Dan,
Your keyboard must be pooped.
IMO, what's missing the most in hunting today (not just BOWhunting) is ethics and how-to education (field dressing, tracking, etc.). In your position, I'm sure you see more of this than I ever will.
Obviously, I've never taken your course (fly me up and I will), but I have taken our State's hunter safety course (not required due to my age) as will as an NBEF/IBEP course (also not required in IL). The classroom and outdoor portions (blood-trailing) were where the how-to happened. In the process of that, ethical issues like public image and effective ranges were discussed.
If anyone walked out of those classes and missed it, well, there's no teaching them then.
Look, I highly doubt that there's a proficiency test out there that I couldn't pass with my recurve. Not tooting my horn, but that's just the way it is. So, it really doesn't directly effect me one way or the other. I still think mandatory proficiency tests are a Band-Aid solution and does nothing to solve the problem.
In all the debating here and elsewhere, the only meaningful thing that proficiency tests have been shown to produce is, as you said,<font color=red>"showing we as hunters, here specifically bowhunters, actually care whats going on"</font id=red>. I agreed with this when I refered to mandatory proficiency tests as something along the lines of a "warm & fuzzy PR move". I think you might have misinterpreted what I meant by that.
If memory serves, and it may not, bowhunters can keep taking the test up there over and over until they pass, right? That's not the way it's done down here. We have certain areas that require proficiency tests to gain access too.
Remember that thread on the Trad forum a while back by Dick4Bows? I shoot with him quite a bit. Now, he and a buddy of his, who I also shoot with, took a proficiency test for such an area earlier this year. Dick's a hell of a good guy, but he's been fighting the worst case of target panic that I've seen in my life. Accordingly, his buddy, is a better shooter. Dick passed the test, and his friend failed. The test didn't quite work out like it was supposed to.
Now, Dick knows what his effective range is and stays within it...and it's less than 20 yards. To his credit, he's been going to CO for many years to try to bag his first elk. Last year he passed up a shot that would have been a chip-shot to most, because it was just a few yards too long for him. This guy doesn't need a proficiency test to avoid wounding, he's got his ethics for that. And ethics, as we've all agreed, is not instilled when a person stacks arrows into a pie plate.
JRW
Edited by - jrw on 11/12/2002 16:26:09