COMMENTARY
Hunting shows are not exactly reality TV
Don’t believe everything you see on the Saturday morning hunting shows.
I have a video — distributed by an animal rights organization — that shows Jimmy Houston, a popular producer of televised hunting and fishing shows, trying to kill a deer from a tree stand at a game ranch.
The “hunt” took place within a fenced enclosure, and at one point Houston can be heard complaining that some of the video wouldn’t be usable because viewers would see the corn spread on the ground in front of the tree stand.
It’s a miserable example of why we hunters should be worrying far less about the activities of animal rights groups than about the wretched excesses of our own fraternity.
The problem television producers have is that it’s all about “show,” not “tell.” We writers can go to a hunting or fishing area, talk to experts there and write a story even if we don’t do well ourselves.
Most of the people who will visit those places after reading the stories won’t go for weeks, months or even years. So what I, and most of the other writers I know, try to provide is a realistic assessment of what you can expect if you go there.
But if the TV guys don’t get good action footage, they don’t have a show. They’re not trying to give you an assessment of a wide range of possibilities. They want to grab your attention with the spectacular, which is why they spend little time on anything but video footage of people shooting animals or catching fish. They also compress days of hunting or fishing into a few minutes of killing and catching.
The need for action pictures results in many television hunting shows being made inside fenced preserves, where there are so many big bucks that any imbecile can kill one. And the result is that the shows often are merely infomercials for the game ranches.
The hunting shows shot on deer ranches are ludicrous. How many times in Michigan have you had five or six trophy bucks standing in front of you? That sight is common on Saturday morning TV.
But even that apparently isn’t enough of an advantage for some people. The video that has Houston on it also shows another “hunter” inside a tiny fenced compound killing a deer that is so sick or drugged that assistants have to prop it up against a tree to keep it from falling over.
I think that the stress these shows place on killing a deer produces unrealistic expectations in many people who don’t get to hunt on ranches and is one reason that some people violate game laws.
One good example is the people who applied for multiple tags in Michigan’s antlerless deer drawing, even though each hunter is allowed to apply only once. Those hunters know the rules, or should know them. They’re printed clearly on the application forms and in the hunting regulations.
The Department of Natural Resources is warning those people to void all but one of their applications, either online or by visiting a license dealer. If they don’t void the extra tags, they won’t be included in the drawing Friday.
I’d like to see a rule that says anyone who applies for more than one tag is disqualified from the antlerless lottery not just for this year but for the next two years, as well. And with the computerized license systems we have today, it’s pretty easy to catch the would-be cheaters.
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