NYS Hunter Safety Course
Sep. 11th, 2017 03:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2eR7fIr:
OH RIGHT so I Livetweeted my entire hunter safety course, hampered only by losing signal and my battery failing. It’s not all that entertaining, but it’s here. Let me compile those notes into something.
So, to start off with. It became obvious within the first few pages of reading the supplemental booklet that there’s some kind of company that makes hunter safety courses, because hunter-ed.com kept coming up. The info in the booklet is so transparently not tailored to any particular state that it didn’t even take a Google search to find that yeah, it’s definitely some company that makes these booklets and all the state hunting-support agencies, whatever they may be, use them.
There’s mandatory homework you have to do before you show up. Like organized people, my sister and I immediately downloaded the pamphlet. She printed out two copies, secured them with binder clips, printed off the quiz, and put it in a folder. This was April. “Before September,” she said, “we’ll get together and review it.” “Yeah,” I said, and then we promptly forgot about it until 11pm the night before the class. (”Were we supposed to… bring something?” I asked. “I think there was a thing we had to read,” she said, and we went and searched our inboxes to find the long-ago email. “Mandatory homework,” she said. “Fuck,” I said, looking around the disaster of her piles-of-junk disorganized apartment. “Wait,” she said, and went directly to a shelf and pulled out the folder, miraculously. “Look at that! Thanks, Past!Me!”)
[Long story below, which is somewhat entertaining but mostly I’m writing it down because I was so nervous and didn’t know what to expect. This is what happens. Yes, you shoot guns. I wasn’t expecting that at all.]
The morning of the class, which was at a local rod and gun club I’ve driven past my entire life without really noticing, we filed in the door. “Show me the homework,” the lady said. If you’d completed it online, it gave you a receipt. [that cost $15, we didn’t do it.] [turns out if you do that, you’ve already taken the test at the end of the class. who knew. you still have to take the class.] “Sorry about my handwriting,” I said. “Oh,” she said, “I don’t have to read it, I just have to see that you did it.” I assumed it would be collected in class. I was wrong.
You literally just have to do the homework and prove you did it. They don’t care what you write down. It’s just to prove that you’re taking this seriously, and have given it a moment’s thought before showing up.
Just after us, a man arrived. They asked him for the homework. “Oh,” he said. “I’m gonna be honest, I totally forgot. I don’t even know what it was supposed to be.”
“Sorry,” the girl said, “you can’t take the class without it. Come back tomorrow, let me move your name to tomorrow’s class: you absolutely have to have it. It’s easy and stick around after I’ve signed everyone else in and I’ll go over with you what you’ve got to do, but you have to go and do it and come back tomorrow with it, I can’t let you in now.” (It took me probably an hour to do it; it’s not nothing.) So, for real: you have to do the homework before you show up. Everyone wants you to succeed, but the entire point of the thing is moot if you don’t take it seriously.
So, for real, the guy left.
The instructor was a big mumbly youngish dude who, it turned out, was a forklift operator by day. He had been teaching this course, which is a volunteer gig, for ten years, because he liked hunting and had gotten shot at by other hunters in the past and was directly deeply invested in making his entertaining hobby a lot less dangerous if possible.
This was the overarching theme of the thing. “Is hunting a right or a privilege?” he asked. People mumbled answers. “A privilege,” he answered. “Nobody has a right to hunt. It’s a privilege, and they could change the laws and take it away at any time. So it’s in everyone’s best interests to not be idiots, not abuse the privilege, and make it as safe as possible for everyone so that we all get to keep doing this. We have no right to it and we can’t expect it to continue if we don’t work for it.”
It was kind of refreshing.
He went around the room and asked everyone why they were here. There were 17 people in the class. 9 of them were women. One of the ladies checking people in at the door confirmed, later, that the slight majority of enrollees in the courses tended to be women. There’s the obvious point that some women come at the urging of their male relatives so that said relatives can then use the tags issued to the women to hunt additional game once they’ve exceeded their own maximum, so the women never intended to hunt, but in this group, all of the women did seem to intend to go on hunts themselves. Most said they wished to accompany family members or continue a family tradition. Two of the male attendees were children, boys of 12, which is the age at which you can apply for a license (I believe there are restrictions); both boys said their desire was to accompany their relatives on long-standing family traditions of hunting trips. Race-wise, there were two Asian women (Korean, I believe, from their names), who seemed related to one another– sisters, perhaps– and everyone else seemed white, but later in conversation it became apparent that at least two, perhaps three of the men were actually Latino, so it was a more diverse group than at first glance. I’m not the most astute at picking up on those sorts of things, though, so more subtle demographics may have eluded me.
The class was sort of equally divided up between going over wilderness safety, gun safety, animal identification and conservation issues, and general etiquette rules. There was a huge emphasis on things that are legal but not ethical, and what you should do in various situations– again, coming back to the notion that people get offended about hunting and if too many people get offended, it’ll get banned.
The instructor had a diagram. On one side, it said, 10% hunters. In the middle it said 80% indifferent. And on the other side, it said 10% anti-hunting. He pointed at the 10% anti and said, “their goal is to ban hunting.” He pointed at the 80%. “As long as they don’t care either way, it won’t happen.” He pointed at the 10% hunters. “So our job is to be nice to them and not piss them off. We can’t win over that 10% who hate it, but if we’re total jerks to the 80% who don’t care, they’ll start to care, and then we’re done.”
He had a slideshow of “disrespectful” things, like someone who had crammed a caribou into a Jeep Wrangler (most of it hung out the back), and someone who’s deer’s bloody gutted posterior was hanging out of the trunk of a Honda Civic (”You mean to tell me there wasn’t nohow you could shove that thing in there. Cut the legs and bend them, fer heaven’s sakes”), and someone who’d put a deer onto a roof rack and the thing had trailed blood all down the side of the silver car. “Quarter the animal,” he said. “Wrap it in garbage bags. Borrow a pickup truck. This not only makes you look like a total asshole, it also spoils the meat, and that’s disgusting. You do something like this, you’re not only inflaming the anti-hunting types, you’re pissing off those 80% neutral types, and you’re pissing off the other hunters, so– you look like a jerk.”
There wasn’t much review of the laws. He said, they’re in your book, look them up. Finer points change yearly, so you gotta read it, there’s no point me telling you. There was a lot of review of respecting posted no trespassing signs. There were scripts for approaching landowners. (”NEVER show up in your gear with a gun to ask to hunt. You go in regular clothes, by yourself or max with ONE buddy, and you ask BEFORE the season, and you don’t loom or act crazy, what is wrong with you.”)
There were two practical portions of the class, which I got the idea is non-standard but optional. We split into two groups, and half of us went down to the rod and gun club’s outdoor range, where we were given a loaded semi-automatic .22 rifle with a scope, and each fired five shots into some targets that had been set up. It wasn’t, like, to teach us how to shoot, or to evaluate our skills; I think it was just to ensure that we’d been exposed to proper firearm etiquette and didn’t make asses of ourselves.
The other group, then, meanwhile, went out with an associate of the instructor (another club member), who had set up a blood trail using fake blood, to give us some idea of how to track a wounded animal. Here was the simulated tree stand, here was the spot where we had fired the shot, therefore here was the exit wound spray, and now we have to find where the animal went next given a vague direction of “you saw it jump that way”. So we all went and poked around, and it turns out it’s really hard to see blood on grass.
We traveled quite a distance through the woods, finding occasional droplets and splatters, and finally we found a deer mannequin– and the instructor laughed and said ‘oh shoot i didn’t know that was there, that’s not it,’ and we kept looking and there was another deer mannequin. The instructor meanwhile did give us some good pointers and tips on what to look for, how to tell which direction the creature had gone, and what sorts of common behaviors to expect (they tend to go downhill, toward water). They emphasized that it’s hard to track an animal, but it’s crucial, because if you haven’t killed the thing clean, it’s going to suffer, and that’s unethical of you. So I thought that was a good section in the class!
There’s also usually a section, I guess, where they give you a gun and you have to cross a fence with it. (There were slideshows on it; I guess people often shoot themselves or other people while trying to navigate obstacles in fields.) They didn’t make us do it because it was muddy. (The procedure, if you’re wondering, is that you unload the gun, lay it down underneath the fence, go some distance away and crawl under, then come back and retrieve the gun by the stock. If there’s more than one person, someone holds all the guns while everyone else crosses, hands them over, and then crosses too.)
After we broke for lunch, the instructor demonstrated how to clean a gun, basic disassembly of the different types of guns, and mentioned politics for the only time in the entire presentation– he’d bought a particular gun because it went on sale when Trump was elected. Nobody said anything, but someone must have made a face, because he laughed and shrugged and said, “Man, a sale’s a sale, and it was a really good sale, so I wasn’t gonna not.” That was it, though; there was literally no mention of politics besides that except that the Pittman-Robertson Act, which tied hunter education funding to wildlife conservation (and ensured that hunting license fees went toward conservation, etc), was a bipartisan act named for the two politicians who introduced it– a Democrat and a Republican.
Toward the end of the class, two DEC officers showed up– I think actually they were the two officers for our county. They rolled in in separate pickup trucks. The DEC officers were entertaining, they came in armed and in uniform and bulletproof vests and such, and the one guy just spoke in a shout and ended every phrase with “… okay?” “SO IF YOU RUN INTO A PROBLEM– OKAY?– YOU’RE GONNA HAVE TO USE YOUR HEAD– OKAY?– AND MY CELLPHONE NUMBER IS IN THE BACK OF THIS BOOKLET– OKAY?– WHICH MEANS YOU CAN CALL ME AT TWO AM BUT IF YOU CALL ME AT TWO AM IT HAD BETTER BE FOR SOMETHING GOOD– OKAY?” whereupon his quieter companion interjected, “But, I mean, if it’s something good, you’d better call us at two AM,” and the first guy was like “– OKAY?”
I mean, the DEC cops are actually among the most terrifying cops in the entire law enforcement system. If you’ve crossed them, you are in bad trouble. They don’t just do game warden work, they also do pollution issues, and smugglers and poachers and such. They roll pretty heavy. Notably, however, and they pointed this out as well, uniquely among policemen, they expect that anyone they encounter will be armed, probably with a large weapon, and a loaded one. “Be chill, okay?” the one said. “Don’t freak out and try to unload your gun when you see me coming, okay? Don’t mess around with it. Just put it on safe and point it somewhere that’s not me. I know you have a gun, and in fact it’s weird if you don’t, so just be chill, okay? It’s extremely unlikely that’s what I’m here about.”
My sister put up her hand. “What about if I have a concealed carry permit?” she asked. “How does that overlap with hunting? Should I mention it?”
The DEC guy shrugged. “I guess if it’s relevant,” he said, “yeah, but I mean, we’re not going to be as interested in that as most cops, so. Like. It’s gonna depend on context.”
Someone else asked, then, if you have a concealed carry permit, and you’re hunting with a handgun, do you have to then have the handgun concealed while you’re hunting, and the DEC guy just sort of stared at him for a long moment, and said, “I mean, if you’re in the woods and there’s nobody to see you, then it’s not going to be relevant, so I guess if you’re asking if you have to like quick-draw if you see game, then no, the point of the concealed carry is when you’re in public and the woods are not generally considered public.”
What I’m taking from this is that while my sister doesn’t seem to intend to use a handgun for hunting, she does intend to carry her handgun while hunting, and that just seems like overkill, but you know what, you do you, girl.
The last thing the DEC guys talked about was that if you are not a landowner, and don’t have access to a good hunting site, there are several state-held parks that do allow hunting, there’s an index of them in the booklet you get with your license. While many, many people do go to those sites to hunt, the vast majority of them don’t go more than 100 yards into the woods, the quieter officer went on, and so if you actually make a day of it and really hike for a reasonable distance, there are vast untouched herds in there. “I see a ten-pointer cross out of Shaver Pond like, every time I go by there,” the other guy said, shaking his head. “Nobody ever goes in there after him.”
The last part of the class, the instructor got out the test and just went over it. The point, he said, is not that you do a closed-book test like in school. The point is genuinely to know the answers to the question. So he went over the questions, which were mostly hilarious (”Most injuries involving tree stands occur: A) while climbing up or down from the stand, B) when the hunter falls asleep while sitting in the stand, C) while the hunter is attempting to shoot from the stand, or D) while hiking in to get to the stand.” Uh…) and there were a couple he hadn’t addressed as such (i.e. with the same terminology) so he confirmed that we could intuit the answers from what we’d covered, and then we took the test.
That was about it. I’ve confirmed that I’m still not super-into this sort of thing, but I do remember how guns work, I do wish I had a scope sight because that would make me a lot more certain of my target, and I really have no idea whether I actually want to hunt any deer, but now I can go out with my dad and my sister and maybe we’ll make a dent in the nuisance deer population on the farm. I think we’ll probably also go out on mom and dad’s property; the main reason there is that otherwise, people trespass, and make a mess. if we’re out there we can kind of nip that in the bud, or at least keep an eye on it. Their property adjoins several other properties, including one very permissive landowner; and for the last 30 years, one of the neighbors on our street, who owns a quarter of an acre, has consistently maintained that the undeveloped land around him owned by other people is perfectly fair game for him to use as he likes because it’s nature and that’s a fundamental human right. Which, like, we wouldn’t care if he just wanted to hike or take pictures or even camp, but what he means by that is riding his four-wheeler and snowmobile, and going hunting, including shooting from his car, which is illegal even if it’s your own property, so. (He also still has a sign up on his lawn that says ‘Hillary For Prison’ so if that gives you any insights… my dad has been rolling his eyes at this guy since 1977.)
Anyway. So, if anyone was curious about what a hunter safety course is like, there’s New York State.
OH RIGHT so I Livetweeted my entire hunter safety course, hampered only by losing signal and my battery failing. It’s not all that entertaining, but it’s here. Let me compile those notes into something.
So, to start off with. It became obvious within the first few pages of reading the supplemental booklet that there’s some kind of company that makes hunter safety courses, because hunter-ed.com kept coming up. The info in the booklet is so transparently not tailored to any particular state that it didn’t even take a Google search to find that yeah, it’s definitely some company that makes these booklets and all the state hunting-support agencies, whatever they may be, use them.
There’s mandatory homework you have to do before you show up. Like organized people, my sister and I immediately downloaded the pamphlet. She printed out two copies, secured them with binder clips, printed off the quiz, and put it in a folder. This was April. “Before September,” she said, “we’ll get together and review it.” “Yeah,” I said, and then we promptly forgot about it until 11pm the night before the class. (”Were we supposed to… bring something?” I asked. “I think there was a thing we had to read,” she said, and we went and searched our inboxes to find the long-ago email. “Mandatory homework,” she said. “Fuck,” I said, looking around the disaster of her piles-of-junk disorganized apartment. “Wait,” she said, and went directly to a shelf and pulled out the folder, miraculously. “Look at that! Thanks, Past!Me!”)
[Long story below, which is somewhat entertaining but mostly I’m writing it down because I was so nervous and didn’t know what to expect. This is what happens. Yes, you shoot guns. I wasn’t expecting that at all.]
The morning of the class, which was at a local rod and gun club I’ve driven past my entire life without really noticing, we filed in the door. “Show me the homework,” the lady said. If you’d completed it online, it gave you a receipt. [that cost $15, we didn’t do it.] [turns out if you do that, you’ve already taken the test at the end of the class. who knew. you still have to take the class.] “Sorry about my handwriting,” I said. “Oh,” she said, “I don’t have to read it, I just have to see that you did it.” I assumed it would be collected in class. I was wrong.
You literally just have to do the homework and prove you did it. They don’t care what you write down. It’s just to prove that you’re taking this seriously, and have given it a moment’s thought before showing up.
Just after us, a man arrived. They asked him for the homework. “Oh,” he said. “I’m gonna be honest, I totally forgot. I don’t even know what it was supposed to be.”
“Sorry,” the girl said, “you can’t take the class without it. Come back tomorrow, let me move your name to tomorrow’s class: you absolutely have to have it. It’s easy and stick around after I’ve signed everyone else in and I’ll go over with you what you’ve got to do, but you have to go and do it and come back tomorrow with it, I can’t let you in now.” (It took me probably an hour to do it; it’s not nothing.) So, for real: you have to do the homework before you show up. Everyone wants you to succeed, but the entire point of the thing is moot if you don’t take it seriously.
So, for real, the guy left.
The instructor was a big mumbly youngish dude who, it turned out, was a forklift operator by day. He had been teaching this course, which is a volunteer gig, for ten years, because he liked hunting and had gotten shot at by other hunters in the past and was directly deeply invested in making his entertaining hobby a lot less dangerous if possible.
This was the overarching theme of the thing. “Is hunting a right or a privilege?” he asked. People mumbled answers. “A privilege,” he answered. “Nobody has a right to hunt. It’s a privilege, and they could change the laws and take it away at any time. So it’s in everyone’s best interests to not be idiots, not abuse the privilege, and make it as safe as possible for everyone so that we all get to keep doing this. We have no right to it and we can’t expect it to continue if we don’t work for it.”
It was kind of refreshing.
He went around the room and asked everyone why they were here. There were 17 people in the class. 9 of them were women. One of the ladies checking people in at the door confirmed, later, that the slight majority of enrollees in the courses tended to be women. There’s the obvious point that some women come at the urging of their male relatives so that said relatives can then use the tags issued to the women to hunt additional game once they’ve exceeded their own maximum, so the women never intended to hunt, but in this group, all of the women did seem to intend to go on hunts themselves. Most said they wished to accompany family members or continue a family tradition. Two of the male attendees were children, boys of 12, which is the age at which you can apply for a license (I believe there are restrictions); both boys said their desire was to accompany their relatives on long-standing family traditions of hunting trips. Race-wise, there were two Asian women (Korean, I believe, from their names), who seemed related to one another– sisters, perhaps– and everyone else seemed white, but later in conversation it became apparent that at least two, perhaps three of the men were actually Latino, so it was a more diverse group than at first glance. I’m not the most astute at picking up on those sorts of things, though, so more subtle demographics may have eluded me.
The class was sort of equally divided up between going over wilderness safety, gun safety, animal identification and conservation issues, and general etiquette rules. There was a huge emphasis on things that are legal but not ethical, and what you should do in various situations– again, coming back to the notion that people get offended about hunting and if too many people get offended, it’ll get banned.
The instructor had a diagram. On one side, it said, 10% hunters. In the middle it said 80% indifferent. And on the other side, it said 10% anti-hunting. He pointed at the 10% anti and said, “their goal is to ban hunting.” He pointed at the 80%. “As long as they don’t care either way, it won’t happen.” He pointed at the 10% hunters. “So our job is to be nice to them and not piss them off. We can’t win over that 10% who hate it, but if we’re total jerks to the 80% who don’t care, they’ll start to care, and then we’re done.”
He had a slideshow of “disrespectful” things, like someone who had crammed a caribou into a Jeep Wrangler (most of it hung out the back), and someone who’s deer’s bloody gutted posterior was hanging out of the trunk of a Honda Civic (”You mean to tell me there wasn’t nohow you could shove that thing in there. Cut the legs and bend them, fer heaven’s sakes”), and someone who’d put a deer onto a roof rack and the thing had trailed blood all down the side of the silver car. “Quarter the animal,” he said. “Wrap it in garbage bags. Borrow a pickup truck. This not only makes you look like a total asshole, it also spoils the meat, and that’s disgusting. You do something like this, you’re not only inflaming the anti-hunting types, you’re pissing off those 80% neutral types, and you’re pissing off the other hunters, so– you look like a jerk.”
There wasn’t much review of the laws. He said, they’re in your book, look them up. Finer points change yearly, so you gotta read it, there’s no point me telling you. There was a lot of review of respecting posted no trespassing signs. There were scripts for approaching landowners. (”NEVER show up in your gear with a gun to ask to hunt. You go in regular clothes, by yourself or max with ONE buddy, and you ask BEFORE the season, and you don’t loom or act crazy, what is wrong with you.”)
There were two practical portions of the class, which I got the idea is non-standard but optional. We split into two groups, and half of us went down to the rod and gun club’s outdoor range, where we were given a loaded semi-automatic .22 rifle with a scope, and each fired five shots into some targets that had been set up. It wasn’t, like, to teach us how to shoot, or to evaluate our skills; I think it was just to ensure that we’d been exposed to proper firearm etiquette and didn’t make asses of ourselves.
The other group, then, meanwhile, went out with an associate of the instructor (another club member), who had set up a blood trail using fake blood, to give us some idea of how to track a wounded animal. Here was the simulated tree stand, here was the spot where we had fired the shot, therefore here was the exit wound spray, and now we have to find where the animal went next given a vague direction of “you saw it jump that way”. So we all went and poked around, and it turns out it’s really hard to see blood on grass.
We traveled quite a distance through the woods, finding occasional droplets and splatters, and finally we found a deer mannequin– and the instructor laughed and said ‘oh shoot i didn’t know that was there, that’s not it,’ and we kept looking and there was another deer mannequin. The instructor meanwhile did give us some good pointers and tips on what to look for, how to tell which direction the creature had gone, and what sorts of common behaviors to expect (they tend to go downhill, toward water). They emphasized that it’s hard to track an animal, but it’s crucial, because if you haven’t killed the thing clean, it’s going to suffer, and that’s unethical of you. So I thought that was a good section in the class!
There’s also usually a section, I guess, where they give you a gun and you have to cross a fence with it. (There were slideshows on it; I guess people often shoot themselves or other people while trying to navigate obstacles in fields.) They didn’t make us do it because it was muddy. (The procedure, if you’re wondering, is that you unload the gun, lay it down underneath the fence, go some distance away and crawl under, then come back and retrieve the gun by the stock. If there’s more than one person, someone holds all the guns while everyone else crosses, hands them over, and then crosses too.)
After we broke for lunch, the instructor demonstrated how to clean a gun, basic disassembly of the different types of guns, and mentioned politics for the only time in the entire presentation– he’d bought a particular gun because it went on sale when Trump was elected. Nobody said anything, but someone must have made a face, because he laughed and shrugged and said, “Man, a sale’s a sale, and it was a really good sale, so I wasn’t gonna not.” That was it, though; there was literally no mention of politics besides that except that the Pittman-Robertson Act, which tied hunter education funding to wildlife conservation (and ensured that hunting license fees went toward conservation, etc), was a bipartisan act named for the two politicians who introduced it– a Democrat and a Republican.
Toward the end of the class, two DEC officers showed up– I think actually they were the two officers for our county. They rolled in in separate pickup trucks. The DEC officers were entertaining, they came in armed and in uniform and bulletproof vests and such, and the one guy just spoke in a shout and ended every phrase with “… okay?” “SO IF YOU RUN INTO A PROBLEM– OKAY?– YOU’RE GONNA HAVE TO USE YOUR HEAD– OKAY?– AND MY CELLPHONE NUMBER IS IN THE BACK OF THIS BOOKLET– OKAY?– WHICH MEANS YOU CAN CALL ME AT TWO AM BUT IF YOU CALL ME AT TWO AM IT HAD BETTER BE FOR SOMETHING GOOD– OKAY?” whereupon his quieter companion interjected, “But, I mean, if it’s something good, you’d better call us at two AM,” and the first guy was like “– OKAY?”
I mean, the DEC cops are actually among the most terrifying cops in the entire law enforcement system. If you’ve crossed them, you are in bad trouble. They don’t just do game warden work, they also do pollution issues, and smugglers and poachers and such. They roll pretty heavy. Notably, however, and they pointed this out as well, uniquely among policemen, they expect that anyone they encounter will be armed, probably with a large weapon, and a loaded one. “Be chill, okay?” the one said. “Don’t freak out and try to unload your gun when you see me coming, okay? Don’t mess around with it. Just put it on safe and point it somewhere that’s not me. I know you have a gun, and in fact it’s weird if you don’t, so just be chill, okay? It’s extremely unlikely that’s what I’m here about.”
My sister put up her hand. “What about if I have a concealed carry permit?” she asked. “How does that overlap with hunting? Should I mention it?”
The DEC guy shrugged. “I guess if it’s relevant,” he said, “yeah, but I mean, we’re not going to be as interested in that as most cops, so. Like. It’s gonna depend on context.”
Someone else asked, then, if you have a concealed carry permit, and you’re hunting with a handgun, do you have to then have the handgun concealed while you’re hunting, and the DEC guy just sort of stared at him for a long moment, and said, “I mean, if you’re in the woods and there’s nobody to see you, then it’s not going to be relevant, so I guess if you’re asking if you have to like quick-draw if you see game, then no, the point of the concealed carry is when you’re in public and the woods are not generally considered public.”
What I’m taking from this is that while my sister doesn’t seem to intend to use a handgun for hunting, she does intend to carry her handgun while hunting, and that just seems like overkill, but you know what, you do you, girl.
The last thing the DEC guys talked about was that if you are not a landowner, and don’t have access to a good hunting site, there are several state-held parks that do allow hunting, there’s an index of them in the booklet you get with your license. While many, many people do go to those sites to hunt, the vast majority of them don’t go more than 100 yards into the woods, the quieter officer went on, and so if you actually make a day of it and really hike for a reasonable distance, there are vast untouched herds in there. “I see a ten-pointer cross out of Shaver Pond like, every time I go by there,” the other guy said, shaking his head. “Nobody ever goes in there after him.”
The last part of the class, the instructor got out the test and just went over it. The point, he said, is not that you do a closed-book test like in school. The point is genuinely to know the answers to the question. So he went over the questions, which were mostly hilarious (”Most injuries involving tree stands occur: A) while climbing up or down from the stand, B) when the hunter falls asleep while sitting in the stand, C) while the hunter is attempting to shoot from the stand, or D) while hiking in to get to the stand.” Uh…) and there were a couple he hadn’t addressed as such (i.e. with the same terminology) so he confirmed that we could intuit the answers from what we’d covered, and then we took the test.
That was about it. I’ve confirmed that I’m still not super-into this sort of thing, but I do remember how guns work, I do wish I had a scope sight because that would make me a lot more certain of my target, and I really have no idea whether I actually want to hunt any deer, but now I can go out with my dad and my sister and maybe we’ll make a dent in the nuisance deer population on the farm. I think we’ll probably also go out on mom and dad’s property; the main reason there is that otherwise, people trespass, and make a mess. if we’re out there we can kind of nip that in the bud, or at least keep an eye on it. Their property adjoins several other properties, including one very permissive landowner; and for the last 30 years, one of the neighbors on our street, who owns a quarter of an acre, has consistently maintained that the undeveloped land around him owned by other people is perfectly fair game for him to use as he likes because it’s nature and that’s a fundamental human right. Which, like, we wouldn’t care if he just wanted to hike or take pictures or even camp, but what he means by that is riding his four-wheeler and snowmobile, and going hunting, including shooting from his car, which is illegal even if it’s your own property, so. (He also still has a sign up on his lawn that says ‘Hillary For Prison’ so if that gives you any insights… my dad has been rolling his eyes at this guy since 1977.)
Anyway. So, if anyone was curious about what a hunter safety course is like, there’s New York State.
