A shout-out to fellow blogger Chas Clifton, whom may be linked-to on the blogroll at Southern Rockies Nature Blog, for drawing attention to the Center for Biological Diversity, and its taste in pro-hunting groups. In its effort to portray woodland creatures as Nature’s equivalent of benighted slum-dwelling children ingesting lead paint, the CBD petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency to ban all lead-containing firearms’ projectiles, including those used by the military. The petition failed, even though the CBD endeavored to bring some street cred to its clearly anti-hunting proposition by pointing to the support given it by the “grassroots hunters’ organization” Project Gutpile. “Project Gutpile”? Is that on Lifetime? Like Clifton, and like Donald Sutherland impersonating that general in The Dirty Dozen, “Never heard of it.”
Some minor Googling, though, unearthed a PG website (http://projectgutpile.blogspot.com/p/about-us.html) which discloses that this group is, in fact,
…an online resource for lead-free hunters and anglers. We’ve been promoting non-lead ammunition and raising lead awareness in the hunting community since 2002. We recently expanded our program to include Unleaded [sic] fishing, and we’re now promoting non-toxic sinkers and jigs in addition to ammunition. Lead is an extremely toxic substance with proven, often deadly, effects on humans and wildlife. Join the movement and make your next hunt or fishing trip Unleaded! It’s an easy way to keep yourself and the places you enjoy healthy.
This movement would seem to consist almost entirely of a blog archive with 82 entries, dating back to 2006, and only a single one in 2010—which is about the EPA’s denial of the CBD petition. Its co-founder, and apparently prime mover, is self-described Santa Barbara, California, backcountry hunter Anthony Prieto, which sounds he-man enough for government work.
A 2002 Audubon profile of Prieto (http://www.audubonmagazine.org/features0212/endangered_species.html), though, makes him appear, somewhat regrettably, rather more like the caricature of a deeply liberal superannuated hippie one might find depicted on South Park:
Today Prieto is a single parent of two boys, aged 12 and 14. He works with at-risk teenagers, sings professionally with his own band, and is a devoted condor volunteer. He helps trap and monitor birds. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recovery program uses his artwork on T-shirts and signs. But it is as a hunter that Prieto makes perhaps his most significant contribution. He has embarked on a self-styled, bilingual program to educate sportsmen about lead and its effect on wildlife, especially condors. Naturally garrulous, Prieto talks to individuals and groups of hunters in gun stores, on the street, in the field—anywhere he can get their attention. ”The public has no clue,” he says. “Somebody’s got to get them thinking about it.”
Ah, missionary, humanitarian, single dad, devoted condor volunteer, bilingualism advocate, singer, T-shirt painter, and hunter. I hope some lucky woman’s snatched him up by now.
All right, that may be unfair, but Prieto’s own words (http://www.ojaipost.com/2010/04/a-hunter-speaks-out-on-fish-games-proposed-bear-hunting-changes/) hardly dispel an unavoidable impression of insufferable earnestness when he writes, in opposition to expanding black-bear hunting in California, in boldface, no less:
To say that there’s now an over-abundance of black bears in California is like saying there is no global warming [Gaia forbid anybody ever suggest such a thing—my words]. If anything, there are too many people encroaching on their habitat.
Prieto goes on to insist that if there must be bear hunting,
…let it be archery-only to level the playing field. No rifles, no handguns, no hounds with GPS units.
Let it be, let it be. Which is to say, let it be no bears taken by any hunters. And to ice the gâteau, Prieto adds the obligatory and long-ago wearisome Iron Eyes Cody-like jeremiad:
The indigenous people of what is now California revered both black and grizzly bears alike. The bear was a sacred animal, a spiritual brother of the wild. What a sad, sorry sight this society has become when we continually try to justify killing more predators as people continually encroach and build homes and ranches deeper and deeper into their habitat.
You gotta love the exquisite cultural sensitivity of that “what is now California” part.
This is a perfectly transparent tactic by the CBD, one often resorted to by progressives, and let it be noted, by more than a few reactionaries, to grant authority to some essentially nebulous, straw-man group, from a supposedly divergent, and unexpected, segment of the political spectrum, which echoes, or apes, their own position.
Anti-gunners have, in opposition to the NRA, the vocally pro-Obama, and in almost every other respect obscure, American Hunters and Shooters Association (with which the hideous Jimmy Carter’s former press secretary Jody Powell is somehow affiliated), which claims to be—wait for it—
…a national grassroots organization committed to safe and responsible gun ownership. We are a mainstream group of hunters who are looking to belong to a gun owners association that doesn’t have a radical agenda.
Sounds as middle of the road as rumble strips.
Animal rightists depend on the press-release machine, and pro-vegetarian, Center for Science in the Public Interest to legitimate their assertion of the inherently lethal character of animal flesh in the human diet. Perhaps most egregious (and I have to admit I feel intellectual discomfort treading anywhere near this issue, even as an exemplar) is the way New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg claims not to have a met a single 9/11 survivor who in any way opposes the building of a “mosque” within hailing distance of Ground Zero. In short, everybody who matters supports his pose, at least in the Honorable Bloomberg’s anecdotes.
The ultimate fault for this sort of fast shuffle lies, of course, squarely on journalistic indolence. When it comes to an issue of any complexity, it is far easier, and more facile, to report the handout, rather than doing even the most rudimentary, and even slightly risky—to the accepted wisdom–amount of legwork. Instead of doing nothing more than turning to a little something I like to call the Internet, it seems that journalists, especially when it comes to “green” issues, and those of “social justice” or “economic equality,” will round up more usual suspects than Captain Reneau in Casablanca. So the same predictable, politically correct scientist, Midwestern state university assistant professor, or grassroots organization is trotted out time and again, whether he, she, or it actually has something to say. And we see that none of it’s about lead, at all, but about quicksilver, the kind found in smoke and mirrors.
Tom McIntyre’s a contributing editor at Sports Afield and Field & Stream magazines. He also writes for the television production company Orion Multimedia. He’s hunted on six continents and is the author of seven books, the latest The Field & Stream Hunting Optics Handbook, published by The Lyons Press, www.LyonsPress.com, and Wild and Fair: Tales of Hunting Big Game in North America, from Safari Press, www.safaripress.com. While his son attends college out of state, he lives with his wife, dog, and cat in Wyoming.
