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June 1996
Danger in Paradise

By Antonia Gorman

 



If, as the old adage goes, home is where the heart is, then my home lies high in the Pocono mountains in a town called Honesdale, Pennsylvania. Here a silent and empty house waits for me during the week while I toil in New York City. Here it opens its doors to me late every Friday night, calm and serene, as if to say, "I know you would be with me more if you could." I love this house. I love its spaciousness and the Victorian details. I love the satisfaction I get from the weekend projects: the feeling of accomplishment when painting a bedroom, the gratification of wallpapering a bathroom. I love the fact that my 93-year old neighbor’s father-in-law built this house and so knows the history of every structural and esthetic detail.

He knows that, in 1918, he himself helped plant the pine trees that surround it; that his mother-in-law had four rooms torn down in 1940 so she wouldn’t have to clean such a big house; and that the ugly dropped ceiling in the corner room was meant to create an office for a dentist with the inauspicious name of Dr. Payne. He knows that the handrails in the bathtubs were installed when the house was used as a home for disabled women, and that the lack of shrubbery is a result of a rapacious goat kept by the man from whom we bought the house — the man who sold it to us for such a bargain because he was deeply indebted to loan sharks (he told us this as we left the closing table) and who managed to stay one step ahead of the law (the state trooper told us when he politely knocked on our door in ‘89).

But if the house were to burn to the ground, or be lost in a flood, or get blown away by a hurricane, my home would remain in Honesdale because my heart rests ultimately not in the house, but in the nearby woods. Every weekend, Ginger, my beloved golden retriever, and I wander its trails and every weekend it gifts us anew. In spring, it presents us with wood sorrel and honeysuckle, wild roses and strawberry. In summer, a heron returns and the ducks talk to each other at dusk with strange little croakings that sound like tree frogs. In the fall, Ginger bounds exuberantly down the trails, her golden-red fur making her invisible, except for her movements, against the leaves that cover the ground. And in winter, the snow-covered branches spin shimmering webs overhead and the cold chases away the dirt-bikers, bringing a calm that beckons the normally shy deer to drink, in full daylight, from the river’s edge. Then fresh moss appears again on the rocky cliffs and promises the return of spring weeks before the harbinger robins come.

The Sound of Displaced Air
But amidst the great natural beauty there lurks danger. Hunting is a popular pastime in Pennsylvania and there is not a month during the year when a man with murder on his mind can’t legally satisfy his lust for blood. He can trap mink and beaver in January and fox and raccoon in February. He can shoot crow in March, fire at woodchuck in April, and so on through the year.

But it is between Thanksgiving and Christmas, when deer season is open, that hunters descend in force and life becomes truly tenuous. Ginger and I are luckier than most who call the forest home; we have a house into which we can retreat. But there are times, pushed by Ginger’s restless pacing and my own inexplicable longing, when I chance a violent encounter and take to the trails again, hoping that by staying near the roads and houses I’ll stay far from the hunter’s bullets. This is a precarious approach, though, for Ginger relishes her freedom and often bolts off the trails to explore the world that greets her.

More dangerous than her wanderings, however, is the casualness with which Honesdaleans hand out guns. For $5.75, a child of 12 can legally purchase a hunting license if he has attended a two-day Game Commission lecture and has the written permission of his parents. The price of a license goes up to $12.75 for those aged 17 and over, but proficiency requirements remain the same — a hunter needs only to understand hunting and trapping regulations, and may have no experience with or skill in handling his weapon. Add alcohol to the equation (Pennsylvania’s laws against shooting while intoxicated are unreliably enforced) and it becomes obvious why every year the local papers carry stories of men who accidentally shoot themselves or others, either because they were drunk, careless or inept.

Lest you think I overstate the risk, let me tell you that three years ago, I had a bullet come so close to my head that I could actually hear the displaced air as it passed. Let me also tell you that no one came rushing from the foliage to express concern for my well-being because, I am certain, no one had kept track of the path of that bullet.

My chance of being injured, however, is minuscule compared to the chance faced by non-human animals. According to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), over four million animals are reported killed each year by guns, arrows and traps, while an estimated additional eight million are wounded by these weapons and die slowly and painfully later from blood loss, wound infection and injury induced starvation.

Silence and Harassment
How is it that this vast carnage, which is perpetrated by a mere seven percent of our population, goes mostly unprotested by the rest of us? One of the reasons is that the Game Commission personnel (whose jobs would not exist if there were no hunters to oversee or supplies of animals to stock) have convinced us that, in the absence of natural predators, hunters are all that prevent game populations from exploding. What the Game Commission fails to acknowledge, however, is that their policies not only encourage the destruction of predatory animals (there is no closed season on coyotes, for instance), but also purposely promote unnaturally high birthrates among those animals desired by hunters, especially among the white-tail deer who are the target of choice for 93% of all hunters.

To raise deer birthrates artificially, the Game Commission intentionally encourages the growth of browse food by setting forest and marsh fires, clear cutting timber and mowing thousands of acres of land. With an unnaturally high supply of food, deer herd sizes increase, creating the appearance of a "need" for hunters to thin population sizes.

Another reason for non-hunter silence is the impediment to speech placed on us by state legislators. Currently, legislators in 35 states have passed "hunter harassment" laws that provide penalties for such activities as protesting on hunting grounds, making loud noises or spreading repellents to scare away game, and interposing oneself between a hunter and an animal.

What Can Be Done
The constitutionality of this legislation is currently being challenged in some states, but until the laws are abolished, there are other ways to combat hunting and trapping without risking jail. For example, private landowners can post "No Hunting" signs on their land, witnesses to poaching in national parks can report the crime to the National Parks and Conservation Association (800-448-NPCA), and everyone can write to their Congressperson to protest the opening of national wildlife refuges to hunting and trapping and the use of tax dollars to manipulate habitats (a list of Congresspeople can be obtained from local branches of the League of Women Voters).

Those who choose to write to their members of Congress can include requests in their letters for a repeal or revision of the Pittman-Robertson Act of 1937. This act takes the excise taxes from the sale of guns and ammunition and gives them to state wildlife agencies to help fund "wildlife management projects"— almost always a euphemism for habitat manipulation designed to increase game animal populations. Another way to protest hunting is to contribute to anti-hunting groups like PETA, Friends of Animals, Greenpeace, and the Humane Society of the United States. Be careful, though, to investigate charities before sending them money. Some well known environmental groups, such as the Nature Conservancy, Sierra Club and World Wildlife Fund for Nature are unopposed to hunting, while others, such as the National Wildlife Federation, Wilderness Society and Wildlife Conservation Fund of America actually support current hunting and trapping policies.

As I watch Ginger burst once more out of the underbrush and onto the forest path, I am reminded of the words of George Bernard Shaw: "While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts," he said, "how can we expect any ideal conditions on this earth?" To reclaim the paradise of our forests and mountain ranges, we must come to recognize the joy animals have in their own existence and to respect their right to embrace that existence, unmolested by us.

Antonia Gorman is a vegetarian who divides her time between New York City and Honesdale, PA.

 


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