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96 PartFour Though I’ve outlined a modified code for field sports and answered some important objections, there are several remaining issues of sufficient importance to warrant specific attention. In this part, I cover the future of field sports and what sportsmen must do to maintain a publicly and ethically acceptable basis for their activities. The recommendations made in the following chapters are in some ways radical, and will provoke howls of complaint from some hunters and anglers. Nevertheless, they are implied by the modified sportsman thesis and the code of conduct proposed in the last chapter. The goal of Part Four, then, is to make some suggestions about what field sports must do to persist and perhaps even flourish. This means that various cultural and political forces must be slowed and reversed because they are damaging the prospects of the continued existence of field sports. As sportsmen, we need to address issues such as postings to exclude field sports on private lands; the trend toward hunting and fishing on exclusive vacations and at private ranches as alternatives to public spaces; the hyper-competitiveness of tournaments and the professionalization of field sports; the burgeoning use of gadgets; all terrain motor transport; firearms and hunting; policies of stocking fish and game; and the use of sportsmen as agents of wildlife management. All of these are hard issues, often left to economic calculations and personal preference. We need an alternate, an ethically based way of considering them that takes into account the environmental virtues and the code of conduct developed in the last chapter. Besides putting our own house in order by modeling the best behavior, what can be done? The answer to this question is complex, and I will begin the task in two ways. First, I will explain how the desire to develop environmental virtues is thwarted by the forces of commercialization, competitions, and the over-reliance on gadgets. This explanation will not resolve these complex issues, but it will offer some much needed guidance. Second, I will suggest a partial answer lies in sportsman education for youths and conservation-group membership for adults. ImplicationsfortheFutureofFieldSports Implications for the Future of Field Sports 97 In Chapter Ten, I connect environmental virtues to some other general standard values of outdoor recreation, civic values whose importance is sufficient to justify the continuation of field sports. These values will then be employed to evaluate various problems standing in the way of this continuation. Chapter Eleven examines a force that, if left unchecked, will ultimately undermine the capability of field sports to generate virtue. This is the force of commercialism and includes not only the economic power of the “sporting industry” but also the marketing of money tournaments and the portrayal of field sports in the media. In Chapter Twelve, necessary changes in sportsmen education programs are evaluated based on the criteria developed. Chapter Thirteen considers the judgments made by sportsmen about the value and meaning of game animals, given my account of environmental virtue, and contrasts this with a standard view taken by some state and federal agencies. Critics often fasten on these viewpoints because it looks to them like animals are merely live targets stocked for the “games” of field sports. What are game animals? What values should sportsmen find in game animals? Finally, in Chapter Fourteen, I look for areas of common interest between field sports and other kinds of outdoor recreation. Only in this way can we avoid the fragmentation and weakening of those activities best suited to develop environmental virtues. ...

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