Piss, vinegar and the Humane Society

Lord, it's nearly the end of April and I've hardly blogged at all this month because I've had a strange little case of writer's block.

But I pushed that block off the edge of a cliff tonight, and all that piss and vinegar I've been holding back for weeks is coming out. Right now.

Where to begin?

There's been a little debate in California for the past couple months about a state proposal to expand bear hunting here.
There were two key components to the proposal: One was to expand the number of bears that could be taken each year because our bear population is thriving (can't tell you how often I've heard about black bears coming out of the hills of Southern California to take a dip in people's swimming pools in the summer - seriously). The other component was to allow houndsmen to use GPS tracking collars on their dogs.

I didn't really dive into this debate for one key reason: I haven't hunted bears.

I'm confident that our Department of Fish and Game wouldn't expand hunting if it didn't think game populations could withstand it - that's a no-brainer rooted in science. But I haven't hunted with hounds and doing so doesn't personally interest me, so I didn't feel I could bring much to that part of the debate - and, as you can imagine, that was the part that packed the biggest freak-out factor.

But I watched from the sidelines nonetheless, and got more and more irritated as pretty much every story quoted the Humane Society of the U.S. describing bear hunters as "trophy hunters."

We all know why the HSUS does this: Public support for meat hunting is very high - 85 percent - while public support for trophy hunting is very low - 28 percent (source: Responsive Management, 2006). So, if you can paint hunters as being motivated by the trophy - which is often interpreted by the non-hunting public as tossing the meat - you can effectively turn the hunters in question into villains.

I saw this in story after story, and when an LA Times article on the topic popped up in my alerts last week, I'd finally had enough.

I freely admit that the tipping point was the fact that the reporter had drunk the Kool-Aid and led the story with this offensively unfounded statement: As outdoor activities in California go, bear hunting is not particularly popular. Officials estimate that, at most, 1% of the state's population hunts black bears. Many of the other 99% are appalled that anyone does. That's crap, and I fired off a comment to that effect.

But by that time I was pretty disappointed that so many of my colleagues in the biz weren't challenging the HSUS on the completely fabricated suggestion that people in California just hunt bears for trophies, so I called bullshit on that too.

The fact is that there is absolutely nothing to back up the claim - period.

Of course, I don't have anything to suggest that bear hunters here are solely driven by the desire for bear meat either. But here's what I do have that I'm pretty sure the HSUS doesn't: I know a LOT of people who hunt, and because I have real conversations with them, I'm pretty familiar with their motivations.

Which are? Complex. We hunt because we love hunting. For some of us, meat is a huge motivation - personally, I won't kill anything that I won't eat (aside from bugs - not going there quite yet). For others, the meat is merely a bonus. And I've actually met one person who doesn't eat what he kills.

Most of us would love to bag a glorious trophy animal - who wouldn't be excited about that? But most of us can't afford to hunt solely for trophies. So the HSUS's assertion just doesn't ring true.

But hey, HSUS, if you've got an actual fact to back up your claim, bring it. I may only have a pair of jacks on this, but I'm pretty sure you don't even have a deuce.

Unfortunately, the HSUS won on this issue. The DFG pulled its proposal (you can read a little more about that here on Phillip's Hog Blog, which gets into some very serious issues I'm not even touching on here, because I'm focused on the trophy-versus-meat issue).

On the bright side, during my little spate of comments on the LA Times website, I heard from a friend who thanked me for speaking up on hunters' behalf on the issue. We got to emailing back and forth about bears and he offered to hook me up on a hunt.

I told him I was very specifically looking for bears that feast on the avocado groves in SoCal. You know the deal - you are what you eat, so that's gonna one tasty bear.

"Oh, look at you, specifically looking for guacamole bears!" he replied.

Notice how he wasn't shocked that I didn't give a flying fig about trophy quality? Shocking. It's what happens when you know what you're talking about.
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P.S., if you want to read about hunters who value the fur and the meat, check out the latest posting at Base Camp Legends, which I saw just after hitting publish on this post. Be sure to read the comments.
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Special thanks to my friend T. Michael Riddle for turning me on to a nice soundtrack for my piss-n-vinegar mood tonight. Dude, Heavens Door and Ala Camita? Sweet.

© Holly A. Heyser 2010