Not long after the defeat of Maine’s anti-bear hunting referendum, the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine (SAM) undertook a mission to better educate non-hunting Mainers about the critical role that hunting plays in wildlife management.

In a well-presented booklet titled “Why Maine Needs Hunters,” SAM executive director George Smith said, “Today even the newspapers in northern Maine always seem to have anti-hunting letters in them.”

Smith is right on. In fact, you can write the script. During November a newspaper runs a photo of a deer hunter with a handsome trophy buck. This is followed by a boilerplate anti-hunting letter that maligns hunters as bloodlusting barbarians. It happened again a few weeks ago in the letters section in one Maine daily newspaper. This particular letter was disturbingly different from the run-of-the-mill anti-hunting letter. Oh, it contained the usual – the predictable condemnations and sweeping generalizations that stereotype hunters as a class of violent human beings – but it went one step further.

The letter writer asserts that all violence in this world can be traced to hunters and hunting. The letter states that, “it is a well-accepted theory that violent crime in later life is often predated by childhood killing.” It wants us to believe that those of us who bring youngsters along into the hunting traditions are mentoring tomorrow’s violent criminals.

A well-accepted theory?

Research that is available on the subject suggests just the opposite. Not only is hunting not connected to youth violence, hunting is shown to have the opposite effect. Hunting leads kids away from the boredom and alienation that so frequently leads to youthful violence. Dr. Chris Eskridge of the University of Nebraska looked into the possibility of a connection between hunting and violent crime, comparing hunting licenses sales with crime rates by county. Eskridge didn’t find any correlation, and, in fact, found the exact opposite. There was an inverse relationship between violent crime and the sale of hunting licenses. The higher the number of hunting licenses, the lower the crime rates.

This should not be surprising to those of us who are knowledgeable and intimately familiar with hunters and the long-standing hunting heritage of Maine. Throughout America, rural values are still relatively strong, and it’s in rural areas where hunting is strong, values are strong, and crime is lower than in urban areas of the country.

As a hunting parent, I, as with so many thousands of other hunting parents across this country, have watched my young hunters grow, mature and learn. My children learned through hunting to understand nature and wildlife. They learned responsible behavior, patience and woodmanship. Through ethical hunting, they also learned respect for life, personal self control and our place in the food chain.

The young hunters that I have known and mentored outside my immediate family have grown to adulthood as loving, responsible, productive citizens and parents.

Although the diatribe is mostly old stuff (and the writer is entitled to his or her views), there is a larger question here. Should a letter writer be permitted to malign an entire class of citizens in a letter to the editor without any substantiation whatsoever? Newspapers have gatekeepers, editors who edit letters for taste, veracity and libel. Usually, when writer make inflammatory or outrageous charges that are discernibly bogus or untrue on their face, a gatekeeper edits for appropriateness or simply refuses to publish.

The problem may be as simple as this: the newsroom gatekeepers themselves don’t know enough about Maine’s hunting heritage or the role that hunting plays in our society to recognize when an anti-hunting shill is playing fast and loose with the truth.

Perhaps the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine needs to spend more time talking to Maine newspaper editors.

V. Paul Reynolds is editor of the Northwoods Sporting Journal. He is also a Maine Guide, co-host of a weekly radio program “Maine Outdoors” heard Sundays at 7 p.m. on The Voice of Maine News-Talk Network (WVOM-FM 103.9, WCME-FM 96.7) and former information officer for the Maine Dept. of Fish and Wildlife. His e-mail address is [email protected].