Social media is a great tool for promoting hunting, fishing and conservation to a vast audience.
But only if there’s a purpose.
November and December are understandably busy months for deer hunting posts on sites such as Twitter and Facebook. Proud hunters post pictures of their harvests and even use the platforms to update each other on what they’re seeing in their neck of the woods. Social media is a valuable means to get an interesting perspective on deer season throughout Pennsylvania and in other states as well.
I have no problem with a hunter posting a presentable photo of their harvest, as long as it’s done out of respect.
I’ve also enjoyed posts of different landscapes, trail camera photos and interesting things that others come across in the natural world while they’re hunting.
And it seems like every year there are more people making more posts about their time in the field. It all seems pretty harmless, I guess, but I question if we, as hunters, are going overboard in our desire to photograph and share every aspect of our time in the woods.
I wonder if we are spending more time “hunting” for likes and reactions on social media than we are actually hunting for deer?
Pennsylvania Game Commission executive director Bryan Burhans even cautioned against that very thing when, in a recent deer season news release, he stated “Don’t let that buck of a lifetime catch you playing with your smartphone!”
Such a warning wasn’t needed years ago, but it is today.
I’m convinced that more hunters are spending an increasing amount of time on their phone when they’re in the woods, and I’ve seen many examples of it recently on social media.
On Twitter, for instance, one hunter was posting several “tweets” every hour while he was supposedly in his deer stand. Another person, on Facebook, constantly posted photos of the woods surrounding his treestand, wondering where the deer were. Maybe they were in front of him while he was staring at his screen.
Maybe it’s all harmless, but it’s absolutely pointless as well.
I think it’s a problem when someone is more concerned with generating “likes” than actually focusing on the hunt itself. If you want to sit in your treestand and chatter away on Twitter, go for it.
Me? When I’m in the woods, I’m unplugged.
Period.
What concerns me more, however, are some of the questionable hunting photos and videos that I see on social media.
Kill shots.
I think posts of kill shots are disrespectful to the animal being hunted, and they serve no purpose in the name of ethics, conservation or even decency. Perhaps even worse, kill shots certainly don’t cast hunting in a positive light to the majority of the population that are non-hunters.
Like it or not, we as hunters are a minority, and we had better be cognizant of how the rest of the population forms an opinion about the sport we love. A video of a buck absorbing a bolt from a crossbow does little to sway a non-hunter to our side.
One recent example that really bothered me was a video I came across on Twitter. A hunter in Michigan, who also happens to be a television personality on a well-known hunting channel, posted an interesting video of a nice buck approaching his stand. The buck walked into a field and stood broadside as the hunter quietly opened a window in his stand.
On his tweet above the video, he wrote “Should I post the shot?”
I replied back, “For what purpose?”
Needless to say, I was in the minority and soon after his kill shot video was posted, the “likes” began to pile up.
The fact that more people liked the video of the buck being shot as opposed to the post of the animal approaching the stand bothers me. The kill shouldn’t be the pinnacle of any hunt. The highlight, if you will, should be the events leading up to it. Watching the buck approach the stand was neat. Seeing it get shot was unnecessary.
Philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset summed it up best in the book, “Meditations on Hunting” when he wrote, “One does not hunt in order to kill; on the contrary, one kills in order to have hunted.”
Again, the best thing about hunting are the events and occurrences that lead up to the shot.
Sure, social media is a great way for hunters to communicate and share photos of what we harvest and experience in nature.
But we need to remember that the animals we pursue, whether it’s a trophy buck or a squirrel, should all be respected, admired and valued.
They shouldn’t be belittled and demeaned in a kill shot video whose only purpose is to generate bloodthirsty “likes” on social media.
- This column originally appeared in Pennsylvania Outdoor News
