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This, from today's LA Times:
Tuesday, September 21, 1999
COLUMN ONE
Encouraging Kids to Pick Up a Gun
In rural America, families say youngsters who hunt for game learn valuable lessons. Critics say the dangers are all too apparent.
By STEPHANIE SIMON, Times Staff Writer
PRATT, Kan.--The dead doves stack up in a limp little pile at her side. She handles them gently. Not gingerly, gently. She is a gentle girl. Tall and blond, a bit shy to smile, so quick to rub the ears of her goofy spaniel, Pete. She likes horses and adventure
stories. Beanie Babies, she says, are dumb. She's 11. She loves to draw cartoons. And she hunts.
Handling a gun is as natural to Aubrey Manes as brushing herteeth. Well, almost as natural. Her dad doesn't hover every time she
brushes her teeth. When she picks up a gun, he hovers.
"Be careful where you point it, kid. . . . OK, Miss Aubrey, go
ahead and load up. Just point it off away from here. . . . Here you
go. . . . Don't move. . . . Right in front of you! Get him! . . . Shoot!"
That's hovering.
Aubrey doesn't seem to mind. Dad hovering is part of hunting.
And hunting is part of life.
That's how many families in the Midwest--and the South and
the West and the Northeast, too, for that matter--see it. They
read about kids with guns shooting up schools, shooting up
grocery stores, shooting up one another. They don't get it. These
are not the kids they know. Not the guns they know.
In their worlds, kids with guns are most often a good thing.
They see a kid with a gun and they think: He's learning
responsibility. She's gaining a new respect for life. He's bonding
with his father. She's connecting with nature. Then they think:
Wish I could have fresh game for dinner, too.
Hunting, all across rural America, is a family sport. But it's a
sport in jeopardy. Fewer and fewer people are hunting. Fewer and
fewer kids show any interest. A 1995 survey by the National
Shooting Sports Foundation found that only 25% of hunters were
under age 35--down from 48% a decade earlier.
Animal-rights activists welcome this trend. To them, hunting
is legalized barbarity, no better than baiting roosters in a
cockfight. They also fear that hunting warps young kids. Teaches
them it's OK to kill. Makes them too comfortable with death.
Out here, however, folks like Rob Manes, Aubrey's dad, feel
with a passion so deep they can hardly articulate it that hunting
is good for a family. So they let their 3-year-olds tag along to
duck blinds. They buy their kindergartners BB guns. So they take
their second-graders target shooting. Enroll their 9-year-olds in
hunter education. And when their 12-year-old bags his first wild
turkey, they're as proud as if he'd gotten into Harvard.
Teaching kids to hunt, they say, is one of the best ways they
can think of to raise good kids.
Opening Day of Dove Season
It's quiet out here on opening day of dove season.
So quiet that Pete, the brown-and-white spaniel, sounds
jarringly loud as he pants and wheezes his excitement. He bounds
around, wiggling. His floppy ears twitch.
The air feels wispy sweet.
Aubrey's sitting on a low hill, polishing off a
chocolate-glazed doughnut and trying to blend in with the white
wildflowers that offer her only camouflage. She's wearing jeans,
a T-shirt and a baseball cap. Her gun, a Savage single-shot
20-gauge--her dad's old gun, from when he was 11--rests across
her knees. Pete slobbers on her shoulder.
"There he is, Aubrey!" Her dad's voice, sharp and low.
She looks up. Spots the dove circling the murky pond in the
pasture where they have permission to hunt. "Right in front!" her
dad barks in that same urgent whisper. She struggles to a crouch.
"Shoot him! Go! Shoot him now!" Her gun is raised. She aims. Then
sags. That's not a shot she can make, and she knows it.
"Aaah, he's too far away now, kid."
She sits back on her hill to wait for the next one.
Waiting is a big part of hunting. At least, the kind of hunting
that Rob Manes believes teaches his children values.
His kind of hunting is not the macho sport of redneck
stereotype.
You don't storm into the woods, pop open a beer and blaze
away at anything that moves. You're patient. You hunt only what
you want to eat. You retrieve every animal you down. And you
never shoot at an animal if you think you might wound but not
kill. Better to come home empty-handed than to injure an animal
and watch it crash through the woods in pain.
At this point, hunting's critics step in, brandishing a big
scarlet H for hypocrisy. Oh, sure, they say, talk all you want
about ethics. You can't wiggle out of the raw, sad truth: You're
killing an animal, and you're doing it for sport.
Hunters respond: You're right.
Although some rural residents do subsist mainly on the meat
they hunt, most of the 14 million Americans who hunt don't need
to shoot for their suppers. Manes and his friends concede it
would be easier--and likely cheaper, too--to drive down to the
supermarket and buy shrink-wrapped hamburger and not ever
think of the cow who was slaughtered to provide it. But they
prefer the taste of fresh game.
And they're absolutely convinced that the animals they shoot
live better--and die more humanely--than the ones who provide
our steaks and our chicken nuggets and our Sunday morning
bacon.
It's an odd philosophy to twist your mind around if you haven't
been raised with it. But these hunters insist they respect, even
venerate, the animals they kill.
Let them explain: If you spend two days tracking a buck
through the forest, crawling through mud and struggling over
thorn bushes, you're bound to respect the animal. You'll learn
much about his world. And you'll surely appreciate the venison he
provides when it finally lands in your skillet. Opening a
container to get at your Big Mac just doesn't give you the same
sense of connection.
Aubrey's dad hopes hunting will give her an honest
understanding of how she fits into the food chain. He expects
she'll learn patience and perseverance, too. And then there's his
selfish motive for encouraging her to hunt; he so enjoys this
time with Aubrey, the talking and the listening, the waiting and
the shooting, the sitting side by side eating doughnuts as Pete
romps in a dew-draped field.
Sure, they could bond just as well by camping.
Aubrey could learn patience from bird watching.
They could hike to study the great outdoors.
Critics of hunting always point that out: children need not
pick up a gun to get fresh air, exercise, time alone with dad.
True enough, Manes knows. And yet.
Hunting has the adrenaline. The action. It's a chance to feel
part of an age-old tradition. It's an opportunity to provide for
your family, even if you're just an 11-year-old girl. Camping?
Hiking? They're fun. True enough. And yet.
Rob Manes always took for granted that he would hunt with
his children. Just like his granddad hunted with him.
Taking Dead Aim, and Then the Kill
Snap! Aubrey locks the shotgun barrel into place.
Huh, huh, heh! Pete wheezes at her side.
The sky cups them both like a ceramic bowl of the purest
baby blue, swirled with finger paint clouds of swooning white.
A dove swoops over the distant tree line, flutters, banks,
circles over the pond. Aubrey squints. The muscles along her
tanned forearm pull taut.
Crack! Her shoulders, bony, jerk. She lowers the gun. Slowly.
Off on the far side of the pond, the dove banks one last, fading
circle and sinks. Fast.
"You got him! You got him!" Aubrey's dad exults. Aubrey grins.
"Good shot, kid! Unbelievable shot!" Overjoyed to be useful, Pete
bounds to the pond and splashes across. Sniffing through the
tufts of grass on the shore, he emerges triumphant, trailing
feathers, the dead dove in his mouth.
It's a small bird, of delicate gray, with a patch of bright blue
beside one eye. Aubrey takes it from Pete. She smooths the
feathers. She lays it down at her side. Blood flecks spot her
wrist. She doesn't notice. Or if she does, she doesn't care.
This is what bothers some critics of hunting. Even if they can
rationalize the fate of the prey, they still cannot shake a queasy
feeling that it's wrong for kids to be so comfortable with killing.
Most states require all hunters to take a 10- to 12-hour
education class, which includes gun safety and wildlife
identification, before obtaining a license. But few set a
minimum age to enroll.
As long as a child can pass the licensing test--and
8-year-olds do--he can legally hunt.
"It's a very serious concern," said Michael Markarian, vice
president of the Fund for Animals, a national animal-rights
group based in New York. "If you're teaching kids that it's OK to
hurt and maim and kill animals simply for fun, what type of
message does that really give them?"
Aubrey, at 11, does not think it's OK to hurt or maim animals.
But she does think it's OK to kill them, as long as she plans to
eat them. Death--at least of prey--does not bother her.
Indeed, the first time she watched her dad saw open a deer's
head to remove the antlers, she begged him to give her half the
brain for show-and-tell. Then she wheedled him for an eye so she
could study it. She likes that stuff.
Her little sister, Lauren--who at 9 is just starting to
hunt--still squirms when her dad plucks ducks for dinner. "It
looks like it hurts them," she explains, "even though they're
already dead." Aubrey, more worldly, says she's "gotten used to
it."
Is that, necessarily, a problem?
No one seems to know for sure.
Animal-right activists claim hunting can "desensitize" kids
to bloodshed. Several academics who specialize in children and
violence said they were not aware of any studies on the subject.
For her part, Aubrey believes hunting has made her more
cautious, not less.
She knows a bullet can't be taken back. She understands death
is irreversible.
Like her dad, Aubrey views hunting as a sacred responsibility.
It's not bang, bang, yee-haw, let's go kill us some doves. And
it's not the casual violence her peers see daily in the media.
"People think it's cool to shoot at someone on a video game.
Maybe it looks neat to them on TV when people die or get shot at.
But it's not like that with hunting," Aubrey said.
Which is not to say that kids who hunt are always
responsible.
Remember that photo of a 6-year-old Andrew Golden cradling
a shotgun up against his chubby cheek? Golden was raised in a
hunting family. His grandpa built him a duck blind. His father
taught him to hit pop-up targets. Hunting was fun, a family
sport. Until Andrew, at age 11, got together with his
13-year-old buddy, Mitchell Johnson, and ambushed classmates
at Westside Middle School in Jonesboro, Ark., killing four
children and a teacher.
That tragedy--that photo, most of all--got quite a few
nonhunters thinking: It can't be right to give kids guns.
Six-year-olds should be mourning Bambi, not stalking him.
Rob Manes rejects that logic. Sure, some children are not
mature enough for firearms. Some adults are not mature enough,
either.
But he sees no reason to rip youth hunting because a few kids
go tragically bad.
"Hunters are a cross-section of society, like any other group,"
he said. "You'll find people who are dangerous with a gun, just
like there are people who are dangerous with a car or a kitchen
knife."
To teach his own daughters to handle guns, Manes, a
41-year-old assistant secretary of the Kansas Department of
Wildlife and Parks, drilled them from toddler-hood in three basic
rules: Consider every gun loaded. Never point a gun at anything
you don't want to kill. Always know your target and what lies
beyond it.
He hides his guns out of their reach. But he trusts his girls.
So does his wife, Dedra. The way they figure it, gun safety is
just another household rule, like no TV until the homework's
done.
"It's like everything else you don't want them to touch, like
the hot stove or the television knob," Manes said. "You make sure
they know those axioms well."
Leaving the Hunt, With a Warm Glow
In the golden light of midmorning, the air just starting to
crisp toward autumn, Aubrey lies back on her hill, soaking up the
day.
She's done hunting for now. Has to get back to school for
English. Already, she's missed math and social studies. Between
them, Aubrey and her dad have killed five doves in three hours of
shooting. "We got a lot," Aubrey says, sounding surprised, as she
picks up the birds by their thin little legs and packs them away
in a bucket. It's not really a lot, however. Even she knows. Five
doves aren't even enough to feed the whole family for dinner.
Still, as they collect their shell casings and load up what's
left of the doughnuts, Aubrey and her dad both glow, satisfied.
"I feel good," Aubrey says.
They walk off toward the pickup together.
And head home with doves.
Copyright 1999 Los Angeles Times. All Rights Reserved
[This message has been edited by Covert Mission (edited September 22, 1999).]
Tuesday, September 21, 1999
COLUMN ONE
Encouraging Kids to Pick Up a Gun
In rural America, families say youngsters who hunt for game learn valuable lessons. Critics say the dangers are all too apparent.
By STEPHANIE SIMON, Times Staff Writer
PRATT, Kan.--The dead doves stack up in a limp little pile at her side. She handles them gently. Not gingerly, gently. She is a gentle girl. Tall and blond, a bit shy to smile, so quick to rub the ears of her goofy spaniel, Pete. She likes horses and adventure
stories. Beanie Babies, she says, are dumb. She's 11. She loves to draw cartoons. And she hunts.
Handling a gun is as natural to Aubrey Manes as brushing herteeth. Well, almost as natural. Her dad doesn't hover every time she
brushes her teeth. When she picks up a gun, he hovers.
"Be careful where you point it, kid. . . . OK, Miss Aubrey, go
ahead and load up. Just point it off away from here. . . . Here you
go. . . . Don't move. . . . Right in front of you! Get him! . . . Shoot!"
That's hovering.
Aubrey doesn't seem to mind. Dad hovering is part of hunting.
And hunting is part of life.
That's how many families in the Midwest--and the South and
the West and the Northeast, too, for that matter--see it. They
read about kids with guns shooting up schools, shooting up
grocery stores, shooting up one another. They don't get it. These
are not the kids they know. Not the guns they know.
In their worlds, kids with guns are most often a good thing.
They see a kid with a gun and they think: He's learning
responsibility. She's gaining a new respect for life. He's bonding
with his father. She's connecting with nature. Then they think:
Wish I could have fresh game for dinner, too.
Hunting, all across rural America, is a family sport. But it's a
sport in jeopardy. Fewer and fewer people are hunting. Fewer and
fewer kids show any interest. A 1995 survey by the National
Shooting Sports Foundation found that only 25% of hunters were
under age 35--down from 48% a decade earlier.
Animal-rights activists welcome this trend. To them, hunting
is legalized barbarity, no better than baiting roosters in a
cockfight. They also fear that hunting warps young kids. Teaches
them it's OK to kill. Makes them too comfortable with death.
Out here, however, folks like Rob Manes, Aubrey's dad, feel
with a passion so deep they can hardly articulate it that hunting
is good for a family. So they let their 3-year-olds tag along to
duck blinds. They buy their kindergartners BB guns. So they take
their second-graders target shooting. Enroll their 9-year-olds in
hunter education. And when their 12-year-old bags his first wild
turkey, they're as proud as if he'd gotten into Harvard.
Teaching kids to hunt, they say, is one of the best ways they
can think of to raise good kids.
Opening Day of Dove Season
It's quiet out here on opening day of dove season.
So quiet that Pete, the brown-and-white spaniel, sounds
jarringly loud as he pants and wheezes his excitement. He bounds
around, wiggling. His floppy ears twitch.
The air feels wispy sweet.
Aubrey's sitting on a low hill, polishing off a
chocolate-glazed doughnut and trying to blend in with the white
wildflowers that offer her only camouflage. She's wearing jeans,
a T-shirt and a baseball cap. Her gun, a Savage single-shot
20-gauge--her dad's old gun, from when he was 11--rests across
her knees. Pete slobbers on her shoulder.
"There he is, Aubrey!" Her dad's voice, sharp and low.
She looks up. Spots the dove circling the murky pond in the
pasture where they have permission to hunt. "Right in front!" her
dad barks in that same urgent whisper. She struggles to a crouch.
"Shoot him! Go! Shoot him now!" Her gun is raised. She aims. Then
sags. That's not a shot she can make, and she knows it.
"Aaah, he's too far away now, kid."
She sits back on her hill to wait for the next one.
Waiting is a big part of hunting. At least, the kind of hunting
that Rob Manes believes teaches his children values.
His kind of hunting is not the macho sport of redneck
stereotype.
You don't storm into the woods, pop open a beer and blaze
away at anything that moves. You're patient. You hunt only what
you want to eat. You retrieve every animal you down. And you
never shoot at an animal if you think you might wound but not
kill. Better to come home empty-handed than to injure an animal
and watch it crash through the woods in pain.
At this point, hunting's critics step in, brandishing a big
scarlet H for hypocrisy. Oh, sure, they say, talk all you want
about ethics. You can't wiggle out of the raw, sad truth: You're
killing an animal, and you're doing it for sport.
Hunters respond: You're right.
Although some rural residents do subsist mainly on the meat
they hunt, most of the 14 million Americans who hunt don't need
to shoot for their suppers. Manes and his friends concede it
would be easier--and likely cheaper, too--to drive down to the
supermarket and buy shrink-wrapped hamburger and not ever
think of the cow who was slaughtered to provide it. But they
prefer the taste of fresh game.
And they're absolutely convinced that the animals they shoot
live better--and die more humanely--than the ones who provide
our steaks and our chicken nuggets and our Sunday morning
bacon.
It's an odd philosophy to twist your mind around if you haven't
been raised with it. But these hunters insist they respect, even
venerate, the animals they kill.
Let them explain: If you spend two days tracking a buck
through the forest, crawling through mud and struggling over
thorn bushes, you're bound to respect the animal. You'll learn
much about his world. And you'll surely appreciate the venison he
provides when it finally lands in your skillet. Opening a
container to get at your Big Mac just doesn't give you the same
sense of connection.
Aubrey's dad hopes hunting will give her an honest
understanding of how she fits into the food chain. He expects
she'll learn patience and perseverance, too. And then there's his
selfish motive for encouraging her to hunt; he so enjoys this
time with Aubrey, the talking and the listening, the waiting and
the shooting, the sitting side by side eating doughnuts as Pete
romps in a dew-draped field.
Sure, they could bond just as well by camping.
Aubrey could learn patience from bird watching.
They could hike to study the great outdoors.
Critics of hunting always point that out: children need not
pick up a gun to get fresh air, exercise, time alone with dad.
True enough, Manes knows. And yet.
Hunting has the adrenaline. The action. It's a chance to feel
part of an age-old tradition. It's an opportunity to provide for
your family, even if you're just an 11-year-old girl. Camping?
Hiking? They're fun. True enough. And yet.
Rob Manes always took for granted that he would hunt with
his children. Just like his granddad hunted with him.
Taking Dead Aim, and Then the Kill
Snap! Aubrey locks the shotgun barrel into place.
Huh, huh, heh! Pete wheezes at her side.
The sky cups them both like a ceramic bowl of the purest
baby blue, swirled with finger paint clouds of swooning white.
A dove swoops over the distant tree line, flutters, banks,
circles over the pond. Aubrey squints. The muscles along her
tanned forearm pull taut.
Crack! Her shoulders, bony, jerk. She lowers the gun. Slowly.
Off on the far side of the pond, the dove banks one last, fading
circle and sinks. Fast.
"You got him! You got him!" Aubrey's dad exults. Aubrey grins.
"Good shot, kid! Unbelievable shot!" Overjoyed to be useful, Pete
bounds to the pond and splashes across. Sniffing through the
tufts of grass on the shore, he emerges triumphant, trailing
feathers, the dead dove in his mouth.
It's a small bird, of delicate gray, with a patch of bright blue
beside one eye. Aubrey takes it from Pete. She smooths the
feathers. She lays it down at her side. Blood flecks spot her
wrist. She doesn't notice. Or if she does, she doesn't care.
This is what bothers some critics of hunting. Even if they can
rationalize the fate of the prey, they still cannot shake a queasy
feeling that it's wrong for kids to be so comfortable with killing.
Most states require all hunters to take a 10- to 12-hour
education class, which includes gun safety and wildlife
identification, before obtaining a license. But few set a
minimum age to enroll.
As long as a child can pass the licensing test--and
8-year-olds do--he can legally hunt.
"It's a very serious concern," said Michael Markarian, vice
president of the Fund for Animals, a national animal-rights
group based in New York. "If you're teaching kids that it's OK to
hurt and maim and kill animals simply for fun, what type of
message does that really give them?"
Aubrey, at 11, does not think it's OK to hurt or maim animals.
But she does think it's OK to kill them, as long as she plans to
eat them. Death--at least of prey--does not bother her.
Indeed, the first time she watched her dad saw open a deer's
head to remove the antlers, she begged him to give her half the
brain for show-and-tell. Then she wheedled him for an eye so she
could study it. She likes that stuff.
Her little sister, Lauren--who at 9 is just starting to
hunt--still squirms when her dad plucks ducks for dinner. "It
looks like it hurts them," she explains, "even though they're
already dead." Aubrey, more worldly, says she's "gotten used to
it."
Is that, necessarily, a problem?
No one seems to know for sure.
Animal-right activists claim hunting can "desensitize" kids
to bloodshed. Several academics who specialize in children and
violence said they were not aware of any studies on the subject.
For her part, Aubrey believes hunting has made her more
cautious, not less.
She knows a bullet can't be taken back. She understands death
is irreversible.
Like her dad, Aubrey views hunting as a sacred responsibility.
It's not bang, bang, yee-haw, let's go kill us some doves. And
it's not the casual violence her peers see daily in the media.
"People think it's cool to shoot at someone on a video game.
Maybe it looks neat to them on TV when people die or get shot at.
But it's not like that with hunting," Aubrey said.
Which is not to say that kids who hunt are always
responsible.
Remember that photo of a 6-year-old Andrew Golden cradling
a shotgun up against his chubby cheek? Golden was raised in a
hunting family. His grandpa built him a duck blind. His father
taught him to hit pop-up targets. Hunting was fun, a family
sport. Until Andrew, at age 11, got together with his
13-year-old buddy, Mitchell Johnson, and ambushed classmates
at Westside Middle School in Jonesboro, Ark., killing four
children and a teacher.
That tragedy--that photo, most of all--got quite a few
nonhunters thinking: It can't be right to give kids guns.
Six-year-olds should be mourning Bambi, not stalking him.
Rob Manes rejects that logic. Sure, some children are not
mature enough for firearms. Some adults are not mature enough,
either.
But he sees no reason to rip youth hunting because a few kids
go tragically bad.
"Hunters are a cross-section of society, like any other group,"
he said. "You'll find people who are dangerous with a gun, just
like there are people who are dangerous with a car or a kitchen
knife."
To teach his own daughters to handle guns, Manes, a
41-year-old assistant secretary of the Kansas Department of
Wildlife and Parks, drilled them from toddler-hood in three basic
rules: Consider every gun loaded. Never point a gun at anything
you don't want to kill. Always know your target and what lies
beyond it.
He hides his guns out of their reach. But he trusts his girls.
So does his wife, Dedra. The way they figure it, gun safety is
just another household rule, like no TV until the homework's
done.
"It's like everything else you don't want them to touch, like
the hot stove or the television knob," Manes said. "You make sure
they know those axioms well."
Leaving the Hunt, With a Warm Glow
In the golden light of midmorning, the air just starting to
crisp toward autumn, Aubrey lies back on her hill, soaking up the
day.
She's done hunting for now. Has to get back to school for
English. Already, she's missed math and social studies. Between
them, Aubrey and her dad have killed five doves in three hours of
shooting. "We got a lot," Aubrey says, sounding surprised, as she
picks up the birds by their thin little legs and packs them away
in a bucket. It's not really a lot, however. Even she knows. Five
doves aren't even enough to feed the whole family for dinner.
Still, as they collect their shell casings and load up what's
left of the doughnuts, Aubrey and her dad both glow, satisfied.
"I feel good," Aubrey says.
They walk off toward the pickup together.
And head home with doves.
Copyright 1999 Los Angeles Times. All Rights Reserved
[This message has been edited by Covert Mission (edited September 22, 1999).]