I don’t have any problem with hunting per se, and enjoy fishing myself, but I gotta look at this story about hunting declining and think that it’s a little silly to hunt an animal when 90% of us live within blocks of a supermarket.
New figures from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service show that the number of hunters 16 and older declined by 10 percent between 1996 and 2006 - from 14 million to about 12.5 million. The drop was most acute in New England, the Rocky Mountains, and the Pacific states, which lost 400,000 hunters in that span.
Maybe it’s also because of the loss of places to hunt. Between subdivisions and nature preserves, there just isn’t that much untouched wilderness anymore. Plus hunting is a father-to-son activity: more households are headed by women, fewer of whom hunt or have the time to.
A lot of this actually probably has to do with property rights - there’s simply less rural lands available for the sort of hunting that most suburban & urban dwellers participate in. Fewer farms, decreasing waterfowl populations, etc.
A lot of traditional hunting grounds for pheasant, dove, and quail in central California, for example, have been plowed under for sub-developments. And quite a few farms that used to be open for public hunting now are corporatized, and very strict about not allowing passage for any reason.
Add in that more and more kids are being raised without a common sense approach to firearms - a minority are taught that guns are objects of worship, a larger number are brought up thinking that guns are only for the criminally insane, with a decreasing middle ground …
Of course, it could just be that there’s still a significant population of 16-and-under hunters, but that it’s becoming more common that they lose interest later in life.
Less hunters, but more guns. Now that’s odd.
There must be an ammunition shortage, or else a couple hundred thousand Americans are just DONE with shooting things.
The black rifle crowd disparages hunters by calling them “Fudds”. That is from Elmer Fudd of Looney Tunes fame. The gun culture in the US is moving away from being associated with hunting, and moving more towards gun eroticism and militia fetishism.
(Black rifles are rifles with a stock made from black composite plastic.)
Hunting is part of rural culture - perpetuated in suburbia for a while as a means of reconnecting with rural roots. That is dying out. Some rural kids still hunt, but most seem to view camo as a fashion statement. The disturbing part of this is that the classist elements of hunting become clearer. It is increasingly a rich man’s activity.