. Journal, Winter issue 2007
At age twelve, I vividly remember the first time I shot at a grouse ... it was running on the ground. Dad simply looked my way and said, "they do fly son." That was enough. I never even thought about shooting at any game bird except turkeys, unless they were flying.
Ethics is defined as the discipline which deals with what is good or bad. Though legal, shooting a grouse on the ground is something no self respecting grouse hunter would ever do. Never. Doing so reflects badly on your values, on your character. Hunting ethics refers to decisions hunters make in the field; a personal code of conduct if you will. Obviously in the same situation, hunters may react differently. I read something somewhere that clarifies this point. It said that hunter ethics is the way a hunter behaves when no one is looking.
In the market hunting days, prior to game laws, bag limits did not exist, and there was little consideration given to the consequences of indiscriminate killing. As game laws were enacted, duck hunting changed. As duck populations decreased, punt guns, live decoys, and bait were declared illegal. Wooden decoys replaced live ones. Duck calling replaced bait to entice birds to come to the shooters.
How ones ethical standards develop depend to a large degree on how young hunters are mentored. In my case, I was lucky because I had a great mentor. Dad had a number of mini-ethics lessons that he taught me as I grew in hunting. These lessons centered on safety, self control, and respect for myself, the animal, and landowners.
One of the first lessons he taught me was to never shoot unnecessarily while hunting. If you wanted to plink with your 22 rifle, then do it on the shooting range. I also learned to always keep my gun unloaded except when in a hunting situation. Always carry the gun barrel pointed at the ground. Never climb over anything with a loaded gun. Never climb a tree stand with a bow. Climb first, then use a tie line to pull up the bow.
Then there were the personal lessons that helped to teach me respect and mold me into an ethical hunter, an ethical person. Never brag about your hunt in public in a boastful, rude, manner that showed disrespect for the animal. Sure, I could talk about the hunt and animals harvested with friends. But do so with satisfaction, not disrespect for the animal. Share game taken with the landowner. It’s the polite thing to do. Even if the landowner declined, always make the offer before you leave the land.
When young hunters are mentored ethically, there are many values gained from hunting. As a kid, I didn’t think much about my values, but I soon learned right from wrong while hunting and the simple truth is that when you hunt "right," you gain more than you can ever imagine. The values are real and important to ones development as a hunter and as a person.
For example, I’d like to believe that hunting played a major role in teaching me to be patient. As a kid, I had low self esteem. I wasn’t big enough for football, basketball, etc., and I wasn’t musically inclined. I did well in class, but back then, that quality was not highly appreciated by my classmates. However, I could shoot a bow and I was a good hunter. That did wonders for my self worth.
Life for kids today is different than it was thirty years ago. They spend an average of 6 ½ hours a day looking at a television or computer screen. Two-thirds of them have a television in their bedroom and half have a video game player there as well. No wonder hunting participation has dropped in the double digits over the past five years. Obviously our hunting agencies and organizations haven’t done a very good job of letting people know why we should get kids away from the television and into the woods. Wouldn’t parents be more prone to allow their children to learn to hunt if they understood the values gained? Would today’s young people benefit from having more patience, self esteem, and good character? Maybe more so than any time in our history.
Another hunting value is learning to appreciate wildlife and ecosystems from hunting. Would not the future of our ecosystems and wildlife be far more secure if all young people held such an appreciation? For me, that development of an appreciation for wildlife was so intense, that it led to a career as a wildlife professor.
One often overlooked value that comes from being in the woods every fall is the enhancement of ones spirituality. The world for most young people does not center around the importance of becoming spiritual, but as I’ve grown older it has become quite clear that my spiritual development was enhanced by time spent in the woods. Would our society benefit if more of our young people held higher spiritual values? Silly question.
When you hunt you develop observational skills, and you also learn that you as a hunter have stewardship responsibilities towards wildlife and habitat. Wouldn’t it be great if all of society had the same interest in habitat that we see with the turkey hunters in the National Wild Turkey Federation or the elk hunters in the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, etc., etc.?
What does this all mean for the hunting instructor? We spend lots of time talking about responsibility and teaching shooting skills. But maybe we need to somehow let the students and their parents know about the values kids get from ethical hunting. I’m not sure how we teach young hunters the importance of self respect and how that impacts a hunter’s ethics. But the future of hunting would be greatly enhanced if all hunters had a better understanding of self respect, the development of hunter ethics, and how that leads to a value system that builds and molds them, their career, and their life.
