About those Grip ‘n’ Grins
My first deer.
In less than two weeks, on Sept. 19, the opening of bow hunting season in Minnesota, more than 90,000 archers will take to the woods, hoping to shoot a whitetail deer. On Nov. 7, they’ll be joined by more than half a million hunters for firearms season.
And over the course of the fall, the Star Tribune will publish photos of successful hunters kneeling behind dead deer, holding antlers in one hand and a rifle in the other. Many of these photos will be of young people who have felled their first deer.
Inevitably, letters to the editor will follow, decrying the practice of hunting and the newspaper’s tradition of publishing such photos. Some readers won’t like the blood and the sight of a dead animal. Some will tie hunting to the gun violence that continues to plague our country.
As an adult-onset hunter, I take a different view.