I have to admit, I failed to understand the real motive behind the Legislature’s decision this fall to eliminate the minimum age for a “mentored” deer hunting license in Wisconsin. I never bought the argument that “if a child isn’t exposed to an activity by the time he or she is eight or nine years old they will never be interested in it”. I was 12 the first time I touched a real golf club–and I didn’t take the sport seriously until my late teens–but now it is my passion. I did try imagine an eight or nine year old that would be physically and mentally mature enough to safely handle the type of firearm powerful enough to kill a deer–and that his or her parent would be responsible enough to make sure they are handling that weapon safely at all times.
But yesterday’s release of data on mentored hunt licenses sold for last week’s gun-deer season revealed that the main reason for the change is not to “get more kids interested in hunting”–it’s actually to “allow guys to shoot more deer”.
How else to explain the sale of ten licenses to infants. Children less than a year old were issued deer hunting licenses this year. Another 50-kids under the age of five were sold licenses. I had to laugh at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel story on those numbers as the reporter posited that some of those licenses “may have been purchased as keepsakes for the children”. I highly doubt that, because somewhere in Wisconsin a four year old bagged a deer last week. Now I want you to think about that for a minute. A four-year old fired a .10 guage shotgun or a 30.06 rifle accurately enough to down a deer. Most four-year olds I’ve met couldn’t sit quietly long enough for a deer to get within a quarter mile of them. I’d like to see if our toddler sharpshooter’s father also happened to bag a buck earlier in the season.
What makes this charade easier to pull off is that in-person registration is no longer required. Nobody has to take a “successful” four year old hunter to a DNR registration station to present the deer and the tag. All the “real hunter” has to do now is call the hotline or log on to the DNR website and enter the license information and nobody has any idea if the “mentee hunter” even set foot in the woods.
I’m not saying the hunters that got licenses for children too young to walk or talk did anything illegal. Group hunting is common in Wisconsin and filling someone else’s tag has been allowed for decades. But lawmakers can spare us the public hearings and the floor debate about “preserving Wisconsin’s sporting heritage” when it is now obvious that this is nothing more than an effort to get around the “one hunter-one deer” requirement. And while ten newborns were “hunters” this year, you can bet that numbers will increase next year as guys realize what a great scam it is. Or are you telling me that Oshkosh B’Gosh and Carters have to start making blaze orange onesies?
