Posted on 03/10/2005 12:05:35 PM PST by Al Gator
Studies: Interest in Hunting Fading By ANGIE WAGNER Associated Press Writer
March 10, 2005, 2:19 PM EST
As a teenager, Bryan Dinkins and his grandfather would go out before dawn on many a winter morning to hunt duck. They would quietly discuss school and life while waiting for the birds.
Dinkins, now 40, hasn't been hunting in six years. He's too busy, he says, and anyway it would take six hours to drive somewhere to hunt ducks in California.
It's a common lament in the new century, a time when urbanization and hectic lives can get in the way of hunting traditions. Hunting now is not just about when to go, but where to go? How much will it cost? And, more than ever, who will go?
"If we think about how the country was explored and developed, it was hunters, it was trappers," said Steve Williams, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. "If we lost that, I think in some way we lose part of the American character."
Rest of the article is here: http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/wire/sns-ap-the-fading-hunt,0,7832682,print.story?coll=sns-ap-nationworld-headlines
(Excerpt) Read more at newsday.com ...
Sad but true.
I bucked the trend, I started hunting in 2000 at the tender age of 34. Now that the wife has left, I'll get to hunt more, yeeeehaaawww.
Once you get the bug, the bug owns you :-)
My son and I drove a thousand miles to hunt pheasant in South Dakota last year, as we have for many years. If you want to hunt, you'll find the time.
Pheasant hunt in SD is well worth the drive!
I kind of like coyotes.
Study: American interest in hunting fading.
Poll: America ready for woman president.
Future poll: America no longer interested in gun ownership.
Yup, these studies and polls are totally free of push-political agendas.
I still hunt a lot every fall, but it gets harder and harder to find places to hunt. Now that I'm no longer a major landowner, I have to depend on the generosity of landowners I know, and these landowners are turning hunting into a revenue stream. SD is even banning, essentially, the long tradition of road-hunting. Landowners want it stopped so you have to pay. Normally, I want a landowner to be able to do whatever the heck they please with their land, but when my tax dollars pay for set-aside acres, I feel doubly ripped off paying the same guy a couple hundred dollars to hunt pheasants there.
I'll be bowhunting until the day I die, and I grew up urban
I notice its mainly Calif, and neighboring states. Other than Wyoming that could be explained by all the people moving from Calif and bringing their life styles with them.
Well, I bought my first son his lifetime NC sportsman hunting license before his first birthday. My second son just got his las month (we were late getting his because of money constraints. He just turned 5!) I also plopped down the cash for mine, though I would have been better off doing it when I was a teenager.
I have huntend all my life, going with my dad when I was barely walking. I hope to continue the tradition of hunting and fishing in my boys that my dad instilled in me. Only way we can keep the traditions alive is by MAKING time to get them in the woods.
I wondered about that too.
I think the writer just hopes the trend is true. I don't know for sure if it is. I know a lot more women are in the field and that's good.
Maybe someone from the north american hunt club could let us know if these numbers are true or a liberal wish.
believe it or not, the first time I saw a wild black bear was when he was hunting in upstate New York when he was in the AF....I was with him and the bear was probably only 20 feet from us......
I got married in '99 and started hunting in my mid-40s...never too late!
Soooo,, you gonna try your hand?
I'm glad.
A hunterhater HUH?
I'd be much more interested in hunting if they'd open season on terrorists.
It's absolutely true. It depends on where you live...but more and more of the country is living in upper middle class to upper class Suburbia and Exurbia.
Among young people in the Suburbs and Exurbs of the DC-to-Boston corridor, Hunting is regarded as the ultimate white trash redneck activity. EXTREMELY uncool.
Notice you never see any Mountain Dew commercials featuring hunting. If people under 30 are going outdoors its to rock-climb and bungee-jump and snowboard; hunting is unthinkable.
Of course, if you live in a rural town in West Virginia, things aren't like this at all. But that's not where the population is.
I fully expect hunting to be banned within 30 years in states like California, New Jersey, Connecticut etc. where the population of Soccer Moms and such in suburbia overwhelms the rural population.
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