Elk slaughter spotlights disdain for "slob hunters"
By Chuck Oxley
The Associated Press
Close-up
BOISE, Idaho — Mid-November is a gorgeous time of year in the Idaho backcountry, with granite peaks dusted by snow and abundant wildlife on the move.
That was the scene at Tex Creek, near the Wyoming state line, at dawn last Nov. 15. But within hours, it became a killing field, as groups of hunters shot volleys of gunfire into cornered, frightened and confused herds of elk that had no escape.
"The area was packed with hunters and there were 1,500 elk on the mountain. There was no place for them to go," said Terry Thomas, regional manager with the Idaho Fish and Game Department. Early winter weather had pushed huge numbers of elk into a confined area in front of the hunters' guns.
Jubilant hunters who were on the scene early used radios and cellphones to call their friends in town, alerting them to the easy prey. People who hadn't hunted in 20 years grabbed their rifles, hopped in their pickup trucks and headed for the hills.
Some had hunting licenses; some didn't. Some had elk tags, verifying a legal kill; others didn't. Some people chased elk with their pickup trucks; others took wild shots from more than 600 yards, wounding animals that would die slowly.
"There were not just single shots coming from the valley. There were volleys of shots," Thomas said. "We heard people on radios talking about taking multiple elk. One told his buddies, 'Don't shoot any more, I've got four down.' "
The killing continued, at a lesser pace, for three days, with little regard for regulations or ethics. In those days and the days that followed, game wardens wrote more than 50 citations for misdemeanors. One felony charge was filed. At least 20 elk were killed illegally, and more than 20 cases are still under investigation.
The hunting community has a term for these people: "slob hunters." They are the ones who disregard regulations and traditions, and ethical concepts such as "fair chase." They are also the ones who give animal-rights groups like the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals ammunition to use against the sport of hunting.
"This doesn't sound like a hunt. This sounds like murder," said Stephanie Boyles, spokeswoman for the Norfolk, Va.,-based organization. "Nothing they did that day could be considered sportsmanlike."
Teaching ethical hunting
Jim Posewitz teaches ethical hunting at Montana State University and has written "Beyond Fair Chase: The Ethic and Tradition of Hunting." He said incidents such as Tex Creek happen because the hunters have so little appreciation for the animal, how wild animals came to be valued by society and the effort it has taken to restore elk since the late 1800s, when excessive hunting almost wiped them out.
While understanding varies from person to person, most hunters do pursue their sport from an ethical base of right and wrong. The basic concept is fair chase, an idea developed in the conservation movement that began in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
In the 1800s, from the Lewis and Clark expedition on, animals were taken for commercial profit in the West. As a result, populations of big game and some smaller animals, such as beaver, were devastated. The buffalo simply were gone.
"Even the number of elk had fallen to just 40,000 animals when Theodore Roosevelt came out West to hunt and ranch in 1886," Posewitz said.
But Roosevelt and like-minded conservationists changed the standard. No longer were wild animals hunted commercially for profit. The idea of conservation and sportsmanship developed; a hunter was someone who cared about recovery and restoration.
"The heart of that sporting code is what we are talking about today," Posewitz said.
Posewitz and Boyles have common ground in discussing hunting ethics, agreeing that the problem is rooted in education and exacerbated by modern life.
In Idaho, hunting classes are a prerequisite to purchase a hunting license for anyone born in 1975 or later. But young hunters are not the problem, Posewitz said. It's the older generation who exempted themselves when the hunter-education laws were passed that needs a refresher course in fair chase.
"We have not done a very good job of teaching. If you don't know those things, the tendency to behave badly or casually is enhanced," Posewitz said.
The other problem is simply a matter of time, Boyles said. Hunters, particularly urban dwellers who set foot in the forest only on an autumn weekend or two, aren't willing to put the time into their own training.
"They don't want to spend time in woods actually tracking and learning how to stalk an animal. They want to get in and out quickly and hang their trophy on the wall," Boyles said.
"We call them the weekend warriors, the ones who only want to go out one or two days" to hunt big game during the entire season, said John Hansen, a game warden for the Idaho Fish and Game Department whose territory includes the Tex Creek drainage. "What that translates to, is that the ethics fall out the window and you tend to replace your hunting skills with technology."
Guiding younger hunters
Posewitz suggests that ethical-hunting education should be taught for adults, and the thousands of volunteers who now teach younger hunters could take on the job, perhaps with a new hunter-education association to issue course certifications.
Private landowners, who often hold the best hunting grounds, would be more likely to give permission to proven ethical hunters and not allow others, thus making it a more attractive proposition for the old-timers to take the classes, he said.
"The hunting-education community is ready for this. What has been lacking is government's ability to say, 'do it,' " he said.
An educated population of hunters would go a long way toward preventing unethical behavior and inhumane kills. Most important, they could avoid succumbing to the kinds of instincts that allowed Tex Creek to happen, Fish and Game manager Thomas said.
