By Jim Robertson

Ahh, Spring! It’s a time of healing and recovering from the effects of harsh Winter conditions. The season of birth for wildlife and re-birth for the wild world. Springtime is supposed to be the season of emergence—whether it’s an American robin hatching from an egg or a black bear sow, followed by her newborn cubs, emerging from a cozy birthing den—it’s meant to be a sacred time of life-giving celebration.

So, who, in their right mind, would imagine that Spring would be a good time to declare open season on any species of animal. Well, I don’t know about the “in their right mind” part, but sport hunters are the types who would—and boy have they ever! Especially when it comes to North America’s turkeys or “gobblers” as hunting magazines are so fond of labelling them. Perhaps the childish nickname helps hunters to objectify and degrade the noble birds that founding father Benjamin Franklin thought should be our national symbol.

 Recently, people everywhere are seeing a growth, an expansion—a literal skyrocketing of the sport of Turkey hunting, as if Spring had suddenly and mysteriously transformed into Autumn and Elmers of the bird-hunting variety all hatched simultaneously and crawled out of their nests to descend on an innocent and unsuspecting world.

It makes no difference whether it’s a red state, a blue state, pink, green or purple, it seems every single state’s game departments are pushing for new or expanded spring turkey hunting seasons after planting the highly prized “game” birds just about everywhere they could possibly think of—including many regions which never supported turkeys in the past.

As a “sport” Spring turkey hunting threatens to overtake baseball as a new American tradition. To be clear, baseball is a sport, and along with football and basketball, it is a team sport, played by evenly matched teams. But hunting doesn’t qualify as a sport for the simple reason that deer don’t carry rifles and turkeys don’t wield shotguns. And unlike hunters, neither of those species has a misguided sense of what constitutes a sport.

Spring turkey hunts have become so popular of late that states without seasons on turkeys are being sucked into the undertow of the sport hunting tsunami threatening to submerge the land in a giant wave of shotgun-toting insanity that’s trying to take the country by storm. Spring hunting is a notion that needs to be exposed and squelched before it becomes yet another “tradition” in the name of exploitation.