Oct. 8, 2007
BOOK REVIEW: Hunters Are True Conservationists, Asserts Frank Miniter in ‘The Politically Incorrect Guide to Hunting’
By David M. Kinchen
Huntington News Network Book Critic
One of my favorite anecdotes in “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Hunting” (Regnery, 269 pages, $19.95) by Frank Miniter is told in the chapter “Nature’s Deadliest Animal.”
No, it’s not a grizzly bear, a people-devouring Florida alligator or a mountain lion or any of the other usual suspects: It’s an animal West Virginians are familiar with, the ordinary whitetail deer. Drivers in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio – especially around Columbus – know what I mean. You don’t want to ride a motorcycle at night; on a nocturnal run on my Yamaha several years ago before I gave up motorcycling, I almost ran into a group of deer crossing WV Highway 3 between Beckley and Hinton. That was my last night-time run!
Beginning on Page 95 of this engrossing large format paperback, Miniter describes the attempt by Princeton, NJ mayor Phyllis Marchand to curtail the deer population in her overwhelmingly liberal area. Yes, there is a divide based on political views, with liberals being mostly anti-hunting (I know, I know, there are exceptions) and conservatives and libertarians being in favor of sensible “harvesting” of deer and other wildlife populations, Minter says.
Anyway, back in heavily intellectual Princeton, where the deer population had risen to an astonishingly 100 per square mile -- easily equal to the number of professors with doctorates -- the deer were literally eating the residents out of house and home and causing many accidents.
Marchand knew that every solution to the problem was distasteful to her constituency, but she contracted with White Buffalo, a deer sharpshooting company in Connecticut run by environmentalist Anthony J. DeNicola. Miniter, a hunter himself and executive editor of American Hunter magazine, describes how DeNicola, who has a master’s degree in forestry from Yale and a PhD from Purdue, assembles marksmen to thin out the whitetail herds ravaging suburbia.
With hundreds of deer-related accidents, including a deer jumping through a plate-glass store window, and fears of lyme disease, Princeton, NJ was a classic example of how overpopulation of whitetail deer has proved the pro-hunting forces correct. This argument doesn’t need to be pushed too far in rural West Virginia, Wisconsin or Michigan, especially when I was growing up on a farm in Van Buren County Michigan in the 1940s. Hunting, thinning out the herd, was a given on our farm, or else we would have starved to death!
Experiments with birth-control for deer haven’t worked, Miniter says, and are far more costly than hunting. The harvested deer are dressed and donated to local groups who help feed the needy, which makes the program slightly more palatable to the anti-hunting suburbanites.
I call it the “Bambi Syndrome,” named after a best-selling book by an Austrian Jew named Felix Salten and a popular 1942 Disney movie based on the much darker novel, “Bambi, A Life in the Woods” (“Bambi, ein Leben im Walde”) published in Austria in 1923 and translated into English by Whittaker Chambers. “Bambi” told the story of a male roe deer (Midwesterner Disney changed it to a whitetail) growing to adulthood in a European forest. Hitler -- a vegetarian, by the way -- banned Salten’s book in 1936 and the author fled to Switzerland in 1939.
In addition to the Princeton episode, Miniter discusses the problem of people-attacking alligators in Florida, and why they are such a major problem in the Sunshine State and not a problem at all in that “Sportsmen’s Paradise” (the slogan on the license plates) Louisiana. Yes, managed hunting plays a role.
Mountain lion attacks in California and bears attacking campers in national parks, are among the many examples cited by Miniter. In addition to the hatred of hunters on the part of the hard Left, I detect that group’s not-so-secret hatred of the human species and elevating animals to a higher level.
The argument goes something like this: the woman hiker attacked and killed by a big cat in Orange County California is the guilty party because she’s invaded the mountain lion’s turf. I can understand this feeling, given the ”inhumane” way humans act toward their own species, let alone other animals, but Miniter insists that a balance must be maintained, an argument with which I completely agree.
Along with the examples cited above – and many, many more – in the back of the book Miniter provides detailed information about each state’s wildlife department as well as a comprehensive list of “hunter-conservation” organizations and another one of youth programs to get young people away from their video games and computers and out in God’s great outdoors.
I salute the folks at Regnery for publishing this excellent book. It’s long overdue.
Publisher’s web site: www.regnery.com
BOOK REVIEW: Hunters Are True Conservationists, Asserts Frank Miniter in ‘The Politically Incorrect Guide to Hunting’
By David M. Kinchen
Huntington News Network Book Critic
One of my favorite anecdotes in “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Hunting” (Regnery, 269 pages, $19.95) by Frank Miniter is told in the chapter “Nature’s Deadliest Animal.”
No, it’s not a grizzly bear, a people-devouring Florida alligator or a mountain lion or any of the other usual suspects: It’s an animal West Virginians are familiar with, the ordinary whitetail deer. Drivers in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio – especially around Columbus – know what I mean. You don’t want to ride a motorcycle at night; on a nocturnal run on my Yamaha several years ago before I gave up motorcycling, I almost ran into a group of deer crossing WV Highway 3 between Beckley and Hinton. That was my last night-time run!
Beginning on Page 95 of this engrossing large format paperback, Miniter describes the attempt by Princeton, NJ mayor Phyllis Marchand to curtail the deer population in her overwhelmingly liberal area. Yes, there is a divide based on political views, with liberals being mostly anti-hunting (I know, I know, there are exceptions) and conservatives and libertarians being in favor of sensible “harvesting” of deer and other wildlife populations, Minter says.
Anyway, back in heavily intellectual Princeton, where the deer population had risen to an astonishingly 100 per square mile -- easily equal to the number of professors with doctorates -- the deer were literally eating the residents out of house and home and causing many accidents.
Marchand knew that every solution to the problem was distasteful to her constituency, but she contracted with White Buffalo, a deer sharpshooting company in Connecticut run by environmentalist Anthony J. DeNicola. Miniter, a hunter himself and executive editor of American Hunter magazine, describes how DeNicola, who has a master’s degree in forestry from Yale and a PhD from Purdue, assembles marksmen to thin out the whitetail herds ravaging suburbia.
With hundreds of deer-related accidents, including a deer jumping through a plate-glass store window, and fears of lyme disease, Princeton, NJ was a classic example of how overpopulation of whitetail deer has proved the pro-hunting forces correct. This argument doesn’t need to be pushed too far in rural West Virginia, Wisconsin or Michigan, especially when I was growing up on a farm in Van Buren County Michigan in the 1940s. Hunting, thinning out the herd, was a given on our farm, or else we would have starved to death!
Experiments with birth-control for deer haven’t worked, Miniter says, and are far more costly than hunting. The harvested deer are dressed and donated to local groups who help feed the needy, which makes the program slightly more palatable to the anti-hunting suburbanites.
I call it the “Bambi Syndrome,” named after a best-selling book by an Austrian Jew named Felix Salten and a popular 1942 Disney movie based on the much darker novel, “Bambi, A Life in the Woods” (“Bambi, ein Leben im Walde”) published in Austria in 1923 and translated into English by Whittaker Chambers. “Bambi” told the story of a male roe deer (Midwesterner Disney changed it to a whitetail) growing to adulthood in a European forest. Hitler -- a vegetarian, by the way -- banned Salten’s book in 1936 and the author fled to Switzerland in 1939.
In addition to the Princeton episode, Miniter discusses the problem of people-attacking alligators in Florida, and why they are such a major problem in the Sunshine State and not a problem at all in that “Sportsmen’s Paradise” (the slogan on the license plates) Louisiana. Yes, managed hunting plays a role.
Mountain lion attacks in California and bears attacking campers in national parks, are among the many examples cited by Miniter. In addition to the hatred of hunters on the part of the hard Left, I detect that group’s not-so-secret hatred of the human species and elevating animals to a higher level.
The argument goes something like this: the woman hiker attacked and killed by a big cat in Orange County California is the guilty party because she’s invaded the mountain lion’s turf. I can understand this feeling, given the ”inhumane” way humans act toward their own species, let alone other animals, but Miniter insists that a balance must be maintained, an argument with which I completely agree.
Along with the examples cited above – and many, many more – in the back of the book Miniter provides detailed information about each state’s wildlife department as well as a comprehensive list of “hunter-conservation” organizations and another one of youth programs to get young people away from their video games and computers and out in God’s great outdoors.
I salute the folks at Regnery for publishing this excellent book. It’s long overdue.
Publisher’s web site: www.regnery.com
