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Laws to permit the colour "blaze pink" for hunters have been proposed in five states in the US. How did this become a legislative trend?
As the legislative session drew to a close last week at the Minnesota state capitol, a curious piece of legislation became the focus of ire for lawmakers - a bill to make something called "blaze pink" legal for hunters to wear.
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Last spring, Wisconsin Representative Nick Milroy had the idea that "blaze pink" might also be an acceptable safety colour as well as a way to get some new blood into the sport.He even got a textile scientist at a local university to investigate whether there were any safety concerns.
"The fastest growing segment in new recruits into hunting are females, and that's one of the big reasons that companies have been marketing things like pink camouflage, pink guns, pink knives," he says.
Participation in hunting in the US has been on the decline for decades, and the sport is overwhelmingly dominated by men.
Safety Orange to become Safety Pink?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 29 2016, @02:46PM
We required "blaze orange" on hunters, but not on other people in the woods. Hunters are still required to avoid shooting people.
I suspect the real issue is the police. Orange camo makes it seem that the hunters probably aren't hunting humans.
Oh, and garment industry lobbying.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Sunday May 29 2016, @07:50PM
I think it's about harm mitigation. Most of the people you're likely to run into while hunting on public land are other hunters. It's not perfect, but I'll bet it has stopped a bunch of people from dying without requiring non-hunters to know which animals are in season and what can be hunted on which public lands before going out into nature.
On topic excerpt from Travels with Charley, by John Steinbeck (Rocinante is the name of his truck, after Don Quixote's steed, and Charley is his dog):
If I were hungry, I would
happily hunt anything that runs or crawls or flies, even
relatives, and tear them down with my teeth. But it
isn’t hunger that drives millions of armed American
males to forests and hills every autumn, as the high incidence
of heart failure among the hunters will prove.
Somehow the hunting process has to do with masculinity,
but I don’t quite know how. I know there are
any number of good and efficient hunters who know
what they are doing; but many more are overweight
gentlemen, primed with whisky and armed with highpowered
rifles. They shoot at anything that moves or
looks as though it might, and their success in killing
one another may well prevent a population explosion.
If the casualties were limited to their own kind there
would be no problem, but the slaughter of cows, pigs,
farmers, dogs, and highway signs makes autumn a
dangerous season in which to travel. A farmer in upper
New York State painted the word “cow” in big
black letters on both sides of his white bossy, but the
hunters shot it anyway. In Wisconsin, as I was driving
through, a hunter shot his own guide between the
shoulder blades. The coroner questioning this nimrod
asked, “Did you think he was a deer?”
“Yes, sir, I did.”
“But you weren’t sure he was a deer.”
“Well, no sir. I guess not.”
With the rolling barrage going on in Maine, of
course I was afraid for myself. Four automobiles were
hit on opening day, but mainly I was afraid for Charley.
I know that a poodle looks very like a buck deer
to one of these hunters, and I had to find some way
of protecting him. In Rocinante there was a box of
red Kleenex that someone had given me as a present. I
wrapped Charley’s tail in red Kleenex and fastened it
with rubber bands. Every morning I renewed his flag,
and he wore it all the way west while bullets whined
and whistled around us. This is not intended to be funny.
The radios warned against carrying a white handkerchief.
Too many hunters seeing a flash of white have
taken it for the tail of a running deer and cured a head
cold with a single shot.
But this legacy of the frontiersman is not a new
thing. When I was a child on the ranch near Salinas,
California, we had a Chinese cook who regularly
made a modest good thing of it. On a ridge not far
away, a sycamore log lay on its side supported by two
of its broken branches. Lee’s attention was drawn to
this speckled fawn-colored chunk of wood by the bullet
holes in it. He nailed a pair of horns to one end
and then retired to his cabin until deer season was
over. Then he harvested the lead from the old tree
trunk. Some seasons he got fifty or sixty pounds of it.
It wasn’t a fortune but it was wages. After a couple
of years, when the tree was completely shot away,
Lee replaced it with four gunny sacks of sand and
the same antlers. Then it was even easier to harvest
his crop. If he had put out fifty of them it would have
been a fortune, but Lee was a humble man who didn’t
care for mass production.
Don't take this all as fact. Travels with Charley is strange book, it has odd parallels to Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas which involved way stronger drugs and was written a decade later. Steinbeck is attempting relay what he experienced as he remembers it, not what happened.