Out & About: Gadgets create moral dilema

OUTFIELD – As archery hunting seasons kick into gear, a Montana sportsman wonders about the influence technology.

“How much is enough?” asks Bruce Auchly of Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks. “How much is too much?

Deciding what is legal is in the regulations books. What’s ethical requires a higher authority, he says.

Arrow and broadhead restrictions are spelled out in Montana’s game laws, but no law says to the archer, “Thou shalt not shoot at an elk walking 75 yards away,” Auchly says.

The only guideline is the knowledge that such a shot will likely result in a wounded animal that may go off and die unfound.

Clouding judgment in some cases is the latest technology and video depictions of it that lead some archers to believe 75-yard shots are OK and result in easy meat in the freezer.

Hunters have technological advantages: GPS units, rangefinders, trail cameras and bowsights that glow in dim light, Auchly says: “Advances in gear, archery equipment and clothing are wonderful. They are also not the culprit.

“The problem is not technology but what it does to us. It can lead us to believe that in our hurried lives, the modern convenience takes the place of practice.”

An invisible line is crossed when hunters no longer use mechanical aids but are used by them, Auchly suggests.

Nearly 70 years ago, Aldo Leopold, the founder of the science of wildlife management, decried the gadgeteer: “He has draped the American outdoorsman with an infinity of contraptions, all offered as aids to self-reliance, hardihood, woodcraft or marksmanship, but too often functioning as substitutes for them.”

Auchly admits he has more factory-made trinkets than necessary. Yet there has to be a limit, he says quoting Leopold, “beyond which money-bought aids to sport destroy the cultural value of sport.”

Hunting is an activity that has no judge, jury, referee or umpire. It comes down to looking into the mirror on the wall – or facing a scrupulous buddy.

“The archer who takes the 75-yard shot at an elk, wounds the animal then makes little attempt to find it, does so without a witness,” he said.

“The archer can walk away and do it all over again the next day. Legally he is a hunter, morally not so much.

“Hunting is tough and should be. Somewhere lies the invisible line between too much stuff and not enough ethics.”

Rich Landers