![]() ![]() A subculture has arisen of trail-camera pictures: hunters brood, Captain Ahab-like, over an especially fine buck snapped in their woods. By collecting their digital cards before a hunt, sportsmen can survey the area without the chore of long scouting trips. These are left strapped to trees, at $100 or $200 each. Another boom involves motion-activated digital trail cameras. The priciest are topped with well-padded seats with footrests and safety rails, and resemble a toddler’s high chair reached by a fireman’s ladder a popular trend is for heated seat cushions and overhead canopies in case of rain. Hunters with access to private land now typically leave several of these platforms bolted permanently to trees, allowing them to whack unsuspecting animals from six or seven metres up. Purists have lost a fight over the ethics of shooting from fixed tree stands. ![]() If that still feels like too much work, hunters can buy electronic calls and life-size decoys to bring animals into range (an extra $49.99 buys a motorised tail, which can be told either to twitch or wag). There are hand-held GPS units for hunters who get lost, carbon-lined camouflage clothes to trap human scents and baits that promise to attract the largest deer. They offer laser sights that paint an assassin’s red dot on distant prey, rangefinders that work at 1,000 metres and night-vision scopes so advanced that they are covered by federal arms-export restrictions. Stores sell high-powered rifles that can be mastered by a novice within a day: thanks to telescopic sights and a handy gun-rest, your correspondent, a classic urban duffer, hit a bullseye with a deer gun on his second shot. On every aisle there are products endorsed by stars from TV hunting shows, big men with imposing facial hair and far-off gazes, with record-breaking animals dead at their feet. But despite the old injunction against extravagance, the real action is in trophies-in the slaying of mighty bucks with 10- or 12-point racks of antlers, or of predators large enough to be skinned and hung on the wall of a basement man-cave. True, there are nods to the prosaic business of turning a deer into a freezer-full of venison. These are crammed with technology designed to let even the idlest woodsman bag a large animal. It is as well that Roosevelt never saw a modern hunting superstore. Drawing on biblical codes of morality, they declared that the role of hunting was to feed a young nation and-in Roosevelt’s phrase-“to keep men hardy, so that at need they can show themselves fit to take part in work or strife for their native land.” To the founders of the modern American hunt, frivolous killing could not be ethical, let alone sporting. Wildlife officials are mostly funded by hunters through licences and game stamps, and are guided by scientific advice. Wild animals are supposed to be killed for food or population control, not mere trophy collection their harvest is regulated by state and federal authorities. To this day America’s wildlife belongs to the public, not landowners. In time they developed a radical new philosophy: the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation. ![]() Closer to home Roosevelt and his allies were dismayed by the near-extinction of the buffalo and other species, driven by such forces as gun technology and competition for land. Though he crossed oceans to shoot lions and scaled mountains to hunt bears, Roosevelt deplored Europe’s elitism, with its royal forests and aristocratic estates wherein lisping sons of privilege chased their father’s deer for sport. In addition to encouraging sportsmanship, his vision of the American hunt was democratic. Years before he declined to blast a bear tethered to a tree by his hosts on a 1902 hunt, spawning admiring newspaper cartoons and the worldwide teddy-bear industry, Roosevelt crafted and promoted a “credo of fair chase”. Hunting lay at the heart of that doctrine: the virile business of learning to shoot straight, to track beasts through brutal heat or cold and to master “buck fever”-a nervous excitement felt in the face of prey that must be suppressed by effort of will. THEODORE “TEDDY” ROOSEVELT, soldier, president and outdoorsman, once summed up his vision for America as a “doctrine of the strenuous life”. ![]()
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