Girls and Boys, Meet Nature. Bring Your Gun.

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[ARCHIVED THREAD] - Girls and Boys, Meet Nature. Bring Your Gun.

Posted: 9/18/2005 9:40:56 AM EDT

I got this from the OC Register, originally from the NY Times... a good read.

Animal rights groups and others oppose sporting groups' efforts to lower hunting age.

Girls and Boys, Meet Nature. Bring Your Gun.

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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.

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Jodi Hilton for The New York Times
Samantha Marley, 9, on a “dream hunt”for bearin Vermont this month, organized by Kevin Hoyt, left.

Jodi Hilton for The New York Times
Chris LaFlamme, left, and Bobby Phillips released their hounds after the dogs sniffed out a bear trail.
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.

Posted: 9/18/2005 9:48:19 AM EDT

[#1]

Waiting for DU to crap kittens.

Posted: 9/18/2005 9:55:22 AM EDT

[#2]

"Dad," Samantha said with bravado, "I got a gun."

Sounds like my girl.

Anyone have contact info for this gentleman? There is no need for him to slep in his truck while in my fine state.

Posted: 9/18/2005 10:46:05 AM EDT

[#3]

I would be a proud father if that girl was mine. I'm glad she won the hunt and didn't back down. Kudos to her and to the sponsor and of course, to her parents who didn't "decline" on her behalf.

Posted: 9/18/2005 11:08:28 AM EDT

[#4]

Glad to see kids are getting into this stuff... Hey, You may NOT like Airsoft but it is a good way to start the fuse for kids to be interested. All my dad had when I was growing up was .22's

Just too bad parents dont get involved the way they SHOULD.

Posted: 9/18/2005 12:02:01 PM EDT

[#5]

Quoted:
I got this from the OC Register, originally from the NY Times... a good read.

Animal rights groups and others oppose sporting groups' efforts to lower hunting age.

...."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.

Great program! I wonder what kind of sordid dirt he has on his wife, to get her to agree to a great gig like his....and does she have a sister????

Posted: 9/18/2005 12:32:47 PM EDT

[#6]

Nothing wrong with that my daughters love to hunt and fish. I can't wait for rifle season to get here as it will be my oldest (she's 10) first year hunting with a rifle.

[ARCHIVED THREAD] - Girls and Boys, Meet Nature. Bring Your Gun.

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