Drizzt
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Girls and Boys, Meet Nature. Bring Your Gun.
By PAM BELLUCK
Published: September 18, 2005
GREEN MOUNTAIN NATIONAL FOREST, Vt. - Chomping wad after wad of Bubblicious Strawberry Splash gum and giggling as she tickled people's necks with a piece of grass she pretended was a spider, Samantha Marley could have been any 9-year-old girl.
A couple of things set her apart, though. She was cloaked in camouflage from boots to baseball cap. And propped next to her on the seat of a truck was her very own 20-gauge shotgun.
Samantha, a freckle-faced, pony-tailed fourth grader, was on a bear hunt. Not the pretend kind memorialized in picture books and summer-camp chants, but a real one for black bears that live in the woods of southwestern Vermont and can weigh 150 pounds or more.
She had won a "dream hunt" given away by a Vermont man whose goal is to get more children to hunt, and she had traveled about 200 miles from her home in Bellingham, Mass., and was missing three days of school to take him up on his offer.
"Almost everything you hunt is pretty fun," said Samantha, grinning and perfectly at home with a group of five men, the youngest of whom was nearly three times her age.
At one point, as the group crossed a wooden bridge, Samantha's father, Scott, who had accompanied her - and had filled out her application for the hunting contest - teased her that trolls lived under the bridge.
"Dad," Samantha said with bravado, "I got a gun."
The dream hunt - all expenses paid, including taxidermy - was the brainchild of Kevin Hoyt, a 35-year-old hunting instructor who quit a job as a structural steel draftsman a few years ago and decided to dedicate himself to getting children across the country interested in hunting.
His efforts reflect what hunting advocates across the country say is an increasingly urgent priority, and what hunting opponents find troubling: recruiting more children to sustain the sport of hunting, which has been losing participants of all ages for two decades.
"Forty years from now our kids will be learning about this as history," said Larry Gauthier, one of Mr. Hoyt's buddies on the bear hunt. "Hunters should be included as an extinct species because we're falling away so fast, we need to be protected."
This year, three pro-hunting groups - the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the U.S. Sportsmen's Alliance and the National Wild Turkey Federation - started Families Afield, a program to lobby states to lower the age at which children can hunt or to loosen the requirements for a child to accompany a parent on a hunt.
"We're trying to take down some legal barriers so kids can get involved earlier," said Steve Wagner, a spokesman for the shooting sports foundation, who said bills to those ends were being introduced in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The group says the 20 most restrictive states set 12 as the minimum hunting age and do not let a child accompany an adult on a hunt without completing hunter education training.
Vermont, by comparison, allows children of any age to hunt if they have passed a hunter's safety course and have parental consent.
Fish and game departments in some states, whose programs depend in part on the licensing fees hunters pay, are trying to entice youngsters with special hunting weekends. New Hampshire, for example, plans to have Youth Waterfowl Hunting Days this month for children 15 or younger, just before the start of the official waterfowl hunting season.
The number of hunting licenses in the United States dropped to 14.7 million in 2003, from 16.4 million in 1983, according to the federal Fish and Wildlife Service. Hunting advocates cite many reasons for the decline.
"Some of it has to do with habitat loss, urban sprawl taking away places where people used to hunt," Mr. Wagner said. "And people just don't have time."
He said that getting children involved in hunting earlier would be one way to turn the trend around. More than 90 percent of hunters are 35 or older, and nearly 80 percent of current hunters started between ages 6 and 15, the shooting sports foundation says. Hunting advocates say children are much less likely to become adult hunters if they wait until they are 16.
Mr. Hoyt, a father of five children under age 13, says he is committed to recruiting younger hunters.
"My youngest child was with me when he was 2 months old and I shot a deer with a muzzle loader," he said. "He was in a backpack. I was stuck home baby-sitting and I felt like hunting."
With his wife, Heather, supporting the family by working from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. at a veterans' home and a Wal-Mart, Mr. Hoyt devotes himself to his mission, asking for donations of services from outfitters, taxidermists, hunting guides and others.
This month he plans to drive his camouflage-tattooed Toyota Tacoma truck to dream hunts for deer, elk, bison or pronghorn antelope in Michigan, Tennessee, Kentucky, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio and Saskatchewan. He intends to sleep in his truck in between hunts and not return home until Thanksgiving.
Mr. Hoyt sometimes tries to recruit sponsors by using an unusual talent: carving detailed pictures of elk, deer and other game on elephant ear mushrooms and sometimes sending samples to people he thinks may give him publicity or support (like the rock musician and hunting advocate Ted Nugent, who called to thank him but did not sign on as a sponsor).
"It's a way to get a foot in the door," Mr. Hoyt said. "If I meet them and give them a mushroom, they seem to remember me."
Mr. Hoyt also tries to speak at schools, but he says that of 114 he has contacted, only 10 have invited him in.
"When I contact the schools they say, 'Is this to promote hunting?' " Mr. Hoyt said. "And actually I lie right through my teeth. I say, 'No, it is to explain hunting.' "
He added, "I hate to stereotype, but most teachers are liberal, tree-hugging, and they're not real sympathetic to the cause."
Dana Calkins, principal of Boltz Junior High in Fort Collins, Colo., said she never returned Mr. Hoyt's calls because "it's kind of like religion to me: whatever the family value is around hunting, that's their own business."
"I just think it has all the makings of a controversy," Ms. Calkins said. "I guess I just feel like there's enough violence in the world."
But John Cook, the principal of Center Street Elementary School in Oneonta, N.Y., has booked Mr. Hoyt to speak.
"I thought it was a great idea," Mr. Cook said, "if people are at least given the opportunity to look at this as a sport. Some people have an aversion to killing anything, and some people have an aversion to guns. All we're saying is that people should have the choice to choose." (Yea, Principal Cook...)
Animal rights groups and other hunting opponents denounce these efforts in part out of concern for the children's safety.
But Mr. Hoyt and other advocates say they take careful precautions and argue that hunting builds appreciation for nature. They also say that hunting fees pay for restoring animal habitats, and that if the animals were not hunted, some would die anyway from sickness or hunger.
"Isn't it better to kill them than to have them die of disease or starvation?" said Chris LaFlamme, who let Samantha and the other hunters sleep in a cottage he owns and supplied dogs trained to sniff out bears.
In two years, Mr. Hoyt said, he has received hundreds of requests for about 30 dream hunts, with many initiated or endorsed by fathers who have taken their children hunting and want to encourage their interest.
Last fall, when he was 12, Taylor Nicholson of Hanover, Kan., shot his first deer on a hunt with Mr. Hoyt. Taylor's father, Larry, who went along with another son, Hunter, then 8, had grown up hunting but had not done much as an adult.
"I even learned a lot," Mr. Nicholson said of the hunt with Mr. Hoyt, "like how to wash your clothes in a special detergent to knock out your scent, and to spray some kind of musk on your feet to cover the smell of your tracks."
Mr. Nicholson said that since the experience, hunting has "become a real interest" of Taylor's, and Hunter has asked to go again.
"We did buy a tree stand," he said, "my first hunting investment in 20 years."
Codie Caron of Pownal, Vt., was 10 last year when he sat still in a tree stand for seven days on a bear hunt in Maine with Mr. Hoyt. Although it poured rain and their shots missed the only bear they saw, Codie said he liked "just being out there in the woods."
Ron Caron, Codie's father, an avid hunter, said hunting ensures that children are "not couch potatoes; they get out, get exercise."
Samantha Marley's father first took her hunting at age 6. When she was 7, during a New Hampshire youth hunting day, she shot her first deer, and Mr. Marley welled up with tears of pride. Later that year, she shot her first turkey. Both animals now hang on a wall at home, the deer wearing silly glasses and a camouflage hat.
The bear hunt involved sending dogs to track and tree a bear (special dog collars emit a signal when that happens, triggered by the posture of the dog looking up the tree), then following the dogs for miles on foot to reach the animal. Mr. Marley, who had never killed a bear, said, "I was hoping Samantha would get one before me."
But after four days, Samantha had not even seen a bear.
"Only thing we found is a frog," Mr. Hoyt said.
"And a dead snake," Samantha chimed in.
Samantha said she relished the experience, although when she returned to school, she tempered her excitement a bit.
"Everybody wondered where I was and I was just like, 'Oh, I was sick,' " she said. "There's this kid that doesn't like hunting that much, and he was sitting right behind me."
...and in the New York Times, no less....
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/18/national/18hunting.html?pagewanted=1
By PAM BELLUCK
Published: September 18, 2005
GREEN MOUNTAIN NATIONAL FOREST, Vt. - Chomping wad after wad of Bubblicious Strawberry Splash gum and giggling as she tickled people's necks with a piece of grass she pretended was a spider, Samantha Marley could have been any 9-year-old girl.
A couple of things set her apart, though. She was cloaked in camouflage from boots to baseball cap. And propped next to her on the seat of a truck was her very own 20-gauge shotgun.
Samantha, a freckle-faced, pony-tailed fourth grader, was on a bear hunt. Not the pretend kind memorialized in picture books and summer-camp chants, but a real one for black bears that live in the woods of southwestern Vermont and can weigh 150 pounds or more.
She had won a "dream hunt" given away by a Vermont man whose goal is to get more children to hunt, and she had traveled about 200 miles from her home in Bellingham, Mass., and was missing three days of school to take him up on his offer.
"Almost everything you hunt is pretty fun," said Samantha, grinning and perfectly at home with a group of five men, the youngest of whom was nearly three times her age.
At one point, as the group crossed a wooden bridge, Samantha's father, Scott, who had accompanied her - and had filled out her application for the hunting contest - teased her that trolls lived under the bridge.
"Dad," Samantha said with bravado, "I got a gun."
The dream hunt - all expenses paid, including taxidermy - was the brainchild of Kevin Hoyt, a 35-year-old hunting instructor who quit a job as a structural steel draftsman a few years ago and decided to dedicate himself to getting children across the country interested in hunting.
His efforts reflect what hunting advocates across the country say is an increasingly urgent priority, and what hunting opponents find troubling: recruiting more children to sustain the sport of hunting, which has been losing participants of all ages for two decades.
"Forty years from now our kids will be learning about this as history," said Larry Gauthier, one of Mr. Hoyt's buddies on the bear hunt. "Hunters should be included as an extinct species because we're falling away so fast, we need to be protected."
This year, three pro-hunting groups - the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the U.S. Sportsmen's Alliance and the National Wild Turkey Federation - started Families Afield, a program to lobby states to lower the age at which children can hunt or to loosen the requirements for a child to accompany a parent on a hunt.
"We're trying to take down some legal barriers so kids can get involved earlier," said Steve Wagner, a spokesman for the shooting sports foundation, who said bills to those ends were being introduced in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The group says the 20 most restrictive states set 12 as the minimum hunting age and do not let a child accompany an adult on a hunt without completing hunter education training.
Vermont, by comparison, allows children of any age to hunt if they have passed a hunter's safety course and have parental consent.
Fish and game departments in some states, whose programs depend in part on the licensing fees hunters pay, are trying to entice youngsters with special hunting weekends. New Hampshire, for example, plans to have Youth Waterfowl Hunting Days this month for children 15 or younger, just before the start of the official waterfowl hunting season.
The number of hunting licenses in the United States dropped to 14.7 million in 2003, from 16.4 million in 1983, according to the federal Fish and Wildlife Service. Hunting advocates cite many reasons for the decline.
"Some of it has to do with habitat loss, urban sprawl taking away places where people used to hunt," Mr. Wagner said. "And people just don't have time."
He said that getting children involved in hunting earlier would be one way to turn the trend around. More than 90 percent of hunters are 35 or older, and nearly 80 percent of current hunters started between ages 6 and 15, the shooting sports foundation says. Hunting advocates say children are much less likely to become adult hunters if they wait until they are 16.
Mr. Hoyt, a father of five children under age 13, says he is committed to recruiting younger hunters.
"My youngest child was with me when he was 2 months old and I shot a deer with a muzzle loader," he said. "He was in a backpack. I was stuck home baby-sitting and I felt like hunting."
With his wife, Heather, supporting the family by working from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. at a veterans' home and a Wal-Mart, Mr. Hoyt devotes himself to his mission, asking for donations of services from outfitters, taxidermists, hunting guides and others.
This month he plans to drive his camouflage-tattooed Toyota Tacoma truck to dream hunts for deer, elk, bison or pronghorn antelope in Michigan, Tennessee, Kentucky, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio and Saskatchewan. He intends to sleep in his truck in between hunts and not return home until Thanksgiving.
Mr. Hoyt sometimes tries to recruit sponsors by using an unusual talent: carving detailed pictures of elk, deer and other game on elephant ear mushrooms and sometimes sending samples to people he thinks may give him publicity or support (like the rock musician and hunting advocate Ted Nugent, who called to thank him but did not sign on as a sponsor).
"It's a way to get a foot in the door," Mr. Hoyt said. "If I meet them and give them a mushroom, they seem to remember me."
Mr. Hoyt also tries to speak at schools, but he says that of 114 he has contacted, only 10 have invited him in.
"When I contact the schools they say, 'Is this to promote hunting?' " Mr. Hoyt said. "And actually I lie right through my teeth. I say, 'No, it is to explain hunting.' "
He added, "I hate to stereotype, but most teachers are liberal, tree-hugging, and they're not real sympathetic to the cause."
Dana Calkins, principal of Boltz Junior High in Fort Collins, Colo., said she never returned Mr. Hoyt's calls because "it's kind of like religion to me: whatever the family value is around hunting, that's their own business."
"I just think it has all the makings of a controversy," Ms. Calkins said. "I guess I just feel like there's enough violence in the world."
But John Cook, the principal of Center Street Elementary School in Oneonta, N.Y., has booked Mr. Hoyt to speak.
"I thought it was a great idea," Mr. Cook said, "if people are at least given the opportunity to look at this as a sport. Some people have an aversion to killing anything, and some people have an aversion to guns. All we're saying is that people should have the choice to choose." (Yea, Principal Cook...)
Animal rights groups and other hunting opponents denounce these efforts in part out of concern for the children's safety.
But Mr. Hoyt and other advocates say they take careful precautions and argue that hunting builds appreciation for nature. They also say that hunting fees pay for restoring animal habitats, and that if the animals were not hunted, some would die anyway from sickness or hunger.
"Isn't it better to kill them than to have them die of disease or starvation?" said Chris LaFlamme, who let Samantha and the other hunters sleep in a cottage he owns and supplied dogs trained to sniff out bears.
In two years, Mr. Hoyt said, he has received hundreds of requests for about 30 dream hunts, with many initiated or endorsed by fathers who have taken their children hunting and want to encourage their interest.
Last fall, when he was 12, Taylor Nicholson of Hanover, Kan., shot his first deer on a hunt with Mr. Hoyt. Taylor's father, Larry, who went along with another son, Hunter, then 8, had grown up hunting but had not done much as an adult.
"I even learned a lot," Mr. Nicholson said of the hunt with Mr. Hoyt, "like how to wash your clothes in a special detergent to knock out your scent, and to spray some kind of musk on your feet to cover the smell of your tracks."
Mr. Nicholson said that since the experience, hunting has "become a real interest" of Taylor's, and Hunter has asked to go again.
"We did buy a tree stand," he said, "my first hunting investment in 20 years."
Codie Caron of Pownal, Vt., was 10 last year when he sat still in a tree stand for seven days on a bear hunt in Maine with Mr. Hoyt. Although it poured rain and their shots missed the only bear they saw, Codie said he liked "just being out there in the woods."
Ron Caron, Codie's father, an avid hunter, said hunting ensures that children are "not couch potatoes; they get out, get exercise."
Samantha Marley's father first took her hunting at age 6. When she was 7, during a New Hampshire youth hunting day, she shot her first deer, and Mr. Marley welled up with tears of pride. Later that year, she shot her first turkey. Both animals now hang on a wall at home, the deer wearing silly glasses and a camouflage hat.
The bear hunt involved sending dogs to track and tree a bear (special dog collars emit a signal when that happens, triggered by the posture of the dog looking up the tree), then following the dogs for miles on foot to reach the animal. Mr. Marley, who had never killed a bear, said, "I was hoping Samantha would get one before me."
But after four days, Samantha had not even seen a bear.
"Only thing we found is a frog," Mr. Hoyt said.
"And a dead snake," Samantha chimed in.
Samantha said she relished the experience, although when she returned to school, she tempered her excitement a bit.
"Everybody wondered where I was and I was just like, 'Oh, I was sick,' " she said. "There's this kid that doesn't like hunting that much, and he was sitting right behind me."
...and in the New York Times, no less....
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/18/national/18hunting.html?pagewanted=1
