Lead us not into temptation by John C. Street
 
Many learned treatises are available on the procedures for harvesting “Trophy” whitetail deer with proper portable tree stand placement.  While the efficiency of this method is irrefutable, the advantage of artificial elevation, regardless of the high art of its placement, morphs the experience by defined intention.  The consummate act, as perceived by antihunters, becomes a distasteful selection process not a hunt.
 
Within the outdoor community, this is one of many issues that we are advised not to discuss.  Certainly not in public.  Never in print.  There are already enough divisionary issues - baiting, trailing dogs, semi-automatic firearms and leg hold traps - for the “Antis.”  We are reproached, don’t go there. 
 
Definitions of our activities are being created for us, built into a judgmental scale of propriety to which we are being held accountable by a general public no longer favorably predisposed to acknowledge our genetic continuity to our hunter gatherer ancestors.  Like other segments - medicine, politics and education - whose motives are questioned in public forum, our behavior must either stand the test of high moral conduct or risk censure by people whose sanctioning authority originates in perception.
 
 
Within our own tribe, it is easy to define the code of acceptable conduct.  This code, however, has been reviewed by a larger community and found lacking. At issue are the “How” and “Why” questions that no government literature on “Where” and “When” can address.   Perceptions, we must accept, are replacing biology.  Bumper sticker philosophies drive the debate.
 
We have been reproached by outdoor writers not  to stumble over our differences lest, like quarry fleeing before the hounds of perception, we find ourselves ideologically separated and taken down one by one.  Few of these scribes, however, are willing to apply the might of their pen to the exhumation of these differences.  With the hubris of a convert, allow me to join the iconoclastic few with an anecdote of epiphany.
 
For several years I obsessed over one particular deer.  For all I know, and I believe this might be true, his last set of antlers and his earthly form have composted back into the soil within shouting distance of my home. 
 
With doe permits available, it wasn’t a sacrifice to pass up lesser ‘horns’.  Victuals were readily obtained, often by my partner in the business of life.  She is, like the female of many species, very proficient. 
 
In the second season of pursuit, in the middle of a clear-cut where I reasoned he should be, the buck leaped from a rotting brush pile.  His escape was immediate, complete and final.  For the remainder of that day he neither panicked nor fled the slashing.  Despite my best efforts, I never saw him again. 
 
Finally, I accepted the obvious. In assigning a value too great to share, unavoidable limitations were imposed.  Assistance would have required disclosure.  Elevation was unavailable in probable locations. I could not take this deer.
 
To the very end, I imagined my reputation for having killed this magnificent animal.  Conveniently left out of these imaginings were the imposition of the unavoidable limitations.  The emphasis was always on the aesthetic value of having done it right, on foot, by myself.
 
The passage of time has not taken away the searing memory of those antlers.  The fire for their possession, however, has waned.  From the ashes of this experience, the nebula of a contrarian idea has grown; ethical pursuit has intrinsic value regardless of the conclusion but achievements without  ethics are hollow.
 
Regardless of what the rule books - or even the edicts of the “Record Books” - may permit, the irrefutable precept of hunting is the death of one animal for the survival of another.  While this precept may seem to be the crossroads where hunters and antihunters diverge, ironically, Steven Kellert’s research at Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies concluded that “only 4.5% of  antihunters objected to all forms of hunting, including hunting for food.” (Note: This quote was excerpted from Ted Kerasote’s book, Blood Ties)
 
On this one point, it would seem, both hunters and antihunters can agree.  While the argument of survival - outside of a few remaining tribes of subsistence hunters - would make a difficult defense, the justification of “hunting for food” strikes close enough to the universal human experience to obtain legitimacy.  It is in Kellert’s qualifier, “all forms of hunting,” that the defense begins to unravel.
 
The emotional red flag issue is “Trophy” hunting.   For antihunters, aggrandizement - getting into “The Book” - is the moral opposite of “hunting for food.”  In the vernacular of the sport,  the expression “you can’t eat the horns” encapsulates the point where philosophical differences arise.
 
If we can intellectually grasp - without completely abdicating personal responsibility - the argument that societal mores influence current events, that violence in the movies and on television promotes dysfunctional behavior, then we might also begin to assign  culpability for the perpetuation of this division where it rightfully belongs; the pictorial and written content of the outdoor press.  Spike bucks on the cover don’t sell magazines, don’t entice advertising dollars and, consequently, don’t promote a written dialog that explores perceptual - and real - differences. 
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Sound rationales can be espoused for hunting from a stand, even the biological desirability of culling older animals from the herd.  Done as a part of the legitimate process of “hunting for food,” these rationalizations might stay within the boundaries of the larger community’s sensibilities.  Done for aggrandizement, as they are currently portrayed in the scripted pablum of outdoor magazines, they damn us all.  
 
We may sit back, sacrosanct in the righteousness of our rule book, repeating the mantra of published regulations while the abrasion of perceptual tarnish erodes our heritage and the hounds of bumper sticker philosophy deplete our ranks.  Or, we can address our differences, explore in mutual inquiry the validity of the activities claimed acceptable within the law but questioned by the larger body politic.  The bigger issues of “How” and “Why”, not the amply explained “Where” and “When” and “How Many” covered in the pamphlets of our regulatory agencies, should dominate our literature, our thinking and our public discourse.
 
We must not allow ourselves to be lead into the temptation of silence.  The hounds are afoot.