Recently I went to a local Sporting Goods store just to check out what was new. I started talking to an older gentleman who worked there about archery hunting. I told him how I learned to shoot when I was nine years old and had started hunting as soon as I was old enough. He said that he taught both of his kids how to shoot and that for many years he taught archery safety classes. As we talked we both came back to the same thought that there are not as many people hunting today as when he started hunting or even when I started. He told me that both kids while still where avid archers both had lost their interest in hunting. I then confessed to him that it had been some time since I was in the woods. Moving from one state to another and not having my hunting things and many other little reasons had kept me from it and was looking forward to going again. Even taking my boys out in a few years when they are old enough.
After I left the store I started to think to myself, “Why is it that hunting is fading away?” My first thought was Gun Control laws the anti-gun movement, but I wasn’t sure that was it. Then I thought maybe animal activists had finally had some effect on things, but that can’t account for all the lost interest. Finally, a thought hit me; What had kept me from hunting all these years? I still had a love for it, I still watched hunting shows and read hunting magazines and talked to other hunters about their hunts. I had moved up in my career and had become busier and when I was not working I would spend time playing video games or on the Internet and then with my children when they came along. As I thought about the things that kept me from the pass-time that I once loved, I came back to the fact that I was caught up in the technology age. Good or bad it had consumed all my free time.
