Hunting is wrong sport for teens
Richard Gates and his son Valin, 13, prepare for last weekend's turkey hunt. Credit: Randee Daddona
Newsday reports that Long Island teenagers can now "hone their skills" at hunting turkeys ["Young hunters," News, April 22]. With all the problems our nation has with teenage violence, drugs, drinking, bullying, etc., teaching them to hunt is the worst recreation we can provide for them.
Let's not muddy the waters. The purpose of the hunt is not to reduce the overpopulation of turkeys. It is to provide recreation for our kids by means of killing. There are many more humane methods of controlling the turkey population, if that is the problem.
Some day, hopefully in the near future, our civilization will delegate "recreational" killing to the same domain as Roman gladiators, bullfighting, burning "witches" alive, slavery and other brutal practices we have outgrown.
If we want our youth to develop proper values, let them not learn to think of a bloody deer or turkey draped over the hood of a car as fun.
Alfred Henick, Medford
You devoted almost two pages to the unnecessary and frankly quite cruel and violence-promoting spring youth turkey hunt, splashing pictures of a girl with her gun and a boy with a bow and arrow. Have Long Island's supermarkets run out of food so that it has become necessary to go out into nature and slaughter peaceful living creatures?
The absurdity of it all happens in the same issue as a reader's lovely photo of two turkeys strolling peacefully in Cold Spring Harbor.
So, what exactly are you promoting here? Appreciate nature or kill it? Take a side.
Thomas Pileggi, Valley Stream
