At Cross Purposes Over Crossbows

Will This Be Your Land?

The Evil Crossbow Isn't the Real DangerCan you believe some folks want to hunt deer with crossbows?Can you believe some folks think this is evil? I don’t know what it is about hunting tools that set some people foaming, but for as long as I’ve been paying attention, rifle hunters have been whining about bow hunters. “They scare all the game and stink up the woods. They get too long of a season. They wound too much game.” In turn, “traditional” bow hunters complain about compound bow hunters who in turn grouse about muzzleloader hunters or handgun hunters ... And now they’re all complaining about crossbow hunters because crossbows are “Too easy to use! They’re too accurate. A crossbow is like a rifle. It’s not fair!” Uh, what? Unfair? Some people are using centerfire rifles to target elk 1,200 yards away, and we’re worried about crossbows throwing bolts that poop out before 100 yards? Meanwhile bears, cougars and wolves hunt with unlimited tags and no closed season. Idaho’s Lolo elk zone in 1995 harbored about 18,000 elk. Today it’s lucky to support 1,800. Yellowstone Park’s northern herd has plummeted from 20,000 to 2,000. Moose in Yellowstone have dwindled from 1,000 twenty years ago to fewer than 200 today and I doubt there are truly that many. Across most of the West, mule deer populations are steadily declining as more suburbs, summer homes, giant windmill farms, airports (Denver,) Interstate highways, golf courses, ski resorts, energy exploration roads, drilling rigs, oil pads and corn fields sprawl across the land. The CRP fields that re-invigorated sharptail grouse and pheasant populations are being plowed into dust. Our few remaining virgin prairies are being sacrificed to $10 a bushel corn. Friends, we don’t need to be squabbling about how we hunt. Rifles, handguns, long bows, quadruple-wheeled short bows, spears or slingshots. It doesn’t matter. Wildlife managers can set and adjust seasons and harvest quotas and the number of permits necessary to maintain healthy numbers of most species. How you collect your fair share is between you and your ethics (I’m not advocating poisoned bait here.) What our Game Departments can’t control are weather, disease, habitat loss, predators and gullible citizens trying to micromanage wildlife by emotion. Urbanization has lulled many of us into a false sense of security. We live in our artificial world of plastic and electronic images. Wildlife thrives unmolested “somewhere out there.” Just confess your love for animals, wear a Save the Whales T-shirt, recycle a soda can now and then and everything will live happily ever after. We hunters know better. We are out there in the mud and blood. We see the disappearing habitat. We know the history of our conservation battles and understand the ramifications of human activities. As a group we have saved and restored North America’s wildlife abundance. The science of wildlife management, financed and supported politically by the shared, limited harvest of Nature’s annual production, has been the most remarkable success of the environmental movement. We have protected millions of acres of wildlife habitat. But today new pressures from a surging human population threaten all of this. Now is the time to educate or friends and neighbors about disappearing wild habitats. Now is the time to fight for scientific wildlife management and wise land use. Now is the time to expose the lies of the animal-rights movement, which squanders hundreds of millions of dollars for no positive impact on wildlife. We are in a race against overwhelming demands for limited natural resources. We have no time to quibble over our hunting tools. # # #