Good hunting

"The Politically Incorrect Guide to Hunting" by Frank Miniter (Regnery Publishing)

Ted Nugent isn't the only guy in America who's not afraid to say hunting is good for the country. Frank Miniter -- the award-winning editor of American Hunter magazine who's stalked game on five continents -- has written "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Hunting." The latest in Regnery Publishing's "PIG" series, it defends hunting from its know-nothing media critics in the big cities and spells out how it benefits conservation, cuts crop damage and saves human lives.

Q: What's your book about and why did you write it•

A: I've been reporting on these things for more than a decade. I worked for Outdoor Life Magazine and now American Hunter magazine, and after digging into what hunting actually does, I found all these facts that the mainstream media are not telling. I see hunting as the conservative environmental movement, actually. When you get really deep into it, that's what hunters really are. They're doing so much good, but that word just isn't getting out there. I thought this should be in a book and it should be out there for people to completely grasp, so I went to Regnery with the idea and it worked.

Q: Is there any one major thing that the general population isn't told about hunting that every American citizen should know?

A: When you talk to people against hunting, their ideas are usually based on an emotional side. They think that hunters want to go out there and kill for pleasure. That's not true at all. You're in Pa., and you're around that culture a lot. You've got a million hunters there. But when you talk to people in these real urban centers, they don't know that hunters are nature lovers. I tell them facts like, "Did you know that every animal in this country that has a hunting season on it has increased in number after a hunting season is placed on it?" They don't get that. I say, "Look, once you put a hunting season on an animal, you actually end up with a constituency of hunters fighting for that wildlife species." This has happened with elk and deer and turkey and all these other game animals.

Q: Is hunting an endangered pastime• The number of hunters has dropped from 19 million in 1975 to 12.5 million last year.

A: It's a fading pastime because we're becoming more of an urban nation than ever before. Even the rural states. You go into the red states and those people move out to get the jobs in places like where I am now, Fairfax, Virginia. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service survey numbers have been slowly going down, though there are some bright spots. The number of women is up 72 percent in the last five years. ... Some of the youth programs now just coming on are bearing fruit. I see that as an important thing. When I talk to a hunter, he usually knows about the ecosystem he's hunting in. he knows where the deer are, and where the grouse are, and what the turkey are doing and this kind of stuff . I think he cares about that resource because he's involved in it so much. When you talk to a non-hunter, they may have a real compassion for wildlife but they don't often understand what the wildlife need, what they eat, what they're doing.

Q: What are three top reasons hunting is good for America•

A: I'd start with money. Hunting and fishing pay for conservation in this country. If you add taxes on our sporting goods (10 or 11 percent depending on what product it is) on the consumer and the manufacturer with hunting license fees, it's just over $1 billion a year just going into habitat restoration and all the other things game agencies do. Non--hunters don't pay that stuff when they go hiking or mountain biking and those kinds of things.

No. 2, hunting actually saves lives. Two hundred people are killed a year in deer-auto collisions and 25,000 people injured out of a 1.5 million accidents nationwide. That's a big deal -- and that's with hunters killing 8 to 10 million white-tailed deer every year. You're five times as likely to hit a deer in urban American as you are in rural America, because you just cannot control deer populations in those areas.

The third -- and this is one thing the environmental movement is starting to understand -- is the ecological disaster that occurs from an un-hunted population of deer or elk and other species. In our Eastern forests, when we let a deer herd go completely uncontrolled they actually end up eating all the vegetation they can reach. You end up with this sort of ecological desert under the canopy, because everything below 6 feet is gone; there's no vegetation whatsoever. The New Jersey Audubon Society in the last year opened up all its lands to hunting and they published a report that said we can't look at ourselves in the mirror anymore because not allowing hunting is destroying our own songbird populations on their own properties.

Q: How do you reverse the downward trend of fewer and fewer hunters?

A: To tell you the truth, it's happening. I don't know if you can completely reverse it. But there are youth programs in many states. I think 11 states now have passed different laws to bring more youth into the sports -- by basically lowering some of the age requirements, and taking away some of the course requirements for the first year; they can try it with a hunting mentor for the first year, that kind of stuff. And the women programs have certainly done that. But there is a change going on in this country right now. The Congressional Sportsmen's Foundation is actually the biggest caucus in Washington. The NRA has taken a huge interest in hunting now; it has done a lot for hunting rights. Beyond that, if you look in the mainstream, The New York Times Magazine last week had a pro-hunting story; they were anti-hunting until just a couple years ago. National Geographic next month has a feature on the benefits of hunting, both nationally and internationally. Internationally, hunting has literally saved the white rhinoceros and lots of other species, because suddenly it gives the private landowner an incentive to have these animals there because they can make real money off of them. So you see the mainstream is starting to get it. If we can continue as a hunting community to get that word out there with books like mine and articles, there's hope. I guess I'm optimistic.

Box of Books

Whitewash: What the Media Won't Tell You About Hillary Clinton, but Conservatives Will by L. Brent Bozell III and Tim Graham (Crown Forum)

Bozell, a regular Sunday Trib columnist and president of the Media Research Center, provides many examples of how the friendly, forgiving, liberal mainstream news media have helped Hillary Clinton advance her political career and put her within reach of reclaiming the White House for her and co-president Bill. Despite the many books and articles written about Hillary, Bozell says, the news media have covered up, downplayed or ignored Hillary's biggest blunders and personal, political and financial scandals. The secret weapon of Hillary's political success has been a coddling news media, says Bozell, who interviews dozens of conservatives to counter the MSM's positive spinnings.

The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future by Randal O'Toole (Cato Institute)

After 30 years of monitoring how federal, state and local planners foist their ideas and values on us about how and where we should live, work and play, Cato Institute fellow O'Toole has spotted a clear trend: They aren't the know-it-alls they think they are. In fact, as O'Toole shows, whether it's failed "smart growth" schemes, oppressive zoning policies, expensive light-rail boondoggles or mismanagement of public forests, government planners have caused us trouble and cost us freedoms. Their misguided, top-down, faddish rules and regulations have brought us higher housing prices, more-crowded roads and forests that are susceptible to diseases and catastrophic fires. O'Toole says it's time to liberate society from planners' control.

Dueling Quotes

Anything can happen in the 2008 election, but it looks like a reasonable guess that by 2009 America will have a Democratic president and a solidly Democratic Congress. ... The question is, what should the new majority do• My answer is that it should, for the nation's sake, pursue an unabashedly liberal program of expanding the social safety net and reducing inequality -- a new New Deal. The starting point for that program, the twenty-first-century equivalent of Social Security, should be universal health care, something every other advanced country already has.

-- Paul Krugman, "The Conscience of a Liberal," 2007

Broken promises are not the major causes of our trouble. Kept promises are. All too often we have put men in office who have suggested spending a little more on this, a little more on that, who have proposed a new welfare program, who have thought of another variety of "security." We have taken the bait, preferring to put off to another day the recapture of freedom and the restoration of our constitutional system. We have gone the way of many a democratic society that has lost its freedom by persuading itself that if "the people" rule, all is well.

-- Barry Goldwater, "The Conscience of a Conservative," 1960