Many of you may be well aware of the often heated debated about whether or not crossbows should be permitted during archery season. If you’re not aware of this issue, check-out the following sources for some information: Outdoor Life, Document from North American Bowhunting Coalition (.pdf file).

Here’s a quote from NABC that summarizes it all: “…in order to preserve the integrity of bowhunting, it is vital that crossbows not be permitted in bow seasons or archery-only hunting areas.” This quote comes from the aforementioned document that is signed by Pope & Young.

It all may sound well and good, but if you’re open-minded, you’ll at least listen to the other side of this debate. I while back I sat down with CEO of TenPoint Crossbows, Richard Bednar (you can listen to our discussion here). Many may not realize that Richard is a 4-time NCAA All-American archer, and he still uses a compound to hunt (in addition to a crossbow). Rick claimed that the stance taken by Pope & Young and others against crossbows goes beyond an anti-crossbow issue and into an anti-hunting viewpoint. See for yourself what Rick had to say; his arguments are quite convincing:

One of the problems we’ve had as a community (not an industry) is that we’ve fought a little amongst ourselves. The bowhunter doesn’t like the crossbow. The recurve guy doesn’t like the compound guy. The release aid guy doesn’t like the guy shooting fingers.

That’s a big problem. Those are all anti-hunting positions. If you’re a hunter, conservationist, a participant in this whole big picture, then it doesn’t really matter what your choice of hunting implements or weapons is.

When you stop to think about game management and health of the herd (of which the whitetail deer is an amazing success story in America, and in particular the Midwest). If the bow hunter wants to fight against allowing somebody in his season, and his numbers [of harvests] don’t meet expectations of biologists (because each year you need to harvest 20-25% of the herd to stay healthy)…what’s going to happen is the Department of Natural Resources and the biologists are going to say, “Okay, here’s what we need to do. Let’s add 2 days to shotgun season. If we do that we will kill 50,000 deer. The bow hunters aren’t taking enough deer, so let’s take [these 2 days] out of bow season.”

Now, is that better for the bow guy to do it that way, or to allow the crossbow guy to come in? It better for us as an ‘arrow-shooting community’ to promote as many arrow-shooting people as we can, whether they be crossbowmen, compoundbowmen, longbowmen, etc. to preserve our archery season.

Minnesota is a good example of this. They don’t have enough bow hunters. They have this great season, but they aren’t shooting any deer. So what they did is they put a week’s worth of muzzleloading season concurrent with bow season, pre-rut. [They did this] because they know they are going to take tens of thousands of deer with muzzleloaders, especially now with inline muzzleloaders and all this accuracy we’ve gotten. They need to manage the herd by taking a certain percentage of deer to maintain a healthy herd.

So, I think fighting amongst ourselves is probably the single biggest threat to our heritage of hunting with arrows that we can have…I don’t understand it.

Rick went on to explain the crossbows role in retention of older hunters and hunters with disabilities and recruitment of new hunters. I’ve yet to hear a good argument against these statements. (I’m playing a little phone-tag with Pope & Young to get their response).

In the coming days I’ll offer my stance on the issue, but first I’m interested in what you all think.

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On August 29th, at 8:30 AM, I sat down with the CEO of TenPoint Crossbows, Richard L. Bednar. Rick graciously agreed to an interview, during which we discussed the definition of ‘outdoors’, the future of conservation and outdoor pursuits, and the bow - crossbow controversy. I particularly admired and appreciated Rick’s willingness to discuss this latter issue without any direct prompts for doing so. You can read an edited version or listen to the entire interview. Links are under the “Pages” tab on the right side bar. Or listen to the entire thing in the audio player below:

Note: I’ve been experiencing some technical difficulties…so if you have any problems, please let me know (deerPhD@gmail.com).

Here are some highlights/reasons why you should listen to the whole interview:

• Did you know that the CEO of TenPoint was a 4-year All-American, 3-year National Champion, and Olympic Alternate in archery?!?!?!
• We discussed Anti-Hunting perspectives without ever talking about non-hunters
• Could Pope & Young have an Anti-hunting perspective?

We also discussed…

• Definition/future of Outdoors & Conservation
• Sharing hunting = Conservation
• Pittmann-Robinson Act
• Species Health

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Last week I was able to sit down with Richard L. Bednar, CEO of TenPoint Crossbows. I’m still writing up the story, but I wanted to share a quick preview of what’s to come.

Rick and I got to talking about dissension among hunters (see recent post by Lowcountry). Some hunters and organizations have been very vocal about their disapproval of the crossbow in archery season. While they all have their reasons, Rick explained that from his perspective, these positions are actually “anti-hunting positions.” Rick did a wonderful job of supporting his viewpoint. His argument was based on the fact that hunters and hunters alone provide necessary financial resources to protect hunting lands and species (via Federal Excise Tax and money from licenses). If the number of hunters increase, then so will our resources.

Crossbows have been very beneficial to the states that permit them in archery season by increasing the number of hunters in 2 ways: 1) easier for new hunters to become involved, 2) retaining hunters who have been injured or have grown too old to hunt with a compound.

Details of the interview will follow shortly, but I wanted to share this quick preview. It can be controversial, but it is a very interesting take.

conservation, hunting, interview, ten point, tenpoint crossbows

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