YouTube: It's Time for Amateur Film-makers to Start Treating Hunting with the Respect it Deserves
By Rob Olson - Delta Waterfowl President
I’ve always had an uneasy relationship with technology. I’m never really sure if we are truly better off with the likes of cell phones and PDAs— wasn’t life pretty good prior to these gadgets filling up our pockets and minds?
With the advent of small, hand-held video cameras, everyone now has the ability to produce short movies, and You Tube has given a whole new generation of budding Steven Spielbergs a ready place to show their wares. As opposed to our ever-ringing, privacy-invading cell phones, at least this video breakthrough provides entertainment, right? I thought so until I recently spent some time looking at some homemade hunting videos on the Net.
Remember last summer when a trio of idiots in Saskatchewan videotaped an out-of-season shooting spree including sniping flightless waterfowl with a rifle? Rightfully, there was outrage far and wide and the culprits were nabbed. Justice served.
Some months later, I was surfing the internet, looking at duck-hunting videos on You Tube only to realize that the three dimwits were only the beginning. It turns out that video cameras open up a portal into our hunting world through which you might not want to journey. Let’s just say, over the course of four hours of looking at home videos, I saw way more of people doing nasty things under the guise of hunting than I ever wished I had. I bet you wouldn’t believe it if you saw it all.
Then again, if you simply continue randomly surfing non-hunting stuff, you see that the internet is all about putting all of humanity on display: the good, the bad and the ugly. Hunting videos hold no special place in the annals of humans behaving badly. But that doesn’t mean that as a hunting community, we should accept poor behavior amongst our own.
As hunters, we all have a responsibility to ensure that our practices don’t perpetuate negative stereotypes. I think we should hold each other accountable, thereby doing what hunters always seem to do: reach for a higher standard. Look at our track record on environmentalism. Who has done more to protect the environment than hunters? Good on us.
If you see a poor hunting video on the internet or watch a hunting show on mainstream television that turns your stomach, please speak up. Send an email comment, it only takes a couple seconds. I suspect many folks are putting their exploits on display in an attempt to feed their egos and so a negative comment from a peer may make someone think twice about filming something unsavory. I suspect some folks simply haven’t had good mentoring. Remember how your dad/uncle/mother told you that not eating what you kill was uncool? It moved you.
I remember when I was 18, my friends and I were hunting on our own near home with no adults in sight—free at last. My one buddy shot a “snipe” which turned out to be a lesser yellow-legs. My other buddy took a shot at a Canada Goose, even though afternoon shooting of geese was not allowed at that point in the season.
Not cool. We were approached by a middle-aged man who, unbeknownst to us, had seen all this happen. What I remember most about him was that he wasn’t mad or disrespectful. He simply told us what we did was wrong and that we probably knew it. He said good hunters don’t do that sort of stuff and didn’t we want to be better than that? We huffed and puffed but we all knew he was right.
Let’s be the non-preachy, respectful and honest people who remind video and television folks, many of whom are young folks who don’t know better, that anything definitely does not go.
I often wonder if hunting was meant to be filmed. I do love watching some of it for the entertainment value. If it could all be high quality, I would be 100 percent positive about it.
Hunting is such a personal and spiritual thing. It’s also raw and edgy on many levels. Hunting is not a soccer game. In some ways, hunting reminds me of our personal relationships with our loved ones – romance, loss, birth…. life. Our personal lives are made up of a collection of private matters that could be filmed, but it had better be done respectfully.
I know you can never go back, and when new technology shows up, it is here to stay. More than any other media form, I think video has the potential to bring out the best and the worst in us as hunters because it is raw, immediate and in your face.
Note to hunting filmmakers professional and amateur: Please, let’s put our best foot forward.
