There’s an old joke about the guy who takes his wife elk hunting in Colorado.
They go in different directions to improve the chance of one of them getting a good shot, and the husband hears his wife’s gun fire, so he heads in that direction.
From a distance he hears she’s screaming at someone, so he picks up the pace.
As he burst through the brush he sees here, pointing her hunting rifle at a cowboy and hears the cowboy say: “OK, lady, it’s your elk. Just let me get my saddle off it!”
And there’s an old, old saying: It stops being funny when it starts being you.
More and more frequently, it seems, there are incidents reported like the one in Pennsylvania from this past weekend, involving hunters who lose their cool and people end up injured.
According to the Associated Press report, two men were hospitalized there “after a fight over a deer carcass in northeastern Pennsylvania.
“State police say the altercation happened in Lehman Township on Saturday. That’s when 33-year-old Bethlehem resident Jason Frey says he shot a deer and tracked it to a property owned by 48-year-old Anthony Contino Sr.
“Authorities say Frey approached Contino, who told him the deer was his and that an associate had shot it earlier that day.
“Contino then told Frey to leave the property.
“A fight ensued involving the two men and others. Frey and another man, 57-year-old Arthur Frey, had to be taken to hospitals. They were reported in stable condition.”
Most hunters understand the implications in today’s society.
They are out in the countryside. They have firearms. There are plenty of people, today, who’d just as soon see them shut down for those two reasons alone.
There are people in our government and people supporting them, who have as part of their agenda the effort to make sure that Americans either lose the right to have guns and to hunt, or that the sport and hobby become so expensive that only a slim percentage of Americans can afford it. It’s the same movement you see in relation to our wilderness.
There are those who would see it become so expensive that only they and their wealthy friends can afford to go there, to experience it.
We working class serfs and our brats need to keep out, so we don’t slop the place up.
There are many ways to combat this effrontery, but one of the most successful is for hunters, preferably ALL hunters, to be as polite, mature and professional as possible.
That means not making the news by beating each other up over a deer carcass.
We have plenty of hunting coming up in the months ahead in this region.
Hopefully we won’t see this news here.
— Chuck Smith