RE: MADMEN!
ON SHOOTING PRESERVES
You folks may or may not know that I belong to a large group of bowhunters that started the United Foundation For Disabled Archers back in 1994. This group hosts two events each year, one in Minnesota and one in Wisconsin, where we treat fifty disabled bowhunters to a four-day whitetail hunt. We raise the funds to house them, feed them and cater to their every need. Needless to say, we all have a huge number of disabled friends. Some aren’t so bad, others are very severe.
Over the past decade plus, I have taken many of these disabled hunters, as well as terminal ill hunters, to shooting preserves to help them harvest an animal or species that they could not readily harvest in the wild. Several cases were a priority, because the hunter would not live until the next season opened. I have also accompanied senior hunters that were just too old or ill to climb a mountain or canoe back into the wilderness. For them, the shooting preserve provides a viable solution to sate their appetite for the hunt.
For Pete sakes, if you don’t believe in shooting preserves, do the Capitalistic thing and don’t spend your money there. There is no more effective solution than that. Preserve owners are not asking that they be made mandatory, the are just asking to be left alone to run the businesses that they work so hard at and operate to feed their families. What is it about hunters that cause them to say, "I don’t like it so lets kill it"? What a shame that we just can’t mind our own business and live and let live.