Lie Down With Dogs, Get Up With Fleas

 

Some 17 months ago, I wrote a piece entitled Honey Pots and Trolls in the Land of Eire in which I noted that some gas bag in Ireland had gotten on the boards to bash a piece I had written two years earlier about the old Irish "strong dog" tests and the potted histories that you commonly find for all Kennel Club dogs, including the Glen of Imaal terrier. 

This guy wanted to talk about badgers, and badger-bating trials, and what great badger dogs they had in Ireland. 

Eh? I was a bit confused, as this fellow seemed detached from any logical mooring. 

He had, of course, not so much as dropped me a line. 

I suspected he did not want to provide a real name and a real email address. 

As I wrote at the time:

A two-year old post? Did someone just get their first dog, or did they just get their first computer? No mind. Now here's the funny thing about this kerfuffle -- the "strong dog" tests once given by the Irish Kennel Club have not been done since 1968! And when they were given, they weren't much of a test of a working dog were they? The Teastas Mor lasted for all of 5-minutes. Five minutes? Five minutes. In this Kennel Club test the dog was not required to find the quarry at all, and if the terrier bayed it was summarily disqualified. Since the Kennel Club rules for this "test" were knitted up prior to the invention of locator collars, one has to wonder how the dog was supposed to be found underground. Telepathy? Dowsing rod? But of course the dog did not need to be located, did it? The Teastas Mor was nothing more than a timed badger-baiting trial in a short artificial earth made to look "natural."

So what was this poster on about, I wondered? 

I had an idea.

Well, it could be a simple matter of another Internet Troll on the boards. Such people are common enough, and I have written about them before. But perhaps in this case it is something else. Think about it -- a person with an anonymous name shows up less than a year ago on a working terrier board, and now he wants to talk about badger baiting in a country where that practice is quite illegal? Hmmmm. Sounds like a honey pot operation to me. What's a honey pot? A honey pot is an old trick. You put down bait (preferably under cover of dark) and then stand back and shoot anything that comes in to feed on it. I have written before about how these Internet bulletin boards might be a problem in this regard, and more people should probably be aware of how these honey pot schemes work if they want to stand clear of real trouble themselves, especially in the U.K. In the old days, law enforcement "honey pots" were store-front fencing operations manned by the police, or a buy-and-bust drug corners where undercover cops replaced the local dealers which had been rounded up a half hour before. Nowdays, thanks to the Internet, cops never have to leave their chair to make a bust -- they just go online to find the folks they want to arrest. Whether they are looking for wildlife poachers or illegal aliens, terrorists or pedophiles, neo-Nazis or stolen property, the Internet is the new hunting ground for law enforcement. Are wildlife officials and animal rights lunatics using the Internet this way? Believe it. It has been tried on me (though I do nothing illegal with my dogs), and it has been tried on others. Right now the Roller Pigeon community is in a bit of a pinch and a bulletin board had to be closed down for a week so that it could be scrubbed of all mention of hawk and falcon killing. Falconers have similarly been nailed for illegal bird sales overseas. Heads up and fair warning. Those in the U.K. who ignore this caution can go to page 30 of the June issue of Earth Dog-Running Dog magazine to find the telephone number of the Hunting Lawyer they may soon need. Those who want to see what the working terriers of Ireland actually look like, however, can go to page 29 of that same magazine. A little irony there, eh?

Well, of course, it turned out I was as right as rain. 

Just six weeks later, a major bust went down in Ireland -- a fact I noted in a post entitled As Predicted: Fools Get Stung at Irish Honey Pot. And behind this bust was some bald-headed poseur showing up at the dog shows, and even trading dogs.  

Of course, anyone with a brain and a sense of smell could have sensed this was coming. 

You did not need to be a dyed-in-the-wool backwoodsman to see the sign. As I wrote:

The spoor was obvious to me, and so too was the scent. When you see such things, just sit down and keep quiet -- the game will reveal itself in time. The funny thing is that genuine digging folks know the score, and have nothing to fear. We aren't going out to bait animals, we are going out to hunt. And we sure as hell aren't using turnspit dogs or fighting dogs to get the job done, are we? We are using terriers, yes, but the terriers used in Ireland to hunt are the same as those used all over -- Jack Russells, Patterdales, Fells and (perhaps) a few Borders. There is no shame or artifice in the world of true working terriers who are being worked by folks who actually know what they are doing. And the job being done is not complex, is it? It's to locate and terminate the quarry, as quickly and painlessly as possible, and to shepherd the safety of the terrier so it can be used again next week.

So what's the latest news? 

Well, it comes to me via way of an email which directed me back to the same before-mentioned bulletin-board where the folks there are all atwitter again because there have been more raids in Ireland. More are supposedly in the works for "known blood sports enthusiasts in Ireland, and as far afield as France and the USA." 

Eh? Come again? 

I am no expert on French law, but I am quit certain that hunting badger is legal in France, and I know for a fact that it is legal in most of the U.S.A. where badger are actually found. 

So there will no arrests, as no laws have been broken -- that is just fanciful bunk cocked up by an ignorant press corps trying to sensationalize things as much as possible. 

As for "baiting," I know no one who does that. Not a one. 

But then, I do not claim to know everyone lurking on the margins of the world of working terriers, even in this country. 

I have noted in the past that there are a few wanna-be pit-dog fighters about, but I will have nothing to do with them, and neither will anyone else with an ounce of brain or a real interest in working terriers. 

These knuckle-draggers are to true working terriers what jack-lighting deer poachers are to real hunters -- an outrage and an embarrassment. 

That said, I have always suspected that most of these loud mouths are nothing more than wannabe tough-guys who do not hunt very much, and who simply talk big to get attention. 

I have written about these fools and fantasy diggers before, and I have noted that their rich fantasy life is every bit as detrimental to real terrier work as the nonsense spouted by Kennel Club matrons.

Does fantasy do any real harm? Generally, no, but at times yes. The fantasy digger who thinks a go-to-ground tunnel is the size of a real den pipe is spreading a lie forged in ignorance that allows the "big wink" of over-large dogs to continue unabated. The preening pretender who prattles on about the glories of brain-dead "hard dogs" in order to compensate for his own male shortcomings glorifies a canine characteristic which, in excess, is too often a serious liability in the field. The show ring breeder whose fantasy fox is as large as a coyote is what led to the Kennel Club fox terrier -- a dog whose chest is as deep as the keel of a war ship. The young enthusiast who thinks a mute dog is a fine thing glorifies a serious nuisance and a potentially fatal liability in a working dog, while the "blue-blazer rosette chaser" who cares more about the color of a dog's nose than it's ability to scent does no better. When push comes to shove, the thing that has killed working terriers over the course of the last 50 years is the creep of fantasy, and the slow but steady erosion of real diggers in the hedgerow. The simple truth is that you cannot protect working dogs without working them. And working a dog is not easy -- it is suspiciously like work for the human as well as the dog. There is equipment to be gotten -- spades, bars, posthole diggers, tie-outs, locator collars, machete, yo-ho, veterinary first aid equipment, and a decent pack in which to carry it all. There are farm permissions to get, and there are the dogs which have to be raised up and given the experience -- experience which can only be gotten by driving out to the country and walking hedgerows and fields for many, many weekends. This is to say nothing of the reality of digging in freezing cold, howling winds, sucking mud, pounding sun, and swarming bugs.

And so, I was not too surprised when I turned on the computer this morning to find someone had sent me another news article from The Sunday Times of London about the badger-baiting arrests in Ireland. Only in this article, two Americans were named -- the owner of Deadgame Kennels in West Virginia, and the owner of Barnburner Patterdales in Iowa. It seems these two gentlemen had imported dogs from Robert Booth, formerly of Ireland and now living in France. 

Booth is a dog-dealer, and part of his business plan has been selling dogs to wanna-be tough guys in America who then go on Internet Bulletin Boards, list-servs, and web sites like "Bay Dogs Online" to claim that their dogs are descended from "Booth's So-and-So" and will "hunt anything." 

 Right. Hunted nothing is more likely. 

As for badger baiting by either of the two named Americans, I seriously doubt it.

You see, neither of these gentlemen live in an area known for badger, and in fact it seems one of them even has to go out of state to hunt groundhog! 

The other fellow seems to "hunt" only a few times a year, and this is generally done by shooting large numbers of raccoon that flee the treeless fields of Iowa in winter only to jungle up in barns and silos where their feces damage vast loads of hay and feed. 

I do not consider this hunting; it is extermination. 

And, let the record show, it is perfectly legal, even if it is not genuine terrier work in my book. 

The United States, thank God, is not the U.K. Not only are guns legal here, but so too are steep-jawed traps. In fact, there are more than 100,000 active trappers in the U.S., and these trappers are trapping (and mostly exporting) over 2,500,000 raccoons a year, along with many hundreds of thousands of wild fox and coyote pelts. 

This trapping does no harm to wildlife numbers; raccoon, red fox, groundhog, and coyote numbers are at historical records. 

As for North American badgers, which are not related to their European counter-parts in any way, they are not protected in most of the states where they occur in any appreciable number. 

If you want to hunt badger in Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, or North Dakota, for example, go right ahead; it is an unprotected nongame species. The states of Nebraska, Wyoming and Missouri, very helpfully suggests using #3 traps. Kansas has a season that stretches from Nov. 12th to Feb. 15th, while Iowa's stretches from Nov. 3rd to Jan. 31st. 

And so it goes. . . . . 

Which is not to say that there is any excuse for stupidity or brutality. 

The oldest adage in the world is both true and poignant: "Lie down with dogs, and get up with fleas." 

If you rub up against dog dealers, dog-fighters, badger-baiters, and wanna-be-tough guys, do not be surprised if their mud ends up being splattered on you, whether it is deserved or nor. 

And if, by chance, you are the kind of person who does not respect both the wildlife and the dogs, please get the hell out of terrier work all together. 

Terrier work does not need thugs and numbskulls. And, if you want my opinion, it does not need any of these Internet bulletin boards at all. As I wrote on this blog back in 2005:

When was the last time you read something useful or interesting or new about fox, raccoon, weasel, groundhog, badger or even ducks on one of these boards? When was the last time you got a bit of practical advice about shifting rocks, closing a wound, or finding permission? When was the last time someone even wrote a well-written story about their day in the field with the dogs? Instead, what you find on the Boards are a great number of very young or immature people who seem to get most of their attention in this world by being combative, or otherwise wanting to work out their manhood issues (and yes there are some women doing that too!). Most of these people seem to know very little about wildlife and not too much about dogs, either. It is ironic, but true, that in the dog world the most common animal is the parrot -- people quick to repeat what others have said or scratched out. The parrot offers no new information or expanded point of view. They have little experience of their own. Think for themselves? Go their own way? Dig their own dog? Parrots don't do that -- they are bird-brained and can only mimic. They do not own a library card and cannot hold a shovel. Starting a bulletin board is certainly easy nowdays, isn't it? These things are now offered up as free services, the code is easy and can be set up in an hour or two, and the only trick is to get people to keep coming back. No committment or investment is needed. Just erect an electronic wall and let the graffitti spraying begin. And graffitti spraying is exactly what you get about 95 percent of the time. In fact, this is the chief product of the bulletin boards -- not information but fighting, not shared experience, but name-calling. It is like a Drunken Night at O'Malleys, except that the drunks are a thousand miles apart and hiding behind fake names. The folks that run bulletin boards are big on "free speech," but it is pure posture to hide true poverty. The sad truth is that if civility were maintained on these bulletin boards, the real truth would come out pretty quickly -- no one has very much to say. In the end, bulletin boards have not created a working terrier community so much as destroyed it. The pictures on "anti" web sites are all culled from bulletin boards. Educated people who might educate, motivate and represent the best of working terriers soon turn away from these boards, leaving the loud, stupid, very young, and unemployed to dominate the boards and represent us all. It is reverse Darwinism -- a devolution to the unfit and the unsound. I think history has shown that nothing has harmed the world of working terriers more than weakly moderated bulletin boards. Mud and slander has been slung on established breeders, 30-year diggers, working judges, and respected authors. At times I have wondered if these things were Animal Rights honey pots -- bait stations set out to poison the working dog community. Whether intended or not, that is what most of them have become. What a sad thing the internet has done to working terriers!

Was I right? I think time has proven it so! .

Zumbo was (Mostly) Right

Sharp-shooting prairie dogs in South Dakota with a truck-mounted professional-grade shooting stand.



Some years back, I was lurking on several boards and list-servs when PETA came out with an advertising campaign against dairy milk. The folks over at FOL (Foxhunters On Line) went nuts. To listen to them talk, this was the end of the world and PETA's silly campaign was proof that the Anti-Christ was coming.

Over on the Dairy Management list, however, everyone yawned at the PETA campaign, and the talk quickly moved on to more germane matters such as the best low-grade slope to have on a loafing shed (3 percent as I recall).

The point here is that one embattled group -- the fox hunters -- freaked out, squawking like pet store parrots next to a slamming screen door. The dairy folks, on the other hand, knew One True Thing, which is that America will always drink milk.

I was recently reminded of these two divergent reactions when Outdoor Life columnist and Big Game Hunter Jim Zumbo posted a short rant to his blog concerning the use of semi-automatic "assault" rifles to shoot prairie dogs.

The gun community went nuts. Outdoor Life promptly fired Zumbo, and everyone in the Mainstream Media was quick to pronounce Zumbo -- a modest man with a small column in a magazine most people do not read -- as economic toast.

It seems all sides wanted to martyr Zumbo for their own purposes. The black-helicopter-spying, UN-hating, survivalist wing nuts wanted a martyr so they could show that they were powerful. The granola-eating, foreign-aid-giving lefties who assume all depravity is due to deprivation wanted a martyr so that they could prove that the "Gun Nuts" were as myopic, intellectually shallow and intolerant as anyone who ever served on a Taliban governing council.

The editors at Outdoor Life, of course, simply wanted to continue to pimp out America for their corporate advertisers. Zumbo must die so that another ad for something you do not need can be tossed into a land fill at the end of the month.

What no one seems to have actually asked is what was Zumbo actually trying to say in his blog? This is, after all, a man who has spent his entire life buying, carrying, cleaning and firing guns. He has shot deer in every state of the Union and knows how to skin a bear with a pocket knife. Is it really possible he woke up one morning possessed by the demon spirit of PETA-founder Ingrid Newkirk? I seriously doubt it.

While a lot has been written about "L'affaire Zumbo," I think most writers have missed the point -- perhaps because not too many of them actually read what Jim Zumbo said.

Here's a little of that original missive:

"While at the SHOT Show recently, I ran into a guy who complained that too many hunters were taking excessively long shots. He’s an outfitter, and witnessed plenty of people shooting at elk at distances greater than 350 yards. He suggested that that was too far, primary because the majority of those hunters had no clue of ballistics. Most were 'Hail Mary' shots. I agree. We read about people making 500 yard shots and more, and that, to me, is ridiculous.

Then at the SCI convention last week, I talked to a guy who bragged that his custom gun kills deer out at 800 yards and better. To each his own, I suppose, but that isn’t hunting. It’s shooting. And I don’t care how great a marksman you are. The risk of wounding an animal at extremely long ranges is high, and where’s the sportsmanship, the ethics, the satisfaction of taking outrageously long shots? I understand there’s a group in PA that shoots deer at 1,000 yards and more. More power to them. Just don’t ask me to support that kind of 'hunting.'”

Zumbo was making a point: there's a difference between shooting and hunting. We do not call range-shooting hunting, and we do not call skeet-shooting hunting.

In the English language, hunting means something and we all know it, and should be working to preserve and protect it.

Now, where Zumbo strayed on to thin ice is when he began to talk about marmots. I know something about marmots, and I think a man like Zumbo should just leave them the hell alone.

Marmots, you see, are a special problem. While Zumbo the Great White Hunter is definitely the man you want with you shooting elk in the field, he is not the man you want leading a charge into the dangerous thicket known as marmot politics.

In Zumbo's defense, let me point out that he is not the first ship to wreck on these rocks. In the last election cycle, when my friend Andy (a great Medicaid policy mechanic) stopped by my office to tell me he was going to South Dakota to work on the Rosebud Indian Reservation as an election monitor, I was the first one to give him the bad news: Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota was political toast. Andy wanted to know why I thought so. "Simple," I said, "He's soft on Marmots."

Andy thought I was kidding. He gave me a weird look (I get those a lot), and changed the topic to something I might have real expertise in: the pricing of anti-psychotic medications.

When Andy came back two weeks later, however, he admitted I was right. "The entire election hinged on marmots," he said. "Marmots!" He was amazed. I was not.

Prairie dogs have long been an emotional issue in parts of the West. In truth, these little animals do no harm and quite a lot of good. Of course, that's not the way cattlemen see them. In arid and marginal country, ranchers are always anxious to blame their misfortunes on something more tangible than the weather, and so they take it out on coyotes, prairie dogs and the IRS, not one of which has the slightest impact on a herd of Angus.

While government-sponsored poisoning is the main cause of prairie dog mortality, recreational shooters also have an impact.

Notice what I called these folks -- shooters. They are not hunters. A prairie dog colony does not move. This year it will be exactly where it was last year, and the year before that. There is no "hunting" for prairie dogs.

Nor is there any woodcraft involved. The shooter knows nothing about marmots nor does he care about them. For the shooter, marmots are simply a small target shot from a great distance.

If you hang out on the prairie-dog and groundhog-shooting sections of varmint-hunting bulletin boards and list-servs, you will find that these folks do not talk about the gestation period of their respective marmots, the symbiotic relationship between the prairie dog and the buffalo, the depth of the burrows, the importance of prairie dogs to black-footed ferrets, or the call structure (both audible and sub-sonic) of marmots. A marmot shooter does not know -- or care -- about these kinds of things.

What interests the prairie dog shooter is not the prairie dog, but the ballistics -- the grains of gunpowder used, the feet-per-second, the effect of wind, and the flatness of the trajectory.

Prairie dog shooters have a fetish for physics. The animal itself is simply a convenient excuse to drive out into the countryside with a couple of sandwiches, a cooler full of beer, and a few small sandbags to help steady the barrel on the hood of a car or portable bench.

Zumbo does not "get it" because he is a hunter, and not a sniper. Zumbo seeks to be involved with the animal and its habitat, while the prairie dog sniper cannot be bothered to leave the hood of his car.

While Zumbo's idea of a proper gun is a well-made bolt action rifle or shotgun with a carefully engraved walnut stock and a history behind it, the prairie dog shooter prefers high-end technology and may even be living a kind of Walter Mitty fantasy, with himself as the deeply embedded Marine Corps sharpshooter, and the prairie dog serving as a proxy for the commandant of a Viet Cong prisoner of war camp. Pull the trigger and you get a "red mist" either way.

In truth, there is a fine line between a hunting rifle and a weapon of war. Vietnam-era snipers used to go into the field with their own guns -- carefully calibrated bolt-action hunting rifles originally crafted for deer. Today's military, of course, has specialized sniper rifles, but in truth some of the better off-the-shelf semi-autos like the AR-15 are about as good a shot as the old Vietnam-era sniping rifles. And so they are used by a certain percentage of prairie dog Fantasy Camp snipers, never mind that using a military-looking semi-auto on a prairie dog looks more than a little bit ridiculous.

Zumbo was remarking about this ridiculousness in his since-removed blog posting.

Now a prairie dog is just as dead with a .17 Hornady as he is with a AR-15 (or even a grenade), but is there anyone in the modern era who thinks image does not matter? Do not ALL of us in the hunting community bear the burden of being forced to carry the dead weight of the most reckless things that the stupidest among us do?

That is what Zumbo was trying to say, and here is what he wrote:

"As I write this, I’m hunting coyotes in southeastern Wyoming with Eddie Stevenson, PR Manager for Remington Arms, Greg Dennison, who is senior research engineer for Remington, and several writers. We’re testing Remington’s brand new .17 cal Spitfire bullet on coyotes.

I must be living in a vacuum. The guides on our hunt tell me that the use of AR and AK rifles have a rapidly growing following among hunters, especially prairie dog hunters. I had no clue. Only once in my life have I ever seen anyone using one of these firearms.

I call them 'assault' rifles, which may upset some people. Excuse me, maybe I’m a traditionalist, but I see no place for these weapons among our hunting fraternity. I’ll go so far as to call them 'terrorist' rifles. They tell me that some companies are producing assault rifles that are 'tackdrivers.'

Sorry, folks, in my humble opinion, these things have no place in hunting. We don’t need to be lumped into the group of people who terrorize the world with them, which is an obvious concern. I’ve always been comfortable with the statement that hunters don’t use assault rifles. We’ve always been proud of our 'sporting firearms.'

This really has me concerned. As hunters, we don’t need the image of walking around the woods carrying one of these weapons. To most of the public, an assault rifle is a terrifying thing. Let’s divorce ourselves from them. I say game departments should ban them from the prairies and woods."

Now where Zumbo overstepped the mark is in the last line. You don't need the last line. You see, if Zumbo -- who spends a heck of a lot of time in forest and field shooting and hunting -- has not actually seen assault rifles in the woods and fields, is there really a problem?

I think not.

The good news is that these assault-rifles (or look-a-likes of the same) are mostly in the hands of wanna-be tough guys, ballistic shooters, and a few kids who would be quickly laughed out of deer camp if they showed up with one.

The simple truth is that if you need a 32-round banana clip to kill a deer, you are a joke on legs and no one is going to go hunting with you -- ever.

But the Ballistics Boys who shoot prairie dogs are not hunters. They are shooters, and among this particular tribe, there appears to be a few who are a little low in common sense and a little over-caffeinated to boot.

Apparently there are more than a handful of Walter Mitty fantasy snipers who want to use an AR-15 Bushmaster -- the gun made infamous by D.C.-beltway sniper John Allen Mohamed -- to shoot prairie dogs.

No doubt they also put grease paint under their eyes to cut the glare, and slip on genuine Vietnam-era camouflage before they pretend to be muscular Green Beret commandos on patrol in the Laotian Highlands. Never mind that they are actually pudgy office workers shooting 3-pound marmots on BLM land in Colorado.

Real hunters like Zumbo tend to go the opposite direction. Instead of looking for more fire power and more accuracy, a good shot who really knows the land and his abilities may handicap himself a little bit in order to increase the challenge. He will not shoot over bait. He may chose to hunt wild turkey with an ancient French-built .16 gauge rather than a brand new American-made .12 gauge. He may forgo a high-powered scope, or lower the caliber on his rifle.

True experts handicap themselves in all sports, from cards and golf, to fishing and hunting. The fastest growth in hunting today, I am happy to say, is in the area of black powder shooting -- the very antithesis of semi-automatic fire power. At a time when the entire nation seems to be neck-deep in whitetail deer and turkey, the average hunter is not trying to ramp up for slaughter, but trying to dial down to keep an element of sport in the game.

So was Zumbo wrong? Not at all. Shooting wild game with an AR-15 is such tremendous over-kill that no one needs to say it, and damn few are actually doing it.

Sure there are always going to be some redneck idiots who want to play Rambo, but the proper response is not to legislate or to litigate, but to laugh out loud, draw a few cartoons, and make a joke to their face about the need to "overcompensate for their inadequacies" (And by that you mean shooting inadequacies. If they want to take it another way, that's their problem).

It is a simple truth, that mockery often works better than manifesto.

There is no need to legislate AR-15s from the woods, when laughter alone will work just fine.

_____

• To read more on this topic, see "The Zumbo Flap" by net-friend Steve Bodio (author of Good Guns and many other fine books) and "More Zumbo" by net-friend Matt Mullenix (author of In Season: A Louisiana Falconer's Journal)

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Garbaging for Bears

In my opinion, Ted Williams is one of the finest hook-and-bullet writers in America today. He is smart, articulate, does the research, and thinks for himself.

In short, to ideologues on either end of the spectrum he is a dangerous man.

The piece below comes from High Country News, which is one of the better small publications in the United States, and it goes to the heart of the manipulation of the American public by both the "animal rights" movement and by those who would similarly milk America's hunters and anglers.

Whem Hunters Close Ranks and Close Minds, by Ted Williams

In a few states it is still legal to attract bears with bait for the purpose of shooting them. I call it "garbaging for bears," and, as an avid hunter, find it repulsive - basically assassination. But this is not an article about garbaging for bears. It is an article about the slow, painful maturation of hook-and-bullet journalism in America and about the main force impeding it - demagoguery masquerading as conservation.

"To continually brand all criticism as anti-hunting rhetoric and all critics as anti-hunters only serves to paint us into an ever smaller corner," wrote ardent hunter and Colorado bear biologist Tom Beck in a commentary on hunting black bears over bait. The piece, titled "A Failure of the Spirit," was adapted for the September 1996 issue of Outdoor Life from a pre-publication copy of A Hunter’s Heart, a collection of essays compiled and edited by David Petersen. "How fulfilling is it to shoot a bear with its head in a barrel of jelly-filled doughnuts?" read Outdoor Life’s subhead.

Having once had the job of translating into people-talk what fish and wildlife biologists write, I was flabbergasted by Beck’s piece. It was not at all the sort of thing I’d come to expect from his profession. It sang. The prose was eloquent and lean, the arguments clear and compelling.

I’ll even take some of the credit for steering the piece to a wider readership, since I had tipped off Petersen that huge changes were under way at the 99-year-old magazine.

Out was the old editorial regime, which had seen an "anti-hunter" behind every glacial erratic, which believed that there were certain facts that Outdoor Life’s 1.3 million subscribers shouldn’t know, and for which "conservation" meant tooting around the nation in a 29-foot gas-guzzling "Pledgemobile" entreating the unenlightened and, of course, unsubscribed masses to mouth an ancient mantra called the "Outdoor Life Conservation Pledge."

In were editor-in-chief Stephen Byers and executive editors Will Bourne and Bob Brown, smart, tough journalists who understood the real threats to fish and wildlife, who wanted to teach sportsmen how to help themselves, who were committed to challenging readers to thought and action even if it meant making them mad.

"You don’t lose readers by pissing them off," Byers told me. "You lose readers by boring them."

If you are now rummaging through the September 1996 Outdoor Life for "A Failure of the Spirit," you’ll not find it. The essay was pulled by a bureaucrat at Times Mirror Magazines, publisher of Outdoor Life, on July 24 at virtually the last possible instant. According to The New York Times, the bureaucrat was senior vice president Jason Klein, but Mr. Klein declined to speak with the The New York Times reporter, and Outdoor Life’s publisher, Michael Rooney, referred all calls to Mr. Klein.

Times Mirror had been frightened into its decision by the Ohio-based Wildlife Legislative Fund of America, a group claiming to defend hunting and wildlife management. The Wildlife Legislative Fund had accused Beck of revealing facts sportsmen shouldn’t know and expressing opinions sportsmen shouldn’t hear. And it had prognosticated that his comments on bear baiting would be useful to the vile and ubiquitous "antis." It told sportsmen to complain to Outdoor Life.

Sportsmen responded as if they had been invaded by body snatchers, deluging Byers with faxes, letters and e-mail messages, all of which he showed to his superiors. "I thought sitting on them would be deceptive," he says.

So Byers and Bourne resigned from Outdoor Life, protesting Times Mirror’s beta-wolf tradition of licking the muzzles of paranoid readers, then rolling on its back and urinating on itself (HCN, 10/28/96). I was refreshed to see outdoor editors with integrity. They reminded me that hook-and-bullet journalism doesn’t have to be an oxymoron.

Of course, the Wildlife Legislative Fund had never read what Tom Beck had to say. But Beck, a hunter and a professional wildlife manager in Colorado, was known to harbor incorrect and seditious ideas.

For example, he had dared to question the moribund sport of garbaging for bears, arguing that there can’t be much thrill of the chase if there is no chase. He had suggested that the sport itself - not criticism of it - is fodder for the antis who are forever holding it up as an example of all hunting. He had revealed that spring baiting results in orphaned cubs. And he had opined that baiting at any time of year trains bears to lose their wildness and self-sufficiency, transmuting them into trash-can-bashing, beehive-smashing vagabonds.

In Beck’s own censored words for Outdoor Life: "I firmly believe that baiting creates "nuisance" bears. Black bears are naturally wary, instinctively avoiding close contact with humans. But large amounts of tasty food, easily obtained, defeats this wariness. By baiting, we create lazy bears who have been rewarded, not punished, for overcoming their fear of humans."

According to the Wildlife Legislative Fund, Beck had helped poison the minds of his fellow Coloradans, who in 1992 voted three-to-one to ban bear baiting. Then he had expressed his dangerous opinions in Idaho, where 45 percent of all bear hunters oppose baiting. Clearly, argued the fund’s directors in Ohio, he needed to be silenced.

I would have appreciated Beck’s essay even if I’d disagreed with it. The value of such writing is that it gets sportsmen thinking and exchanging ideas, something Outdoor Life readers hadn’t done a whole lot of before the new editors took over.

The late Canadian angling author Roderick Haig-Brown’s critique of the mass-circulation hook-and-bullet press is, if anything, more applicable today than when he wrote it a generation ago: "Its faults are timidity and conformity. It dare not shock or extend its readers, it must not frighten them with abstract or deeply considered ideas, it must somehow catch and hold even the dullest mentality - or risk a reduction of the advertising rates. With so much at stake (articles) are mainly staff written or else edited into inoffensive inanity."

Equally applicable are Aldo Leopold’s words, older still: "The sportsman has no leaders to tell him what is wrong. The sporting press no longer represents sport; it has turned billboard for the gadgeteer."

Even in 1981, when Gray’s Sporting Journal sent me to Maine to observe one of the last hunts in the state’s last spring bear season, there was no clear consensus among sportsmen about garbaging for bears. Hunters were united only in the strength of their opinions, most saying, "Hell, yes!" and "Hell, no!" A reader poll by The Maine Sportsman, the state’s leading hunting-and-fishing publication, had just revealed that 52 percent of the respondents opposed bear baiting in spring or fall.

Back then managers liked baiting lots more than they do today and lots more than hunters ever did. The "concluding comments’ of participants of a bear-management conference at Kalispell, Mont., read as follows: "Because bear habitat is thick woods, cedar swamps, etc., and the black bear is elusive, bait hunting is a necessary harvest method. Without this method in remote areas, successful hunting would be very difficult."

Imagine how that line of reasoning would have set with the late dean of Atlantic salmon angling, Lee Wulff, who, in pursuing the most challenging of all game fish, purposely handicapped himself by using tiny dry flies and wispy trout rods: "Because Atlantic salmon habitat is thick woods, cold, wild, hard-to-get-to rivers, etc., and the Atlantic salmon is elusive and apt to shun flies, spearing it is a necessary harvest method. Without this method in remote areas, successful fishing would be very difficult."

So that I would not be accused of unfairness, I sought out the bear-baiting outfitter with the best reputation - Jack Hegarty of Jackman, Maine, a gentleman and a conservationist. During his gun-safety pep talk to his clients, Hegarty produced a huge pair of skivvies with a hole in the exact center of a skillet-sized circle of dried blood. The hole had been excavated the previous year when the former owner of the skivvies had accidentally discharged his holstered .45 automatic.

When Hegarty found him, he was standing wide-eyed in the road, swaying. "I think," declared the hunter, "that I have shot myself."

Hegarty asked for and was granted permission to have a look. "He had a fat ass," mused Hegarty, superfluously. "And I grabbed one of the cheeks and pulled it up, and I said, "Hey, you did shoot yourself! ’ ’The bullet hadn’t hit anything important.

So Hegarty got a doctor to sew up the new hole in the guy’s gluteus maximus, and he was back watching garbage the next morning.

For five hours and 16 minutes I watched garbage with an 18-year-old hunter I’ll call George, from Paeonian Springs, Va. Besides 500,000 black flies, the only wildlife I saw was a red squirrel. George, who only heard it, thought it was "a bear for sure." George had saved his money for this dream hunting trip, and all he got to see of the storied north woods was one acre around an onion sack full of rotten meat hanging from a tree 80 feet from a dirt road.

According to the Wildlife Legislative Fund, this is hunting, and anyone who says different is abetting the antis and needs to have a sock jammed in his mouth.

What astonished me about the Outdoor Life fiasco was not the demagoguery of a group that purports to speak for hunters, but sportsmen’s reaction to it. They made cyberspace resonate with outrage, disgust and amazement, as if this were somehow aberrant behavior. It wasn’t. The Wildlife Legislative Fund does this sort of thing all the time. When New Mexico banned spring bear hunting four years ago, the fund spewed shrill action alerts, warning that "the antis were successful in their efforts to influence the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish to drastically curtail bear hunting" and that "the antis are busy doing what they are good at - knocking down the wall, one brick at a time."

Not a word was true. Still, it generated an Outdoor Life piece in which hunting editor Jim Zumbo warned readers that states are abolishing bear-hunting opportunities "under unremitting pressure from animal-rights organizations."

There was "unremitting pressure" all right, but it was coming from enlightened wildlife professionals worried about the resource. As Bill Montoya, then director of the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, wrote the fund: "(Your) article is a great disservice to the sportsmen of our state and to all of your readers ... We have strong indications that hunters were removing bears faster than bears were being recruited into the population as yearlings. That cannot be allowed and our concern is not new ... Some individual hunters opposed the changes, but sportsmen as a group understood the need and recognized the necessity for reduction in bear harvest ...

"Significantly, during the entire months-long route the recommendations took through these hearings, none of your imaginary "antis’ were present or heard from ... Your article, however, has done more for the cause of the "antis’ than any adjustments we could have made to the bear season. Without their saying a word or lifting a finger, you have given them complete credit for eliminating a season when in fact they were not involved ... We have observed the groups you purport to oppose using demagoguery to increase membership and raise funds, but are very disappointed that the fund apparently is using the same tactics of paranoid disinformation."

Montoya’s admonition produced no change in behavior. When Mollie Beattie, the late director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, settled a lawsuit brought by the National Audubon Society, the Wilderness Society and other environmental groups by signing an agreement to end such incompatible activities on national wildlife refuges as jetskiing and waterskiing, the fund told sportsmen to send it money so it could stop her from also banning hunting and fishing.

Like corpses in Night of the Living Dead, sportsmen, including many of my fellow outdoor writers, marched to their checkbooks and word processors. This, despite the fact that hunting and fishing weren’t even mentioned in the suit, and no one at the Fish and Wildlife Service had ever dreamed of banning these legitimate, compatible uses.

Playing Howdy Doody to the fund’s Buffalo Bob, Vin Sparano (Byers’ predecessor at Outdoor Life) editorialized that Beattie’s refuge stewardship "puts hunting, fishing and trapping in danger on 100 million acres’ but that "all is not lost" because groups like the fund are pressuring the Fish and Wildlife Service "to continue hunting and fishing programs within the National Wildlife Refuge System."

When Mollie Beattie opened 15 additional hunting programs and six additional fishing programs - something she had planned to do all along - the fund bragged that it had "bloodied" the service and had "forced it to shelve its plans to restrict hunting on the national wildlife refuges."

Outdoor writers by the drove interviewed the pooh-bahs of the Wildlife Legislative Fund. I asked Refuge Division chief Rob Shallenberger - the person in charge of America’s 510 national wildlife refuges - how many outdoor writers had talked to him.

"I would say less than half a dozen," he told me. "And I had to do some of that on my own. I used to write articles for outdoor magazines, and I have a lot of friends in that community. And I frankly was disappointed in the rapidity with which outdoor writers sucked up all the material they got. They didn’t ask for clarification or comment. Some of that stuff that got printed was almost inexcusable. A lot of us were personally affronted by that. Wait, folks, at least give us the courtesy of a phone call."

Even if the fund’s supporters don’t have a problem with the organization trying to shut up an honest journalist, they ought to have a problem with it wasting their money on a fool’s errand. At least since the time of Socrates, the attempted silencing of presumed heretics has only amplified their voices. So it has been with Tom Beck. People who never even thought about bear baiting - readers of The New York Times and High Country News, for example - are now tuned in.

Meanwhile, I have not quite given up on Outdoor Life. Fortunately, Bob Brown remains on the staff, and he prevailed on Times Mirror to let him publish Beck’s essay in the November 1996 issue. With it appeared an opposing view by Craig McLaughlin, a respected bear biologist from Maine with credentials almost identical to Beck’s and who had neither seen A Hunter’s Heart (now in print) nor been shown Beck’s Outdoor Life piece. It’s not that Times Mirror found courage; it’s just that the bad press frightened it even more than the gas and wind from the fund.

The incident has even helped forge a policy statement by the American Society of Magazine Editors, stipulating that editors "need the maximum possible protection from untoward commercial or other extra-journalistic pressures’ and that when they are pushed around by outside interests the society’s board will investigate and possibly suspend the publication from the National Magazine Awards.

So, for all the wrong reasons, Times Mirror finally made the right decision. At least on one issue, the result will be dialogue, an exchange of ideas, a challenge to thought and action. Maybe it will be the start of something new.
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