Tyler Harris
Last week six-year-old Lexie Harris became what is probably the youngest hunter to ever legally shoot a deer in Wisconsin. Why is this a good thing?
Lexie shot her buck in Taylor County, assisted by her father. By all accounts her dad acted as responsibly as he could if you accept the premise that a kindergartner should be handling deadly force in any form. He told reporters that he bought her a youth rifle, trained her on it, carried her gun to the blind and sat with her as she aimed the gun and pulled the trigger.
Let me pause here and voice my strong support for getting a lot more young people and women into the woods. A girl hunter is a great thing in my book. And if her dad had taken her out to his blind and enjoyed a morning watching nature and listening and looking for deer with his young daughter, this would be nothing but a heart-warming story.
It’s the presence of Lexie’s gun that should make us uneasy. The state Legislature just passed a law removing the minimum age for hunting. So, in some corners, the picture splashed in Wisconsin newspapers of Lexie, her buck and her gun, was celebrated. But a lot more of us cringed.
We took exception because the story portrays something that is fundamentally unsafe and unwise as a good thing. I fear that Lexie’s father, with his knowledge and his precautions, is going to be the exception to the rule. The idea that a young child can safely handle a firearm, or that that should be the norm, is just wrong.
In the deer camp I’ve been part of for the last 25 years we’ve seen quite a few young hunters come into the fold, and it always works the same way. At about age nine or 10 they sit with their fathers in a deer stand. They come to appreciate the long silences, they acquire the skills of patience and close observation, they decide that their dad was right when he insisted they wear long underwear.
By their mid-teens they get their first rifle and take a hunter safety course, though that’s just reinforcement as their fathers have taught them the proper handling and respect for firearms from day one. They continue to share a blind with their fathers but they may shoot a deer under his supervision. These kids are thinking about what college they might attend before they are allowed to hunt on their own.
This is in keeping with long tradition in Wisconsin deer camps. It’s right, proper and safe. And it gets things in the right order. Develop good woodsmanship first, learn how to handle a firearm under close guidance, and, most importantly, learn to love being in the woods even if you never see a deer.
Even if a child of six has the physical stamina for all that — which is very much the exception to the rule, I would think — there is no way he or she could have the time to develop the appreciation for what all this is about. Rushing a young kid into pulling the trigger betrays a lack of respect for the whole sacred ritual of deer hunting and in a practical sense it’s just not safe for anybody involved.
The argument in favor of this madness is that parents should be allowed to decide when their child is old enough to hunt. No, actually they shouldn’t. This should be a societal decision because hunting — even when you’re out there alone — is a communal thing. High-powered rifles send bullets traveling very long distances, crossing property lines. And the game being shot at does not belong to individuals but to all of us.
If you take this kind of thinking to its extreme (and all kinds of thinking is being taken to its extreme these days) what’s next? Why shouldn’t we leave it up to individuals to decide when to hunt deer or anything else for that matter? Don’t we trust their judgment to decide when it’s best for the resource and most convenient for them? Who is the government to dictate to us that there should be a nine-day gun deer season in late November?
I am glad — even thrilled — that Lexie Harris is in the woods. I hope she’s joined by her sisters all over the state. But they should learn that hunting is not just killing and it’s not just about the individual hunter. We have obligations to the prey, to fellow hunters and to society in general. And those are lessons that are getting lost in the story of the kindergarten deer hunter.
