So I checked this morning to see if I’d gotten any more votes in the Outdoor Blog of the Year contest (no time like the present to move me up in the rankings!) and I happened across a really interesting poll about the greatest threats facing hunters and anglers. Though there was a bit of grousing about the animal-rights fanatics, the runaway winner in the poll was loss of habitat, primarily to development.

It’s habitat to hunters, but to those of us who eschew shooting the forest’s creatures, it’s open space, and the issue is the same. If we don’t keep after governments and “opinion leaders” to keep the wilderness wild, they’ll sell it off to build more Wal-Marts.

I have to admit to have fallen under the spell of the “don’t kill any living thing if you can help it” people — I don’t even like having a real Christmas tree; I cut one down one year and couldn’t get over what a waste it seemed to kill perfectly good tree to decorate my living room for a couple weeks before Christmas. Granted, it’s probably far more environmentally unsound to manufacture fake trees, but at least it isn’t me doing the killing.

I’ve always known hunters and fishermen (& women) and people who prized their firearms and fishing tackle above all but their closest kin, so I was never one to cling to stereotypes about people who do “outdoors” stuff. I cringe when I think of them shooting a seemingly harmless deer, but the thing is, deer are a prey species. Without predators they’ll fill up the woods in a few seasons. Humans are a predator species. It’s our job — heck, it’s in our genes — to hunt.

We see a lot of deer around where we live, but they could be a lot worse except that we have a small but capable population of mountain lions keeping the deer herds in check. We almost never see the lions, but they’re out there; otherwise we’d have a lot more deer.

Again, that’s all about habitat. Governments in the Bay Area have been zealous about preserving open space, which lets nature take its course so people don’t have to. Heck, there are areas south of here where the hunters lament that there’s no point in even trying to go deer hunting; the big cats get ’em all first. Which would you prefer — civilized people or wild, hundred-pound predators — to keep the deer out of your backyard?

My point in posting all this is that we’re all on the same side — if you love the outdoors but prefer not to hunt or fish, you’re making an aesthetic decision, not an environmental one. If you think a walk in the woods is pointless if you can’t shoot at something, think about the thing that grosses you out the most; that’s what killing, skinning and gutting animal flesh is to us non-hunters.

Hunters and hikers will probably never see precisely eye to eye, but the one thing we both need is someplace to go. And others will take it away if we let them.