I am a hunter. I care deeply
about our hunting heritage and our ability to pass it on. Like most
hunters, I consider organizations that work on behalf of hunting my
friends, and those that work against hunting my adversaries. Like
most hunters, I am confused when the lines become blurred. And
today the lines are blurry indeed in regards to the National Rifle
Association (NRA).
The NRA is one of the most effective
lobbies in America. It has protected our right to keep and bear
arms for more than 100 years, and I have been a member for more
than 20 of those years. I am thankful for what the NRA has done.
More than that, I believe in the NRA.
And there’s
the rub. Because I and millions of others like me believe in what
the NRA does on behalf of our right to own guns, we are inclined to
believe it when it tells us it’s standing up for our right to
hunt. This is a dangerous idea, because where the interests of gun
ownership and hunting diverge, I am seeing that the NRA always
comes down on the side of guns.
Not that the NRA
hasn’t done good things for hunters. It helped introduce
legislation to allow hunting on Sundays in states that presently
prohibit it. It’s working to reduce the minimum hunting age
in states like Wisconsin. It supports No Net (hunting) Loss
legislation in several states, which will require states to open
state land for hunting when other state land is closed. But this is
a lot like glitter on a window.
Behind the window, the
NRA aligns itself with politicians who care little about the land
or wildlife, but who will deliver votes against gun control. This
includes politicians like Republican Idaho Sen. Larry Craig, who
serves on the NRA board of directors. Craig was a primary supporter
of the Bush administration’s action removing federal
protection of 58.5 million acres of inventoried roadless areas in
our national forests and returning their fate to the tender mercies
of individual states. The NRA regularly parrots Craig’s
message about our roadless areas, interchanging the terms
wilderness, roadless areas and road closures, which confuses the
public and convinces hunters that their hunting access will be lost
in all of these areas.
In fact, land covered by any of
these three designations is open to hunting; only motorized access
is restricted to various degrees. In fact, hunting and fishing are
usually better in roadless areas. Exhaustive scientific studies
confirm that elk, deer, bears, mountain goats, bighorn sheep and
trout do much better in areas away from active roads. They grow
bigger, live longer and reproduce more effectively. This is not
under debate. People who contest it will probably also argue that
cigarette smoke is good for you.
Perhaps the NRA thinks,
as President Bush seems to think, that if you raise bluegills in a
pond, white-tailed deer in a fenced enclosure and feed wild turkeys
in your backyard, you are a friend to wildlife. That simplistic
approach doesn’t work here in the Western states, where our
big game and game-fish species adapt poorly to human encroachment.
The problem is not that the NRA leadership acts
aggressively to protect the Second Amendment. It is their mission.
The problem is that they mislead hunters into thinking that this
helps hunting. All too often, hunters are foolish enough to believe
them
Here’s the bottom line: If the Bush
administration, with the active support of the NRA, builds roads
into our previously roadless public lands, the premier hunting and
fishing once available there will decline until these areas will be
just the same as places you can drive to now.
I know a
man who raises snakes. His snakes are important to him, so he
raises mice to feed to the snakes. He takes good care of the mice.
He wants them breeding regularly, because he needs lots of them to
support his snakes.
We hunters are the NRA’s mice.
They want lots of us, too, but they worry because there’s
always the outside chance we might start thinking for ourselves. So
they keep us scared of enemies, or people they want us to think are
enemies. Then we dutifully cough up money to help fight those
enemies. Think about it. When was the last time you heard of a
mouse actually helping a snake?
Pat Wray is a
contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High
Country News (hcn.org). He is a writer in Corvallis,
Oregon, a former Marine helicopter pilot, and an avid hunter and
fisherman with a wife and three dogs.
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