posted on October 29, 2009 05:42
The old hunter quietly sat in his makeshift ground blind; his trusty old recurve laid gingerly across his lap. As he watched over the trail crossing the creek bed as it led from the big woods to the adjacent farmers’ field he hoped tonight would be his lucky night because the first of three long firearms seasons started tomorrow. He could be off the ground if earlier this fall he had not procrastinated and fixed the wooden platform in the tree behind him. Instead, he had planned to buy a metal ladder stand before the two-week bow season had begun. Unfortunately the firearm hunters had snatched up the few stands the stores in his area carried. The longer his vigil went, the more his thoughts wandered.
His old felts inside the rubber overshoes weren’t much for walking in, but they kept his feet warm. He surveyed the tattered condition of his old army surplus camouflage and wished he had been able to afford a new set this year. You could buy all the orange clothing you wanted, but decent camo was scarce and fairly expensive. He should have bought a few more arrows too, but with only twelve hundred bowhunters in the state good archery shops were few and far between. In fact, he knew of only two and the closest was eighty miles from his home.
The woods are quiet tonight, but then they always are. He had hunted this chunk of public land for thirty years and never had to deal with other bowhunters. It was his little sanctuary and it gave him a warm, fuzzy feeling. He was a lucky man.
NOW IMAGINE THIS;
In the early seventies the elitist anti-hunting bowhunters had succeeded. The compound bow was banned from use during archery season. That old hunter was hunting in 2009, not 1959. Often I wondered what bowhunting would be like today had those elitists succeeded (and believe me they tried) in banning the compound bow. Would it be close to the image described above? Maybe. We can only imagine.
Inside Archery and Bowhunt America are two magazines that do a fine job of following the archery industry. They constantly do reviews of products manufactured specifically for archery hunters. They pick a category (say arrows) and review a good number available to the hunter.
Here is what I found in just a few past issues (product-number reviewed); Stabilizers-32, Broadheads-46, Targets-22, Trail cameras-15, Backpacks-41, Releases-27, Treestands-34, Carbon arrows-12, Arrow rests-30, and those are not a complete number of products available in each category.
Add to that camo clothing, boots, scents, fletchings, and dozens of related products and it is quite clear that without the compound bow hundreds of thousands of bowhunters and a huge multi-million dollar industry would have never been created had a very few self-absorbed, greedy elitists had their way.
Once again, we find ourselves battling those same elitists. The only difference is this time they are trying to keep an archery weapon banned instead of banning one. They are losing this battle as well because their arguments now are the same ones they used in the late sixties and seventies. They were misguided and wrong then and they continue to be today. That does not slow their passion, however, as they prove to be a persistent bunch. Fortunately, the hunting public is wising up and the antis are finding fewer listeners.
Daniel and I were on the front lines back then, and with the Horizontal Bowhunter Magazine, we once again are lifting our voices in support of all hunters. We understand that hunter exclusion will eventually lead to hunter extinction. With your support, we will strive to increase hunter numbers through crossbow inclusion. Those elitists failed to smother the life out of the archery industry before, and by sticking to facts we will see to it their false rhetoric will fail again