Media Coverage - Let's Leave Bird of Peace Alone
Published October 24, 2006. By Brenda Brissette Mata. The Flint Journal
When it comes to politics, it seems that most people have lost all reason.
Whatever happened to common sense, to considering every side of an issue and trying to find common ground?
Anymore, every proposal or proposition, every candidate or incumbent, speaks in black and white.
It's right.
It's wrong.
He's right.
She's wrong.
You're with us or you're agin' us.
Proposal 3 asks voters to decide if Michigan should establish a hunting season for mourning doves.
According to the outspoken camps on either side (surely you've seen the commercials), there are two agendas behind this proposal:
1. If you can't hunt doves, next thing you know the tree-huggers will fix it so you can't hunt anything.
2. This song bird must be protected at all costs, particularly from the blood-thirsty hunters who want to kill anything that walks.
Good grief.
I like mourning doves. I like the cooing sound and, well, that's all I can think of to like, but I don't think we need to allow dove hunting.
But before you start thinking I'm one of those who think every brown-eyed doe is a poor orphaned Bambi, or that people who hunt are blood-thirsty killers - you're wrong.
I grew up in a house filled with guns. My father was a hunter and a police officer. I took classes to carry a concealed weapon, and I can shoot. I may not be able to take a flea off a coyote at 50 yards, but I can hit the broad side of a barn, provided it's painted bright red and I'm not too far away.
That said, I do not think private citizens need to own automatic weapons, and I don't hunt. I've been hunting, but I just can't bring myself to kill something. And I'm particularly against baiting.
You want to hunt, go sit in the woods and wait for something to walk up to you or learn to track. Staying warm while waiting for Yogi to sidle up to a pile of sugar beets isn't hunting, it's catching.
Gun ownership may be a right, but it's a responsibility. There are too many stupid people who get their hands on a gun and then leave the deadly weapon lying around so a kid can find it and shoot somebody.
What does that have to do with doves?
Not much. But that's the way these arguments seem to go -all or nothing.
We don't need a new law to kill a bird.
If you want to hunt doves, take a trip to Wisconsin, Tennessee or South Dakota or any of the 39 states that allow it.
And anybody who thinks that outlawing dove hunts is the first step to outlawing all hunting or gun ownership isn't thinking straight, either.
There is space between with us and agin' us, but let's leave the doves alone.
