Americanus lazyasses: An Endangering Species

by John C. Street

For three hours I had drifted as quietly as breeze blown confetti across the unusually snowless side hill, sweeping the bench below with binoculars for movement.  Several times the flicker of ears or the horizontal lines of a brownish back betrayed deer, a total count of nine does and two smallish racked bucks, oozing through the screening brush, unalarmed but headed somewhere else with the wind in their noses.  It had been a productive three hours of hunting considering this was the second Saturday of buck season on heavily hunted ground.

Kneeling beside the shielding branches of a young hemlock, I had just focused my field glasses on two odd shaped patches of brown - the upraised ears of a deer - and noted the glint of antlers when the mechanical growl of a slow moving four-wheeler became audible.  As the source of the noise clawed around the side hill and into view, the buck burst from its hide, head and tail down in full flight. 

I watched through the binoculars as the operator jumped off his machine and grabbed a rifle that was riding between the handlebars.  Although the buck was angling up the side hill on a path that would take him within seventy-five yards of where I was kneeling, I kept my focus on the man.  Because of the direction the buck was taking, I would be close to his line of fire if he shot.  As he raised his rifle, I threw myself flat on the ground beside the hemlock.

When the shot didn’t come, I looked up in time to see the man scramble onto his machine and sling dirt and leaves in his haste to depart.  Apparently the movement of my orange vest and hat in his line of sight had caught his attention.  Although I tracked him for quite some distance, an easy chore due to the aggressive tire tread and heavy use of the throttle, I never did get to make his acquaintance.

While it is difficult to say exactly when this phenomena - hunting off ATVs - got started, my earliest memories go back to 1985.  Since then, like a winter thrown stone chip in a windshield, the cracks spreading until the glass is ruined, I have watched ATV trails tendril into nearly all of my favorite hunting grounds, public and private.  Anymore, it’s rare not to encounter a four-wheeler at some point in a day’s hunt. 

As I was researching this phenomenon, I was admonished to “tread lightly.”  The Personal Motorcraft Industry (PMI) - a term I coined to include dirt bikes, four-wheelers, jet skis and snowmobiles - has begun to retaliate against writers who speak poorly of them. “If you can’t say something nice,” I was told, “you’d be smart not to say anything at all.” 

What this kindly - and understandably “off the record” - advisor was telling me was that the PMI’s advertising dollars are substantial enough to effect editorial policy.  Writers who speak poorly about Personal Motorcraft, therefore, are likely to find their names in print where they won’t appreciate it; the “Work Wanted” column of the local newspaper.

So, properly forewarned, I’m not going to say a word about how angry I get when I hike way back into hell-and-be-gone only to have an aberrantly noisy, air and water polluting PM barge into my serenity.  I’m not going to mention the hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil distillates that are being unnecessarily dumped into the environment by purposely inefficient engines nor the impact these PMs are having on soil, water, vegetation, and shore lines or the mammalian, avian and amphibian life forms that are unfortunate enough to be in their way.  Nope, I’m not going to say a word about any of this. 

With the exception of automobile manufacturers, there is no other apparent industry group that purchases more advertising space in outdoor publications than the Personal Motorcraft Industry.  While there can be no argument that many of the people who purchase their products do not hunt, it might also be logically argued - based on the shear mass of advertising in outdoor magazines - that no other group purchases more of their products than hunters.  If, as their distribution of advertising dollars suggests, the PMI recognizes the economic value of hunting, why are they so reckless with the image of the very thing that sustains them?

What does it mean when those representatives of the Personal Motorcraft Industry - who were kind enough to talk with me before they deduced my intentions - refused to admit, “On the record,” that they care about the negative image that their advertising script projects onto hunters and hunting?

And what does it mean when those outdoor magazine editors - who were also kind enough to talk with me before they deduced my intentions - wouldn’t concede, “On the record,” that they understood that their prostitution to the PMI’s dollars is making the non-hunting public even more suspicious of hunters and hunting.

While a paranoid mind might conclude that a recent political quote about a “vast right wing conspiracy” hit the nail on the head, I think it might be better explained with the adage that we should “never ascribe to malice what can be described as stupidity.”  And if that’s being too circumspect, I’ll say it bluntly; the PMI and the outdoor press are either flat out stupid or egregiously unconcerned about the future of hunting.

Birds and animals are identified as either “game” or “non-game” and when a species is in decline it receives a classification like “Threatened” or “Endangered.”  So, since the Personal Motorcraft Industry is fond of naming their machines after animals, I’m going to help them out and give it a proper Latin name; Americanus lazyasses.   

And in keeping with this theme, and in light of the apparent indifference of much of the outdoor press to the negative impact being perpetrated on the image of hunting, we might also give this new species a formal classification.   How about, “Endangering Species?”