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A Woman's Place Is in the Woods
Josey1
Member Posts: 9,598 ✭✭
A Woman's Place Is in the Woods
By FRANCIS X. CLINES
EW CASTLE, Del., Sept. 25 - With the number of traditional male hunters dwindling across the nation, Dawn Fairling, a state wildlife educator, is tracking women, brandishing her well-oiled Remington 1100 single-shot deer gun, her Benelli 12-gauge bird gun and, of course, her tangy recipes for cooking what she calls "harvested critters."
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"There are more and more single-parent households these days, so we want women to discover the old male traditions in which you and your kid can be together as hunters in the woods," said Ms. Fairling, who is on the cutting edge of a national movement known as BOW (Becoming an Outdoors Woman) that has opened the deep-woods sanctuary of male hunters to thousands of women in the last 10 years.
"And game has a lot less fat than other meats," added Ms. Fairling, a canny mix of pragmatist and feminist when it comes to her job of hunting down women who might enjoy hunting down game.
"Real Men Love Outdoors Women," reads the bumper sticker on her bulletin board here in a state education center busy with the pop and thwack of gun and archery hunters practicing at the ranges. True, Ms. Fairling can point more frequently to women showing up at the ranges with their boyfriends. But her basic message to would-be hunters is that the real romance is in escaping the madding world's routine for the pristine solitude of the hunt.
"Hunting makes you take the time to smell the roses," said Ms. Fairling, who visits schools to enlist girls in particular into the mystique of shooting and hunting.
In the last five years of the BOW program, Delaware has licensed 700 women to hunt the woods and water lands. "Before, the number was zero," Ms. Fairling said.
Beyond more divorce and its erosion of father-son traditions, state officials cite the suburbanization of rural woods and the explosion of new sports as factors that have driven down the number of licensed hunters in Delaware by 22 percent in two decades. Nationally, the drop has been 10 percent in the last generation, says the Fish and Wildlife Service. Hunters make up 7 percent of the general population, according to 1996 data; female hunters alone make up 1 percent. The data show women more involved as licensed anglers; about one in four anglers are women.
To invite the gatherer gender to become hunters, BOW was conceived in 1991 by Dr. Christine L. Thomas, a natural resources professor at the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point. Dr. Thomas found that lack of basic information more than ingrown squeamishness was why many women shunned the outdoors.
"There are reasons like nonhunting families, and they only took your brothers hunting, or it's not ladylike, or there's fear of guns or of being the only woman in a hunting camp," Dr. Thomas said. "But we find most of the perceived barriers boil down to: How do I do it?"
That question is answered in 47 states by BOW educators like Ms. Fairling, who loves the woods and the range and is compiling a book of recipes for venison, snow goose and most "harvested critters" short of road kill.
"We just got four new hunters, four gals, out of the national scholastic clays program," the hunter-teacher proudly noted of a competition in which local teenagers she helped train did well. Last weekend, she shepherded them from shooting clay pigeons to hunting live doves.
Dr. Thomas came to hunting by default, she said, as the oldest daughter of a hunter-father with no sons. "I was the only son my father ever had," she said, describing the self-esteem that hunting built, a significant factor in her creating the BOW program.
Twenty thousand women go through BOW's introductory programs nationwide each year, paying about $200 for a weekend's campground room, board and lessons in hunting, fishing and activities like canoeing and bird watching.
"They get the opportunity to learn the terminology, try the equipment, begin to get a support base," Dr. Thomas said.
The lessons here include the bonus of Ms. Fairling's tips on shooting only the game you can eat. "And I teach them that these critters do not taste nasty," she said. "If you know how to handle saut?ed apples, brown sugar and cinnamon, you've got yourself some tasty snow goose."
Beyond initial motives like determination and curiosity about the exotic, women who stay in hunting discover the joy of a new kind of bonding, of finally belonging to a special, venturesome group, Dr. Thomas said. "And it's very addictive," she said. "I'm going elk hunting this weekend."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/29/national/29HUNT.html
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878
By FRANCIS X. CLINES
EW CASTLE, Del., Sept. 25 - With the number of traditional male hunters dwindling across the nation, Dawn Fairling, a state wildlife educator, is tracking women, brandishing her well-oiled Remington 1100 single-shot deer gun, her Benelli 12-gauge bird gun and, of course, her tangy recipes for cooking what she calls "harvested critters."
Advertisement
"There are more and more single-parent households these days, so we want women to discover the old male traditions in which you and your kid can be together as hunters in the woods," said Ms. Fairling, who is on the cutting edge of a national movement known as BOW (Becoming an Outdoors Woman) that has opened the deep-woods sanctuary of male hunters to thousands of women in the last 10 years.
"And game has a lot less fat than other meats," added Ms. Fairling, a canny mix of pragmatist and feminist when it comes to her job of hunting down women who might enjoy hunting down game.
"Real Men Love Outdoors Women," reads the bumper sticker on her bulletin board here in a state education center busy with the pop and thwack of gun and archery hunters practicing at the ranges. True, Ms. Fairling can point more frequently to women showing up at the ranges with their boyfriends. But her basic message to would-be hunters is that the real romance is in escaping the madding world's routine for the pristine solitude of the hunt.
"Hunting makes you take the time to smell the roses," said Ms. Fairling, who visits schools to enlist girls in particular into the mystique of shooting and hunting.
In the last five years of the BOW program, Delaware has licensed 700 women to hunt the woods and water lands. "Before, the number was zero," Ms. Fairling said.
Beyond more divorce and its erosion of father-son traditions, state officials cite the suburbanization of rural woods and the explosion of new sports as factors that have driven down the number of licensed hunters in Delaware by 22 percent in two decades. Nationally, the drop has been 10 percent in the last generation, says the Fish and Wildlife Service. Hunters make up 7 percent of the general population, according to 1996 data; female hunters alone make up 1 percent. The data show women more involved as licensed anglers; about one in four anglers are women.
To invite the gatherer gender to become hunters, BOW was conceived in 1991 by Dr. Christine L. Thomas, a natural resources professor at the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point. Dr. Thomas found that lack of basic information more than ingrown squeamishness was why many women shunned the outdoors.
"There are reasons like nonhunting families, and they only took your brothers hunting, or it's not ladylike, or there's fear of guns or of being the only woman in a hunting camp," Dr. Thomas said. "But we find most of the perceived barriers boil down to: How do I do it?"
That question is answered in 47 states by BOW educators like Ms. Fairling, who loves the woods and the range and is compiling a book of recipes for venison, snow goose and most "harvested critters" short of road kill.
"We just got four new hunters, four gals, out of the national scholastic clays program," the hunter-teacher proudly noted of a competition in which local teenagers she helped train did well. Last weekend, she shepherded them from shooting clay pigeons to hunting live doves.
Dr. Thomas came to hunting by default, she said, as the oldest daughter of a hunter-father with no sons. "I was the only son my father ever had," she said, describing the self-esteem that hunting built, a significant factor in her creating the BOW program.
Twenty thousand women go through BOW's introductory programs nationwide each year, paying about $200 for a weekend's campground room, board and lessons in hunting, fishing and activities like canoeing and bird watching.
"They get the opportunity to learn the terminology, try the equipment, begin to get a support base," Dr. Thomas said.
The lessons here include the bonus of Ms. Fairling's tips on shooting only the game you can eat. "And I teach them that these critters do not taste nasty," she said. "If you know how to handle saut?ed apples, brown sugar and cinnamon, you've got yourself some tasty snow goose."
Beyond initial motives like determination and curiosity about the exotic, women who stay in hunting discover the joy of a new kind of bonding, of finally belonging to a special, venturesome group, Dr. Thomas said. "And it's very addictive," she said. "I'm going elk hunting this weekend."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/29/national/29HUNT.html
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878