The Girl And The Duck And ‘Trophy Shots’

Open public input before the Washington Fish and Wildlife Commission always serves up thoughtful, heart-felt commentary on issues of the day. Also, eye rolls, blood pressure spikes, desk pounding, plenty of yelling – and that’s just me while listening remotely.

It’s people of all kinds of backgrounds and all kinds of stripes expressing their opinions on all kinds of critter and critter-management issues, and – shocker – I don’t always agree with them. Such is the freedom of speech in three-minute doses.

Watching the commission like I have, I’ve heard a lot of stuff over the years and, all totaled, cumulatively filled multiple notebooks with the firehose of words WDFW’s oversight panel has absorbed. Some of it has flavored blogs about various newsy bits that washed out of the meetings.

But I can’t recall that any particular public comment has ever led me to do a stand-alone story. Until now.

A LITTLE OVER AN HOUR INTO the Friday, March 22 meeting, a very frequent commenter from the animal-rights wing took issue with, of all things, WDFW’s statewide hunting prospects.

In case you’re not familiar, the annual document is a compendium of wildlife biologists’ forecasts for the various hunting seasons in their districts. As a hook-and-bullet editor, I’ve always appreciated 1) the information you can glean from it and 2) that the bios and their bosses dedicate the time and energy to produce it for hunters. It actually went away for awhile circa 2010, but Nate Pamplin, then the agency’s assistant Wildlife Program director and now its director of external communications, brought it back.

WDFW’s anti-hunting? Bullsh*t.

Inside, there are all sorts of informative tables and graphs about harvest trends, behavioral info and biological data like fawn survival and buck to cow ratios, hunting advice, pointers on accessing private lands, maps galore. And there are plenty of photos too – live animals, the state’s gorgeous scenery, biologists at work, happy successful hunters.

It was pics of happy successful hunters that struck a bad chord with this particular commenter Friday morning. They were “troubled by the number of photos that depicted hunters with their prey.”

In the hunting prospects.

They juxtaposed hunters’ statements on the reverence we hold for our quarry – the meat of which they acknowledged was “preferable” to that raised on factory farms – with our photographic portrayals from the hunt.

“I don’t see how these photos can be considered anything other than trophy images,” they said. “They are not about food, but about our displays of ego and competitiveness.”

“Trophy” is one of those words around hunting that some try to exploit as a wedge.

In particular, this person didn’t like that WDFW had included a pic of a hunter and his mountain goat in the face of the state’s overall herd decline, but what they found “most disturbing of all” was a photograph buried two-thirds of the way through a recent edition of the prospects of nearly 700 pages.

“It is the image of a very young child, perhaps 6 or 7 years of age, holding a lifeless duck by its neck and smiling into the camera. This does not teach the child about respect and honor for the bird, which has just had its life taken, or even about the food that it may provide. Nor does it teach anything about ethical hunting. Rather, it imparts to this child a sense that a once vital and alive creature is nothing more than a prop for a photo op. To the department I ask, please stop the aggrandizement of trophy shots,” they said.

As someone who has published just a few “grip-n-grin” pictures over the decades, I immediately had to look up said offensive “trophy” photo.

I’m not going to share it here so as to keep the girl and her family off blast, but what I found instead was a cute little kiddo wearing kiddie-sized camo waders and holding a drake taken at a North Sound wildlife area. It’s quite clear she’s proud of it and no doubt her dad was proud of her, too, and so he shared the pic with WDFW.

Honestly, if her father had sent the photo to me, it would be an absolute shoe-in for winning the mag’s monthly photo contest, and I’d probably run it on my cover.

So, yeah, I may not be an entirely objective observer, but what kind of curmudgeon calls out an image of a happy little girl to make a point about “trophy” hunting pics? And who is to say that the girl’s parents hadn’t actually already taught her about hunting ethics and respecting and honoring the kill, and that she isn’t beaming with joy because she realizes she helped bring home dinner that day?

Why the commenter had to veer so very far out of their lane to bash hunters and WDFW was beyond me, but not unusual in my experience with zealots.

IT REMINDED ME OF A STORY from, oh, about 12, 15 years ago, something like that.

I used to ride the bus to work when our magazine office was located in the Pyramid brewhouse in Seattle’s SoDo District, and then down to Tukwila when we moved there. For many of those years I took the 304 and 303 Expresses between Shoreline and downtown.

I didn’t mind the bus. It did make me crazy at times, but also saved us money, plus I didn’t have to deal with rush hour traffic; I could use the ride home to blog on my phone if something came up after hours (which it invariably did – looking at you, WDFW, wolves and whatnot); and, hell, I was also doing my tiny little part to save the damn planet. Gold star for me!

It even inspired a feature I wrote for the mag about using public transit to access fishing spots. While my own busborne adventure to the Edmonds Pier via what felt like ALL of the backroads in Shoreline did not yield any catches, I did write about other rider-anglers who were able to successfully pull it off.

Those bus-riding days are all a blur now, but one ride home on the 304 in particular has stuck in my memory.

You get to know most of the faces on your route, so the bicyclist who got on one sunny afternoon stood out, and in more ways than one.

Most riders would bury their heads in books or phones, stare out the windows or talk quietly with seatmates, but for some reason known only to this guy, he took issue with the magazine one of the regulars was reading.

Sitting several rows ahead of him behind the bus driver, the older gent had a copy of Car & Driver or some similar glossy rag featuring high-powered vehicles, luxury cars, those sorts of aspirational autos, and their reviews. He often read such magazines on the bus ride home.

Perhaps that bicyclist had had one too many run-ins with cars and drivers that day on the mean but actually polite streets of the Emerald City, but there on the bus he tore into the gent for having the audacity to be reading about autos, going on as if they and the man were in league with the devil and were hauling us all to hell locked in the trunk.

“Shame on you!” he pronounced loudly.

He got off in a huff at the first stop along I-5, and we never saw him again after that.

It always struck me as utterly ironic. Here the magazine-reading bus rider was essentially part of a huge carpool that reduced traffic, helped to keep another car off downtown streets, limited his emissions contribution – literally doing all the “right” things – and despite all that, it wasn’t good enough for our loud, puritanical companion that commute.

BACK TO FRIDAY’S COMMENTER and the girl with the duck.

I’m gonna try to take to heart Commission Chair Barbara Baker’s request yesterday morning that the sides fighting one another in front of the commission talk to one another instead of use my blog here to ramp up confrontation and conflict. Try.

As humans, we hunters also tend to take a LOT of pics of our kids, our grandkids, our nieces and nephews, etc. We’re proud of them and their achievements, and those years pass so fast. Maybe at a young age they don’t fully grasp grown-up concepts like hunting ethics, but I have no doubts that on the whole, the millions and millions of grip-n-grin first duck/first deer/first trout/first salmon pics that have been snapped since the camera was invented have ultimately yielded generations upon generations upon generations of conservation-minded sportsmen, a phenomenal force for the natural world.

You’ve probably heard of Congress’s Pittman-Robertson and Dingell-Johnson Wildlife and Sportfish Restoration Acts and their hunting and angling gear excise taxes, so I won’t belabor them, but duck hunters, in particular, have a lot to be proud of. They’re also required to buy federal duck stamps to hunt waterfowl, 98 percent of the proceeds from which go “directly to purchase vital habitat or acquire conservation easements,” according to USFWS.

Those acquisitions not only benefit ducks and duck hunters, but wetland creatures and habitats and water quality as a whole. Even as most North American bird species are in decline over the long term, dabbling and diving ducks and waterbirds have increased.

So, that girl and her North Sound greenhead symbolize not an unethical trophy photo, but a triumph of sportsman-powered conservation in the face of titanic pressures against the natural world. Where some might see “ego,” I see pride in helping turn the tide. Where some might see “competitiveness,” I see quiet, roll-up-your-sleeves-and-grab-a-shovel competence.

WDFW was absolutely right to aggrandize that.

As for that supposedly objectionable mountain goat image, the caption indicates the hunter took it near Mount Saint Helens, where goat numbers are actually increasing and able to provide hunting opportunity under state managers’ plan for the species. In WDFW’s 2025 hunting proposals, a grand total of just seven – 7 – tags would be available in all of Washington this fall. They’re split between the South Cascades’ Mt. St. Helens South (where this particular one was shot), Mt. Margaret Backcountry, Goat Rocks West, Goat Rocks East and Naches Pass goat units.

On the flip side, with goats having a hard go of it in the North and Central Cascades since somewhere in the mid- to late 2010s, special permit opportunities there have already been or are proposed to be zeroed out for this season. Hunters have no issue with that. We don’t want to see Washington lose yet another native alpine denizen, as has happened with mountain caribou.

For the record, there are three other mountain goat pictures in the WDFW hunting prospects document that drew such ire, and they show five live goats – in the North Cascades, Snohomish County and Region 3. Combined with the image of the hunter’s St. Helens harvest, I’d say WDFW nailed the right ratio and proportion for the situation at hand.

I decided to count all the pics in this particular hunting forecast and discovered there were more than twice as many images showing live critters compared to dead ones – 90 to 38. There are also 19 landscapes or nature shots, 10 or so of biologists in action, seven featuring wing collection barrels, two of hunters in the wild, and one is of a dog retrieving a duck. (There are also a bunch of illustrative shots.)

And for the further record, none of the grip-and-grins WDFW ran struck me as distasteful in the least – and believe it or not, I do have standards. Not to say I haven’t run a few of these among the zillion I’ve printed, but I grade against critter piles, people sitting on their kill, fish that must be released being handled poorly, or images that belittle the quarry in some way.

Washington being Washington, I do worry about this, but I hope WDFW’s photo editor doesn’t flinch from Friday’s commenter’s thoughts when they put together 2025’s forecast. Hunters – all people – love to look at images of wildlife, landscapes (Scott Fitkin’s and Justin Haug’s beautiful pics from the Okanogan take me to a beloved countryside) and people who have found success in a shared, noble tradition.

There is power in that, and there is no shame – none whatsoever – in memorializing that happy-sad moment when in sustaining one’s own life, we’ve taken an animal’s. It’s real. It’s a tale as old as humanity. And in doing so today, we’re also giving back to the animals. That’s what the hunting prospects helps ensure.

JUST AS WITH THAT BICYCLIST on the bus, I don’t know why someone would go to such lengths to pluck a pic of a little girl to knock hunters (or – like we heard from a commissioner this morning – unnecessarily devalue sportsmen’s longterm contributions to fish and wildlife and then make the appeal “can we all please work together” on funding issues).

I don’t get it.

How exactly does the goody two-shoes, holier-than-thou approach ultimately benefit the critters or their habitat or make us want to work with you?

Maybe it was just an issue of miscalibration on their part. Lord knows I’m guilty of going too heavy at times. But there was nothing in the photo of the girl and her duck that was out of the ordinary for success pics. It’s just part of who we are and how we celebrate and venerate the hunt and the harvest, the hunter and the quarry. The more you know …

At Friday afternoon’s session of the commission, one thing I heard the actual authors of the now famous Ruckelshaus Report say was that their interviews with stakeholders showed there is a buttload of “passion” out there for WDFW and the work it does for Washington’s fish and wildlife.

So I say, you’re more than welcome to ride the bus with us, and constructive criticism is appreciated, but misinformed comments such as we heard yesterday aren’t.

And now … I want to do something else with my life today, namely, pull invasive weeds in the back 40 and see how my garden’s doing. One thing’s for damn sure, it don’t need watering.