Editors: What’s with the hunting columns?
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals - PETA
December 21, 2005
By Carla Bennett
Recent reports from the newspaper industry look bleak: Circulations are down, advertising revenues are flat, stock prices are sinking, and scandals are harming good reputations. Industry analysts say the percentage of adults buying papers has been going down for several decades.
I’m not a newspaper person—just a reader for the last 60 years or so—so I may not be in a position to advise editors and publishers. But I see evidence that newspapers may not be keeping up with their readership. This is exemplified by the hunting columns that are still common in hundreds of newspapers, despite the fact that less than 5 percent of Americans still participate in shooting sports. Even this tiny figure is a stretch, because it includes target and skeet shooting.
This year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service released statistics indicating that hunting license sales have dropped 10 percent in the last two decades. The number of hunters in the 18 to 24 year old age group has dropped by a third in the last ten years. Devoting regular space to an activity that hardly anybody does anymore doesn’t make much business sense to me.
Naturally, hunters are as upset by their statistics as publishers are by theirs. So the older hunting generation is attempting to do what some newspapers are doing—go after the young folks. But there’s a difference between a young newspaper reader and a young hunter. For one thing, we know from countless news stories that there’s a link between hunting and violent crimes.
Eighteen year old David Ludwig, who allegedly shot and killed his 14-year-old girlfriend’s parents in Lititz, Pa., recently, was an avid deer hunter. Photos on Ludwig’s blog site show his grinning face as he disembowels the bloody deer he has just shot.
It’s not an isolated incident. Newspapers have known since at least 1992 that some young hunters do not distinguish between their victims. That year it was reported that 18-year-old Danny Delgado, who was in the Spokane County jail after shooting and killing a pizza delivery man for beer money, said that if he kills a deer, the deer’s next of kin aren’t notified and that no one worries “about that deer’s wife and kids.”
Since then, numerous school shootings have garnered headlines and heartbreak, and in most cases, the student shooters were hunters. Remember 13-year-old Mitchell Johnson and 11-year-old Andrew Golden of Jonesboro, Ark., who in 1998 took the hunting guns belonging to Golden’s grandfather, who’d taught Andrew to hunt, and used them to ambush their fellow students, killing four girls and one teacher?
As child clinical psychologist and novelist Jonathan Kellerman wrote in USA Today after this incident: “…handing a frightfully immature, troubled human being a firearm and encouraging him to stalk and kill animals is beyond absurd.”
If these incidents aren’t startling enough, a recent study from Michigan State University linked hunting to sexual violence.
So why do many newspapers still print hunting columns promoting violence against animals? Most kids have a natural affinity for animals, but kindness is a learned behavior. Kids need to be taught that animals feel many of the things we humans do, including fear and pain, and need to be treated kindly. They don’t need hunting columns spouting propaganda that killing is fun and a good thing to do to an animal.
But aside from the ethics of the issues, important as it is, I hope newspapers publishers will soon figure out that Americans prefer their wildlife alive. The Fish & Wildlife survey that determined that only 3.9 percent of us hunt also found that 66 million--nearly five time more--of us report that we are “Wildlife Watchers.” In the interest of picking up more readers, you editors with hunting columns may want to drop those columns and replace them with columns that reflect what most people are doing outdoors.
Carla Bennett is the author of “Living in Harmony With Animals” (Book Publishing Company, 1999) and a columnist for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals; PETA.org.
Recent reports from the newspaper industry look bleak: Circulations are down, advertising revenues are flat, stock prices are sinking, and scandals are harming good reputations. Industry analysts say the percentage of adults buying papers has been going down for several decades.
I’m not a newspaper person—just a reader for the last 60 years or so—so I may not be in a position to advise editors and publishers. But I see evidence that newspapers may not be keeping up with their readership. This is exemplified by the hunting columns that are still common in hundreds of newspapers, despite the fact that less than 5 percent of Americans still participate in shooting sports. Even this tiny figure is a stretch, because it includes target and skeet shooting.
This year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service released statistics indicating that hunting license sales have dropped 10 percent in the last two decades. The number of hunters in the 18 to 24 year old age group has dropped by a third in the last ten years. Devoting regular space to an activity that hardly anybody does anymore doesn’t make much business sense to me.
Naturally, hunters are as upset by their statistics as publishers are by theirs. So the older hunting generation is attempting to do what some newspapers are doing—go after the young folks. But there’s a difference between a young newspaper reader and a young hunter. For one thing, we know from countless news stories that there’s a link between hunting and violent crimes.
Eighteen year old David Ludwig, who allegedly shot and killed his 14-year-old girlfriend’s parents in Lititz, Pa., recently, was an avid deer hunter. Photos on Ludwig’s blog site show his grinning face as he disembowels the bloody deer he has just shot.
It’s not an isolated incident. Newspapers have known since at least 1992 that some young hunters do not distinguish between their victims. That year it was reported that 18-year-old Danny Delgado, who was in the Spokane County jail after shooting and killing a pizza delivery man for beer money, said that if he kills a deer, the deer’s next of kin aren’t notified and that no one worries “about that deer’s wife and kids.”
Since then, numerous school shootings have garnered headlines and heartbreak, and in most cases, the student shooters were hunters. Remember 13-year-old Mitchell Johnson and 11-year-old Andrew Golden of Jonesboro, Ark., who in 1998 took the hunting guns belonging to Golden’s grandfather, who’d taught Andrew to hunt, and used them to ambush their fellow students, killing four girls and one teacher?
As child clinical psychologist and novelist Jonathan Kellerman wrote in USA Today after this incident: “…handing a frightfully immature, troubled human being a firearm and encouraging him to stalk and kill animals is beyond absurd.”
If these incidents aren’t startling enough, a recent study from Michigan State University linked hunting to sexual violence.
So why do many newspapers still print hunting columns promoting violence against animals? Most kids have a natural affinity for animals, but kindness is a learned behavior. Kids need to be taught that animals feel many of the things we humans do, including fear and pain, and need to be treated kindly. They don’t need hunting columns spouting propaganda that killing is fun and a good thing to do to an animal.
But aside from the ethics of the issues, important as it is, I hope newspapers publishers will soon figure out that Americans prefer their wildlife alive. The Fish & Wildlife survey that determined that only 3.9 percent of us hunt also found that 66 million--nearly five time more--of us report that we are “Wildlife Watchers.” In the interest of picking up more readers, you editors with hunting columns may want to drop those columns and replace them with columns that reflect what most people are doing outdoors.
Carla Bennett is the author of “Living in Harmony With Animals” (Book Publishing Company, 1999) and a columnist for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals; PETA.org.
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