RE: Mentored youth?
I have no problem with any of the mentored youth hunting programs and have already heard the arguments against it.
If the kid and parent think the kid is ready, fine with me. There is also now a move to let a mentored youth shoot a doe, IF the mentor/parent has a doe tag and will let the mentored youth shoot the doe, thereby using the mentor's doe tag. No problem with that either.
Many other states have neverhad a minimum age to hunt, left it up to the parents to decide. For many years NY wouldn't let anyone under the age of 16 hunt big game, now I think they've finally dropped it to 14 in recent years? 14 years is too long to wait to let kids hunt deer and turkeys.
Somewhere in between those two "extremes" is probably the best answer to introducing kids to hunting and it's most likely below our age of 12 for the first hunting license.