By: Ted Nugent
As powerful a healing force that nature provides us outdoor families in America, now is not the time to let her often intoxicating healing powers deter us from critical cultural life and death concerns and inherent duties that are all around us.
Our sacred outdoor recreation time does not only re-create our energies and spirit, but should always bring a clearer focus to life’s many demands on our priority list.
When I constantly repeat the American quality of life battlecry of God, family, country, it is always gratifying to witness how it resonates with my family, friends, neighbors, hunting buddies, and quite honestly everyone in not just my close inner-circle, but literally everyone everywhere in my everyday walk of life.
But as we painfully see and hear the abject decay of goodwill and decency in increasing segments of American society, not to mention the war on truth, logic and commonsense in the nasty world of fakenews, academia propaganda and runaway criminal corruption in government, the best Americans, ie; hunting families, must step forward now more than ever to counterpunch all that negativity and fight for God, family and country like we mean it, like never before.
Report after report, research after research, indicator after inescapable indicator predicts attrition doom and gloom for the hunting lifestyle and real world, hands-on conservation.
The hunting demographic overall gets slimmer and slimmer every year, with the white, middle-class baby boomers, who make up at least 90% of hunting and fishing licenses purchasers, dropping like proverbial flies.
This is not good on any socio-economic threshold, and certainly not good for the future of wildlife and wildground value. Worse than that, on a spiritual and cultural level, the further mankind distances ourselves from nature participation and appreciation, the weaker our level of commitment to the very pulse of God’s miraculous creation.
We have all seen the guaranteed tragedy of that horrific mistake manifest itself in the most ungodly ways. Literally!
As goes resource stewardship for quality air, soil and water, goes the stewardship of our spirit.
I for one will never, ever give up!
And I can tell you for the umpteenth time why this is happening before our very eyes.
All fifty states in the United States of America are plagued with nonsensical, arbitrary, obtuse hunting and fishing regulations that instead of being designed with scientific foundations for the benefit of wildlife management and the joys of participation, each jurisdiction has created a bizarre land-mine field of laws and rules that simply chase people out of the sport and scare newcomers away from joining us.
Minimum age hunting requirements. Minimum draw weight bows. Banned arrow nocks. Banned trailcams. Banned sighting devices. Arbitrary antler restrictions. Feeding and baiting bans. Late start up dates, mid-season closures and unnecessary early end of seasons. Arbitrary closed season on game birds and other legal game. The hiring of so-called sharp shooters to do damage control instead of hunters allowed to enjoy quality control. Bow case and gun case laws. Stamps for this, permits for that. Nonsensical no hunting zones.
I have had so many discussions with people all the time who would love to go hunting, buy guns, ammo, optics, camo clothing, bows, arrows, licenses, gas, food, lodging, land, cabins, equipment, hire guides, outfitters, butchers and taxidermists and all the vast assorted gargantuan economy associated with the great outdoors, but once they look over the rules and regulations, the say forget it!
We as a sporting family that loves this greatest of sports better turn up the heat with our elected employees and fight like mad to demand regulations, rules and laws that make sense for safety and wildlife management, and nothing else, or the runaway attrition will throttle on until there are so few of us left that the maniac animal rights freaks will vote us out of existence.
Examine the hunting and fishing regulations in your home state. Ask yourself honestly if they make sense, make hunting fun and attractive, or simply cannot be explained and are just a royal pain in the rear end.
Are there rules that make things illegal that are perfectly legal in other states? Yes, there are.
There are so many laws that do not make sense that we should all be kept very busy demanding proper and proven sensible regulations in order to halt the engineered attrition and encourage recruitment.
We can do this. We must do this. The clueless bureaucrats have been running things and ruining things long enough. Let’s get back to the basics, get the government out of our way, and regulate our precious hunting and fishing lifestyle based on wildlife biology, not the current scourge of political correctness and bureaucratic buffoonery. Bureaucratic buffoonery ruins everything.