LITTLE ROCK — Few activities are safer than hunting, and bowhunting, the method prescribed for the next controlled deer hunt in Eureka Springs, is the safest of all.
Nevertheless, anti-hunting activists in Eureka Springs say the hunt will threaten public safety, endanger lives and disrupt the town’s groovy cosmic energy field.
In 2005, alarmists also insisted that a proposed controlled hunt in Heber Springs would threaten public safety. The hunt went as planned, nobody got hurt, and hunters did not kill near enough deer to make a difference. Now, it’s just part of what goes on around there.
Since then, similar hunts have been held without incident in the communities of Eden Isle, Horseshoe Bend, Cherokee Village, Bull Shoals and Hot Springs Village. Nobody’s gotten hurt, and the deer pretty much disappear until the hunters go home.
That’s not all. In 1997, a writer named David Hart wrote an article for Virginia Game & Fish magazine titled, “Washington’s Beltway Bucks.” It chronicled the adventures of two bowhunters who killed monster whitetails in the city limits of Arlington, Alexandria and Fairfax, Va.
Those Washington, D.C., suburbs are within one of the nation’s most densely populated areas. Like Eureka Springs, they have major conflicts between deer and people. Developers carve subdivisions out of formerly deer-rich farmland. Well-heeled buyers build huge homes, plant a fortune in expensive flowers and shrubbery, and then see it all converted to deer pellets overnight. This is just one way deer lose friends.
Hart explained the process by which homeowners can obtain deer deprivation permits from their local animal control agencies. Since they usually don’t hunt, they have to find someone who does, someone who’s competent, who’ll act right, respect their property and respect the neighborhood. That’s not easy because they usually don’t know any hunters, let alone hunters they can trust. Hart explained how two opportunistic sportsmen earned the confidence of skeptical homeowners and gained access to some of the best trophy buck habitat in Virginia. They hunted in back yards from behind swingsets. They hunted from playhouses and from those little wooden forts with plastic slides attached to one side. One of the guys killed a giant buck next to a swimming pool while children boarded a school bus in front of the house.
Nobody got hurt in those suburban D.C. hunts, which unlike the Eureka Springs hunt, were totally freelance and uncontrolled. If it’s good enough for them ...
Statistically, hunting is safer than all other popular forms of American recreation. Alan Hoskin, manager of the statistical department for the National Safety Council, said that hunters logged 791 accidents nationwide in 2001. Of those, 75 were fatal. That includes falls from tree stands and other mishaps.
Comparitively, there were 414,600 football injuries in 2001 that required emergency room treatment, and basketball players suffered 653,700 such injuries. Soccer players had 175,500 injuries that required emergency treatment, followed by swimmers (174,800) and golfers (46,100).
In Arkansas, 28 hunting accidents were reported in 2009-10, nearly triple the number (10) reported in 2008-09. Of those 28 accidents, 13 resulted from hunters falling out of treestands, said Joe Huggins, hunter education coordinator for the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission. Six of the 10 from the previous year were treestand related. During his 26 years with the AGFC, Huggins said he recalls only one “two-party” accident in which a bowhunter shot another hunter.
Some opponents of the Eureka Springs hunt say they would be more comfortable if the AGFC deployed sharpshooters to kill deer. Two problems with that sentiment. One, killing is killing. No method is gentle. Two, the people of Arkansas own the state’s deer, and the AGFC manages them for the public trust. Less than 100 years ago, deer were almost extinct in Arkansas. Through scientific management and regulated sport hunting, we’ve brought them back to record numbers. No community has a right to eradicate a public resource that has been displaced by residential and commercial development. Residential habitat is better, with better food than what’s available in the mature, monocultural hardwood forests surrounding Eureka Springs, especially in a drought year when acorns and other woodland forage will probably be scarce.
Conflicts are inevitable when civilization clashes with nature. It comes with progress.
Sports, Pages 38 on 09/04/2011