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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

MONTH: SEPTEMBER 2006

Culture, coonhunting, & child hunters

Americans who express broad disgust toward Asian cultures over the many cruelties of dog-eating and cat-eating might usefully compare the persistence of those behaviors in South Korea and China to the persistence of American participation in sport hunting.

About three million (6%) of the 50 million South Koreans eat dogs, consuming about 2.6 million dogs per year at present. If the same ratio of consumption applies to the estimated annual production of about 10 million dogs for slaughter in China, about 11.4 million Chinese eat dogs--or less than 1% of the human population of 1.4 billion. Cat-eating in both China and South Korea continues at a much lower level.

Among about 300 million Americans, the U.S. now has slightly more than 13 million active hunters: 4.3%. Another five million people identify themselves as hunters but no longer hunt, chiefly due to advancing age.

A traditional if often elusive goal of deer hunting is to effect a quick kill, but causing prolonged animal suffering is built into the method of many other forms of hunting.

For example, a shotgun blast fired into a flight of ducks, geese, doves, or quail may kill one or two birds outright, while crippling several others, but the whole idea of "wing shooting" with shot rather than a bullet is to try to "wing" the birds, grounding them until retrieved, possibly hours later. The retrieval is often by a dog, inflicting a new terror on the birds until the hunter breaks the birds' necks.

Hunting raccoons with dogs, "coonhunting" for short, may be the cruelest form of hunting common to the U.S.
Coonhunting resembles British-style foxhunting, but without the trappings and social pretensions, and is nocturnal. Instead of following their pack, coonhunters turn the dogs loose, then typically drink alcoholic beverages and listen. When they hear that the dogs have treed a raccoon, they go to the dogs, often aided by radio telemetry and four-wheel drive vehicles, then shoot the raccoon out of the tree for the dogs to tear apart, living or dead.

Coonhounds are frequently kept in remote rural kennels under conditions comparable to those of dog meat farms--and hunting dogs, in many states, are exempted from at least some of the cruelty laws that govern the care of domestic pets.

An especially egregious example of the so-called culture of coonhunting recently came to light, if not justice, in rural West Virginia. This is the same small state where coonhunters trying to restock the local raccoon population in 1976 released 3,500 raccoons captured from a rabies-endemic part of Florida. They started a 30-year rabies pandemic that hit 14 states, spreading as far north as Massachusetts and as far west as Ohio, before air drops of genetically engineered raccoon rabies vaccine pellets finally brought the pandemic under containment. USDA Wildlife Services is still trying to end it, having on August 8, 2006 spread 300,000 doses of the vaccine over eight counties in Virginia near the West Virginia border.

Earlier, pro-hunting organizations including the National Wildlife Federation fought a prolonged court battle against the use of the oral rabies vaccine. State wildlife agencies pushed raccoon trapping and coonhunting, claiming that rabies was spreading because of raccoon overpopulation. Hunters and trappers killed upward of half a million raccoons per year in the affected states, comparable to the numbers of dogs killed in China this year to try to stop rabies outbreaks. Yet the rabies pandemic continued to spread at about 50 miles per year.

Mark Starcher, 38, of Pond Gap, was among the West Virginians who came of age to hunt near the height of the pandemic. On August 10, 2006, a Kanawha Circuit Court jury deliberated for less than an hour before acquitting Starcher of cruelty to a coonhound. Starcher admitted he shot the coonhound and left the remains taped to the steering wheel of a junked car in the woods near Sanderson, as if the dead dog was driving the car. Starcher also admitted burying the gun to hide the evidence. Further, "Starcher admitted that he was drinking and driving with his 9-year-old stepson in the vehicle the night he killed the dog," reported Charleston Gazette staff writer Andrew Clevenger.

Starcher claimed the dog had repeatedly misbehaved during coonhunts, including that night, but denied abusing the dog, and claimed the dog died immediately when shot.

"The law does not allow a coonhunter exception to the [animal cruelty] statute," Kanawha County Prosecutor Bill Charnock told the jury.

From the ANIMAL PEOPLE perspective, Starcher should have been charged with psychologically abusing the 9-year-old by taking him on a coonhunt. Coonhunting is a legal voyeuristic behavior, for adults, but so is attending strip joints. Any West Virginia jury would almost certainly convict any father for contributing to the delinquency of a minor if he kept his 9-year-old out late to visit a strip joint.

Consequences of exposing young people to hunting and firearms at an early age were on display not far north. On July 13, 2006, hunter Michael Guerriero, 46, and his mother Josephine Guerriero, 72, of East Brunswick, New Jersey, were charged with endangering the welfare of a child and possession of illegal weapons. Police found 98 guns in the Guerriero home. Their 11-year-old son and grandson was charged with aggravated assault and aggravated manslaughter for killing Alexander Khoudiakov, 12, while playing with a handgun. "There was no evidence of intent to cause the death, but he acted recklessly by intentionally pulling the trigger," Middlesex County Prosecutor Bruce Kaplan told Tom Haydon of the Newark Star-Ledger.

The arsenal recalled the November 2005 arrest of David Ludwig, 18, in Lititz, Pennsylvania, for allegedly killing Michael and Cathryn Borden and kidnapping their 14-year-old daughter. The parents had objected to Ludwig dating her. Police found 54 guns in the Ludwig family home. "David Ludwig apparently was an avid hunter," who posted an image of himself posing with a freshly killed deer on his own hunting web site, reported Martha Raffaele of Associated Press.

Farther west, Zachariah Blanton, 17, of Gaston, Indiana, shot two deer on July 8, 2006, using a depredation permit that he received despite having "faced prosecution for sex and theft crimes in the past," police told news media. Blanton and six men he hunted with killed at least eight more deer before Blanton was accused of shirking his share of gutting and skinning the carcasses on the night of July 22. Blanton vented his anger by shooting at motorists, he admitted, killing Jerry L. Ross, 40, of New Albany, and wounding Robert L. Hartl 25, of Audubon. Blanton was charged with murder, attempted murder, and criminal recklessness.

Ludwig was old enough to vote when he got into trouble, and Blanton was old enough to enlist in the U.S. military, if his past alleged offenses did not keep him out, but ANIMAL PEOPLE suggests that the psychological harm leading to the criminal charges against both young men may be traced back to whoever taught them, beginning many years earlier, that manhood is demonstrated by killing.

The Khoudiakov death illustrated that even an 11-year-old who is quite familiar with guns may lack the maturity to avoid deadly play.

Yet the trend around the U.S. is to introduce young people to hunting ever sooner. Most recently, Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm on July 10 signed into law a bill that lowers the minimum age for hunting small game from 12 to 10, and lowers the minimum age for hunting deer, elk, and bear with firearms from 14 to 12.

Trying to keep hunters in the field, states have raised bag limits, opened public lands to hunting, lengthened hunting seasons, and introduced doe hunting, bowhunting, and hunting with muzzleloaders. Dove hunting has been reintroduced in Ohio and Michigan. Puma and bear seasons in many states have been opened, re-opened, or extended.

Such measures have kept hunter attrition at about 2% per year over the past 25 years, but as the World War II generation passes on and the Baby Boomers pass their mid-fifties, when hunting participation tends to fall sharply, the decline of hunting is expected to accelerate.

Vigorous efforts to recruit new hunters from non-hunting backgrounds have already failed for more than 30 years. Instead, hunting enthusiasts are ever more aggressively drafting their own young.

Last-ditch defenses of collapsing regimes often include drafting young men barely big enough to shoulder arms, though this tactic rarely buys the ruling cabals much time. The United Nations in February 2002 adopted a convention against the use of child soldiers.

The U.S. did not endorse the convention until November 2002, after most of the developed world had already signed. The stated reason was that the U.S. allows military enlistment at age 17, with parental permission. About 1% of U.S. soldiers are under 18, the Pentagon said.

We are probably decades away from a U.N. convention against recruiting child hunters, but the elements of coercion toward behavior leading to lasting psychological harm are comparable. How much choice does a nine-year-old have, if his father chooses to expose him to coonhunting? Or to make him a witness to shooting a dog?