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Enough jibber jabber

Enough jibber-jabber There is a saying I heard many years ago, the source of which I cannot confirm, but the wisdom of which I can confirm, although at some trial and expense: Never pick a fight with a guy who buys printer's ink by the barrel. My father,

There is a saying I heard many years ago, the source of which I cannot confirm, but the wisdom of which I can confirm, although at some trial and expense: Never pick a fight with a guy who buys printer’s ink by the barrel.

My father, who was a wiser man by far than you or I, once cautioned me never to believe anything I read in a newspaper until I had checked the facts for myself.

It was wise counsel.

These preliminary assertions are germane to what I now say, inasmuch as I don’t want to pick a fight, but I also believe you don’t have your facts right.

In your editorial of April 6th you commendably focus on the decline of the ptarmigan population and the predators depending on it.

Yet throughout you use language more appropriate to rant than rational discourse.

Even your headline makes no sense: Angry birds? Distressed or confused birds perhaps, but surely not angry.

Then you refer to mining exploration going bonkers. What, exactly, does that mean? Bonkers is a vernacular expression for crazy. If mining exploration is going crazy it must be dashing around looking for materials in the earth’s crust of no value, hardly a likely scenario.

In fact, what mining exploration is looking for are the minerals in the earth’s crust which sustain your lifestyle.

Without exploration, extraction and processing of these minerals into everyday products on which you depend, you would be living in a skin tent, lighting your fire by rubbing sticks together and snaring varying hare to cook by your meagre fire.

Then you speak of “jibber-jabber amongst hunting folk about the long-gun registry” and their “yammering about the registry”.

This is not rational discussion, this is pure rant.

Yes, there are some who rant against the registry just as you rant against us. But most of us among the hunting folk have reasoned arguments against the registry and we advance those arguments in rational terms.

I was born 80 years ago into a subsistence community. People depended every day on meat from the bush and vegetables from their gardens, augmented by the little store food they could afford to buy.

As a young boy I carved a likeness, with my pocket knife, of a 30-30 Winchester Model 94, the most common hunting rifle then in use. I carried it about, dreaming of the day I would be a hunter.

And the day came. I came out of the bush with meat to feed the family with whom I then lived and others in the community as well.

And I lived to join my grandchildren in hunting camp, though they did the hunting while I tended camp.

What a great day it was when a grandson came up to the camp from the river’s edge to take my hand and lead me down to where the first meat he had taken was being brought ashore.

We are not the crude jibber-jabbering and yammering lot you would make us out to be. In fact, when it comes to jibber-jabbering and yammering, in some of your editorials you’d be hard to beat.

And as to contributing to conservation and wildlife habitat, if you will do some fact checking, you will find that us hunting folk have done a significant share.

Alan Fry

Whitehorse