If you want to make an anti-hunter’s day, you don’t necessarily have to stop hunting. Just get on Facebook and start a fight between compound bow hunters and crossbow hunters. We’ll apparently handle the rest ourselves.
I’ve watched this argument long enough to notice that we’re becoming remarkably good at deciding who is and isn’t a “real bowhunter.” Crossbows are too easy. Compounds have too much technology. Traditional archers occasionally look at both groups like we’re cheating on a math test. Meanwhile, the people who don’t want any of us hunting are probably wondering why they bothered showing up. We’re doing a pretty good job for them.
Maybe I’m particularly sensitive to this because I’ve seen how division works from a very different perspective. For several years, I worked as a contractor supporting the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, including during the 2020 presidential election, where my work involved election security and misinformation, disinformation and malinformation, or MDM.
One of the simplest examples CISA used to explain the concept was something called “The War on Pineapple.” The question was intentionally ridiculous: Does pineapple belong on pizza?
CISA wasn’t suggesting foreign governments actually cared about Hawaiian pizza. The example demonstrated how an adversary could take something Americans already disagreed about and turn up the temperature. You don’t necessarily invent the disagreement. You find one that already exists, amplify the most extreme voices on both sides, encourage people to pick teams, distort the conversation and keep everyone angry enough to continue fighting.
In other words, you don’t have to create the crack. You just have to find it and keep driving the wedge.
Now replace pineapple pizza with crossbows.
One hunter says crossbows don’t belong in archery season. Another says compound bows aren’t exactly primitive technology either. Somebody questions somebody else’s ethics. Someone else starts talking about what a “real bowhunter” would do. Before long, we’re no longer debating wildlife management or season structure. We’re attacking each other’s character.
And here’s the uncomfortable part: We’re incredibly easy targets.
Our egos, our flair for the dramatic and our occasional tendency toward outright bullying feed directly into this kind of divisive behavior. Somebody throws out something inflammatory, somebody else takes it personally, and within six comments we’re questioning another hunter’s ethics, intelligence, masculinity and probably his choice of camouflage.
We take the bait faster than a black bear at Dunkin’ Donuts.
Social media does the rest. The loudest voices become representative of everyone, reasonable disagreement disappears underneath insults and absolutes, and suddenly the hunter carrying a different kind of bow becomes the enemy.
I’m not suggesting there’s some secret anti-hunting command center deploying keyboard warriors into crossbow Facebook groups. Sometimes an angry bowhunter is simply an angry bowhunter. But having watched these techniques up close, I’ve learned to ask a different question when I see people relentlessly stirring division: Who benefits from this?
And imagine how foolish we’d feel if we ever discovered we’d been played.
Imagine realizing that while we were busy insulting one another, drawing lines between “real hunters” and everybody else, and sharing the most inflammatory garbage we could find, we were accomplishing exactly what people opposed to hunting would want accomplished.
They couldn’t easily do it themselves.
Frankly, they don’t have to.
Why spend tremendous resources convincing Americans that hunting is wrong when hunters can be encouraged to declare other hunters unethical, illegitimate or unworthy of belonging? Why attack hunting exclusively from the outside when our egos and appetite for outrage can tear pieces off it from the inside for free?
That’s the lesson of CISA’s pineapple pizza example that has stuck with me. The pineapple was never really the point. The argument was.
There are legitimate debates to have about crossbows, compounds, technology, fair chase, opportunity and season structure. We should have them. Disagreement isn’t disloyalty, and unity doesn’t require conformity.
But there’s an enormous difference between arguing about how we hunt and attacking someone because they hunt differently than we do.
Recurve, compound or crossbow, somewhere outside our argument is someone who doesn’t want any of the three in the woods. Before we type that next angry response, maybe we should stop worrying about who ordered the pineapple and ask ourselves a much more important question:
Are we defending hunting, or are we being played into dismantling it ourselves?
Jay Pinsky
jay@theoutdoorwire.com
