THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, April 17, 1996 TAG: 9604170378
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: Medium: 57 lines
You have heard of shooting fish in a barrel. What about pursuing foxes in pens?
News that in the past 11 years 20 fox pens, ranging from 100 to 300 acres, have been fenced in Virginia should not surprise us, perhaps.
After all, a nimble little fox - a wraith, no less - can outwit a pack of hounds and a passel of hunters pounding along behind on horses hallooing. The hunters, not the horses. They neigh.
Given plenty of room and fair odds the foxes might wind up hunting us. A hunter told me a pair of foxes could live in my back yard - ``particularly your back yard,'' he said - without anybody knowing the difference.
``That's why it's back there,'' I shot back.
I am not averse to hunters. The noblest fellow ever in Virginia politics was an avid hunter. A flock of quail arising from brush with a clatter of thunder is downright blood-stirring.
If hunters ever become extinct we'll have to renew the species, whomp up the strain from DNA traces. Hunting is in our blood from when we had to hunt to eat.
The Indians, come down to it, were more spiritual about the chain of life than we are. They named one another for animals they admired, cherished and even worshiped.
What surprises me about some hunters is that their sense of sportsmanship does not extend to other animals who hunt.
A program worth watching, when one is in a vacant or pensive mood of a Saturday morning, focuses on hunters after all sorts of prey.
One morning three fellows on a hill were discussing strategy in shooting an elk or moose in a vale 350 or so yards away.
They noted an outcropping of rocks behind which, I surmised, they'd creep, and a draw through which they'd crawl to come face to face with the charging beast.
Imagine my surprise when the youngest, apparently on his first kill the way his voice quavered, mounted his gun on the hood of their truck and shot the animal in the far valley without its ever knowing what had hit him.
At the end one ought to be able to look the foe in the eye.
It was about as sporting as shooting a cow in a pasture when you consider one would have to deal with the irate farmer.
Only once I saw a red fox, early in the dew-sparkling morning, making its dainty way across a mountain pasture, the rising sun burnishing its coat to flame, its bushy tail a lovely floating plume.
Best thing was, the person with me was one to whom, had she been absent, I would have had to try to convey the deft, moving fox.
That's an interesting debate, whether to pen foxes to hunt as well as lengthen the season. On this one, I'm with the foxes. by CNB