My Saturday NY Times didn’t arrive until today, so I missed this interesting article yesterday about the decline of hunting in the United States (I’ve written before about the drop in hunting in Arkansas, a trend you might not credit give the sanctity accorded hunting in Arkansas and the Game and Fish Commission’s general lack of enthusiasm for outdoor activities that don’t involve hooks and bullets.) The number of U.S. hunters has declined from a high of 19.1 million in 1975 to 12.5 million in 2006 and that drop is even worse than it appears because the population has increased significantly during that time.
The gun lobby is busy trying to remove age limits on hunting, put hunting classes in public schools and enshrine hunting in constitutions as a means of slowing the erosion of hunting.
It’s proving hard to combat an increasingly urban culture, a decline in rural population and the rise in video games with their instant armchair rewards.