Sunday, September 24, 2006
Public can tell real hunters from Hollywood fakes
Mark Taylor
Mark Taylor's Outdoors column and notebook appears regularly in The Roanoke Times.
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This just in: Hunters don't believe they are accurately portrayed in television and movies.
A recent poll at huntersurvey.com showed that 55.2 percent of hunters felt they were rarely portrayed accurately, while 38.8 percent said they were only sometimes portrayed accurately.
No kidding.
Internet polls aren't exactly scientific, but it's hard to argue with this one.
A couple of weekends ago when I got together with some friends for some early-season squirrel hunting, a couple of guys were talking about yet another example of Hollywood's typical take on hunting.
Apparently in the popular show "Grey's Anatomy," a turkey hunter is shot by his buddy during a trip that also included some boozing.
My personal "favorite" was an episode of "Spin City" in which an obscenely obnoxious -- but rich -- potential campaign donor essentially extorts Michael J. Fox's character into shooting a fawn during a "hunting" trip.
And, of course, there is "Bambi."
Having grown up in the pre-video era, I never watched it as a kid. But I am familiar enough with the story to know that it doesn't exactly portray hunters in the best light.
Hunters might feel picked on, but we're not alone.
Hollywood rarely gets anything right when it comes to the outdoors.
Ask any experienced climber what they thought about the movie "Vertical Limit." They will start laughing.
"American Flyers" is about as accurate in its portrayal of bike racing as the bike racing scene in "Pee-wee's Big Adventure."
A co-worker who lived in Alaska said theater audiences laughed hysterically during a showing of the drama "The Edge," starring Alec Baldwin, Anthony Hopkins and a tame bear.
To be fair, Hollywood producers aren't the only ones who twist the reality of hunting and fishing.
While a few hunting and fishing shows are pretty realistic, many are carefully edited and constructed to spice things up or clean things up.
Some of those shows are filmed under circumstances that hardly qualify as fair chase. Video hunters are almost never shown making bad shots on game or unable to recover animals.
Many video producers also include reenactments in their hunting segments.
I cringe every time I see footage of a hunter walking up to a felled quarry, saying "There he is!" excitedly and poking the thing with his bow or gun to make sure it's dead.
Sometimes the most realistic Hollywood depictions of hunting and fishing show up in unlikely places.
One of the characters in the mockumentary "Best in Show" owns a fly shop. In one scene he's suggesting flies to a customer and he's nailing it, from the names of the flies to the techniques for fishing them.
In another recent critically-acclaimed movie that probably wasn't seen by a lot of hunters, two men are forced to shoot an elk when they lose their supplies during a wilderness camping trip.
That scene in "Brokeback Mountain" is the most realistic depiction of elk hunting since "Jeremiah Johnson," David Stalling, an avid elk hunter, wrote in a magazine article.
But more times than not, the television or movie hunter is unfairly depicted as obnoxious, demonic and dumb. Hunters are rightly concerned that those caustic images can influence public opinion of a sport that just a small percentage of the population actually participates in.
That may happen to a degree, but it's probably not as bad as we think.
Responsive Management, a Harrisonburg company that specializes in outdoors surveys, recently asked 813 Americans over 18 about their opinions on hunting and fishing.
As might be expected, fishing was overwhelmingly approved, with 93.3 percent of those polled supporting the sport.
The support for hunting was also high. Although 16.3 percent disapproved of hunting, 78 percent approved of legal hunting.
In fact, the approval rate for hunting was up. A 1994 survey had the hunting approval rate at 73 percent.
Clearly, the general public understands that Hollywood hunters aren't real hunters.
Public opinion of hunting is based on what we do, not what people see on TV or on the silver screen.
