RE: Are we really better off as hunters today?
tang,
how true it is. hunters today have lost the natural skills which include navagation, shooting, and endurance that made the old timers mountain men of their time.
now hunters rely on food plots and gadgets to kill their game. They rely on power vs. precision for their weapons. And the biggest heartbreaker of the time atv's vs their own two legs.
brutal said that organizations and funding help wildlife which they do. but there are organizations like the rocky mountain elk foundation that buy up huge plots of land that become nothing more than elite hunting grounds for the ones who can afford the tag. I was a committee member of their organization for four years until i got fed up with the b.s. What did it for me was when they had to have a new office building in the sum of 10 million and they hadn't even got the new worn off the old one that cost 2 million to build. Padded seats for the sake of habitat.
Animals will lose in the end to people encroachment. The area I live in Colorado has become the evil we have been trying avoid for the sake of habitat. They even created a zero elk tolerance in two new units on the valley floor. All because of potatoe farmers saying the elk will spread blight throughout their crops. Those elk were in that bottom before any potatoe was ever grown. Whats next on the hit list deer, antelope, fox, coyotes, rabbits, or any moving creature. Yeah were protecting habitat for the sake of filling our wallets.
Sure I take out clients and base some of my income off that. But it started out as a passion and will end as one. We personally don't hunt private land or bait in animals. We hunt out with the general public on national forest and get the job done and for that we take pride in our skills as woodsmen.
Most of todays hunters have lost what the word hunting meant in the first place. Food plots and gadgets don't make you a great hunter, being a great hunter is in the soul. If you have to kill just to prove to your buddy's you got one then you haven't reached the meaning of a true hunter yet.