We have recently jumped on the local/fresh/organic bandwagon. It took a bit of a health crisis with Mike for us to do so, but hey, whatever it takes to do the right thing. It had occurred to me that hunting and fishing fit well with our new lifestyle, and Dave Henderson echoed that in his article in the Ithaca Journal this morning:
Dave Henderson: Simply put, hunters need a new image
I'll confess to not being a frequent reader of the New York Times. But a copy was lying on a seat next to mine at the airport gate recently — my plane was delayed and with time to kill ...
An article that caught my interest was about the latest populist clique, localism, which is apparently a food-awareness movement or some such. The practitioners are into soft terms such as free-range, grass-fed, organic, locally produced, locally harvested, sustainable, native, low-stress, low-impact, humanely slaughtered meat.
Like many popular social movements, “locavores” operate out of well-founded disgust. It seems that the average American meal travels 1,500 miles from field to fork, consuming all manner of vehicle fuel, fertilizer and pesticides along the way.
The locavores, the story advised, encourage a diet coming from one's own “foodshed” usually within a couple hundred miles of home. Ostensibly that means a healthier lifestyle and diet with money going to rural communities. It promotes eating meat from animals that are able to carry out their natural behaviors while “eating a natural diet”.
It also allows concerned consumers to visit places where their food is raised; supports the production of foods that have fewer chemical fertilizers and pesticides; and it keeps us in touch with the seasons.
While those sound suspiciously similar to the reasons many Americans choose to hunt — and New York's half-million hunters took home 220,000 deer from their local habitat last year and about 8.5 million tons of venison — the literature of localism neglects the management and harvest of wildlife.
This is a shame, because hunters are the original locavores. As a kid, I can remember my family eating varying amounts of venison every year, depending on marksmanship; several pheasants (we had wild ones back then), rabbits, squirrels, grouse, various panfish and even bass, as horrific as that may seem in this day and age of catch and release. The kick is that most were “harvested” within a few miles of our house.
Obviously, I carried that subsistence aesthetic into adulthood. More typical in this culture, my two brothers did not. It's no longer common to look favorably on hunting, and fishing is becoming more and more suspect in modern culture. And, it says here, we could gain a great deal by refocusing the debate onto our relationship with a sustainable, healthful food supply.
There's an obvious place to start: Even most non-hunters are aware of the overabundance of deer where they aren't welcome, in suburban areas. Annually, whitetail deer cause $250 million in residential landscaping damage; deer-vehicle collisions injure 29,000 people and kill 1.5 million deer; and 13,000 Americans contract Lyme disease.
State and federal wildlife management agencies still contend that public hunting is the only cost-effective long-term management strategy. Yet they are forced to experiment with costly deer-control measures like high-wire fencing (it can cost $10,000 to $15,000 per mile), infertility drugs ($550 per deer), police sharpshooters ($100 to $250 per deer) and trap-and-transfer-or-euthanize operations ($150 to $1,200 per deer).
Why? Invariably, the answer comes down to a handful of factors: landowner aesthetics, liability concerns, social attitudes about guns, firearm-discharge restrictions and states' public-relations concerns. Or, in short, because of tensions between hunters and the public.
While many people will never give up their opposition to “killing Bambi and/or his mother”, others may change their minds when they realize that destroying a deer's reproductive abilities or relying on the automobile for population control is really no less wasteful than tossing fresh produce into a dumpster.
Hunters need to push a new public image based on deeper traditions: We are stewards of the land, collecting indigenous, environmentally sustainable food for our families.
Yeah, good luck with that. Realistically, all I can hope is that at least the choir is listening to the preaching.
http://www.theithacajournal.com/apps/pb ... 5/cWVxs%3D
