A few years ago a buddy — whom to this day is so embarrassed about this episode that he refused to let me name him — was invited on a “hog hunt” at a game ranch in the northern Lower Peninsula of Michigan.

Not wanting to seem ungracious, he accepted. And as someone who understands where meat comes from, he figured if nothing else there’d be a mountain of pork chops in his freezer.

The hunt went something like this: Early morning they were dropped in the enclosure and told where the pigs might be. Some time passed, and the ranch operator drove into the enclosure again to see how they were doing. Within moments, the truck was surrounded by pigs expecting to be fed.

One bow-toting member of the “hunting” party decided that would be an opportune time to shoot a hog. He picked one out and drew, but the animal came closer, still expecting a meal. So the guy kicks at the hog to back it up, then grabs a stick to get it far enough away to shoot. Finally the porker gets the picture and backs away, and a point-blank arrow pierces its chest.

It runs away squealing, but that doesn’t deter the other hungry little piggies. So my friend shoulders his muzzleloader and pops another porker.

End result: Two fat pigs for the table, and a story that I cannot do justice. It still makes me belly laugh every time I hear it at deer camp. But it’s hard to call that a hunt. On any level.

I can’t help think about that as Michigan’s game managers go to battle against feral hogs, most of which have escaped from some sorry facility just like the one described above. They’re horribly destructive, a threat to wildlife, livestock and humans.

Michigan’s DNRE wants them declared an invasive species, which would make them illegal to possess, which would effectively shut down swine hunting operations statewide. The goal is to “shut off the faucet” and stop new animals from escaping.

First, I understand that there are high-end operations that manage their fences, keep strict control of their animals and even test for disease. I believe that those facilities are not the problem. I also believe they afford something that resembles a hunt, with quarry that could hurt you.

I’m not a high-fence guy. If it can’t turn and run for a mile the second it detects you, it’s not a free-ranging animal, and it’s not my bag. But we’re predators after all, and if you’re eating what you kill there’s no appreciable difference between collecting your own meat and having a butcher do it.

Hog-shooting lodges are not in themselves evil. But a hog-shooting lodge done poorly is. The risks of allowing such facilities to keep turning hogs loose are just too high.

Everyone agrees that a well-regulated industry would not be a problem. A bill introduced Wednesday by three Michigan lawmakers would mandate it.

Let’s see that it becomes law. Let’s see that the good operators pay for the sensible regulations that will ultimately keep them in business. Let’s see that the bad ones fail.

And let’s save future hunters the embarrassment.

The news today was encouraging: It appears that the sole Asian carp found in June in Lake Calumet did not pass through the electrical barrier near Lockport, Ill., which is designed to keep the invasive, ecosystem-crushing fish out of Lake Michigan.

That’s good.

Instead, it looks as though it was put into Lake Calumet several years ago by humans. That’s bad.

How many more Asian carp have been moved around? And to where?

And to those who think this fish’s origin proves that the barrier is working: Put down the kool-aid. Seriously. We’re talking about lots of water here. So far they’ve only found one fish on the bad side of the barrier. That’s great, but one fish doesn’t tell anyone jack squat about whether that barrier is working or not.

We all hope like heck that it is. But one misplaced fish doesn’t prove a thing.

What say we keep looking..

As a young newspaper editor many moons ago, I paid extra close attention to details and tried to learn as much as I could about a lot of things so I could avoid putting stupid things in the paper. Things like calling Marines “soldiers,” which really rankles both Army guys – who actually ARE soldiers — and Marines alike.

So one day walking past the newsroom bulletin board I noticed a new posting that listed a whole slew of common mistakes that reporters and copy editors make. It was written, if I recall, by some revered know-it-all (I use the term with respect) from the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times. Most of them I’ve long forgotten, because but there was one that I will never forget: It ridiculed the use of the term “high-powered rifle” on the basis that ALL rifles are high-powered, and that it’s silly and redundant to call a rifle high powered.

Ahem. I beg to differ. Go shoot an elk at 100 yards with a .22 LR (of course, the R stands for rifle). Then at the same distance shoot it with a .338 Win mag. Now ask the elk if one was more powerful than another. Oops, maybe you should have asked after the first shot – the one that made it twitch its hide like it was bitten by an insect — because that second one vaporized its innards.

The fact is there are low-powered rifles AND high-powered rifles, and anyone who shoots rifles or has done even a little homework about which rifles are suited for which game (think .30-30 vs. .30-06) knows that.

I was reminded of that poor advice by the photo below, which of course pokes fun at the media’s general ignorance of firearms. Having been in newsrooms most of my adult life, I can assure you there isn’t some large-scale anti-gun bias in there. What is there is a pretty well-educated, mostly suburbanized group of people who know a lot about a lot of things, but not much about guns. Are some of them opposed to gun rights? Sure. About as many as there are card-carrying NRA members.  There are a handful of each, and a whole bunch who just don’t know their assault rifle from a hole in the ground.

It doesn’t mean they’re malicious. Just ignorant. And worthy of the poke.

Sometimes people just don’t get it.

I have on my desk a new video game titled “3-D Hunting 2010.” It’s made by a company called Kalypso, and promises that I can hunt 26 different species of “rare and wild animals” in a variety of “exotic locations.”

The selling points listed on the package include creating a unique “hunter,” developing skills, a wide array of weapons, realistic dangerous animal behavior, weather effects and 72 different missions.

It sounds like Kalypso did a nice job of making its game as realistic as a two-dimensional electronic game played in a controlled environment can be. But it’s the final feature that caught my attention: “Avoid being the hunted – don’t get caught by the gameskeeper or Game Over!”

Uh oh.

So I opened up the game, plugged the disk into my computer and watched my worst suspicion form on the screen. This is not a hunting game, it’s a poaching game. You start by choosing which POACHER you want to be. Half the game is shooting animals and the other half is dodging the law.

Really?

How hard would it have been for the folks at Kalypso to make this a legal hunt? You start the game by acquiring weapons and supplies with limited funds, so you’re already forced to make choices. Why not make a hunting license one of the requirements so that when the gameskeeper approaches, you can prove you’re hunting legally? Why couldn’t they have made part of the challenge passing up animals the hunter aren’t licensed to shoot? If they absolutely needed to include poachers, couldn’t they have made up some good guy/bad guy scenario where you can choose to poach with a different risk/reward structure? Or somehow pitted hunters against the poachers who are ruining their sport?

I realize that in the grand scheme of things this doesn’t quite rival thousands of barrels of crude oil billowing into the ocean every day. And I highly doubt that this video game will make kids run out and poach elephants.

But this game represents a frightening and somewhat disheartening gap that exists between hunters and non-hunters: Too many of the latter see no difference between hunting and poaching.

I never, ever hunt or fish without the proper licenses and legal equipment, and I believe that the vast majority of hunters are the same way. Do I want a conservation officer interrupting my hunt or stopping me to check out all my gear? Of course not. But I know before I start any hunt that if one does I will be in compliance. I have nothing to fear from them, and I’m glad they do what they do.

As hunters, we are willing and important participants in wildlife management in a world where more and more people have eschewed that responsibility. Game laws exist for reasons that most of us fully support, and if we disagree with them we adhere to them anyway because it’s right. If you don’t, shame on you and congratulations on your new video game.

The line between hunting and poaching is very clear to me, and I wish it were as clear to everyone. Anti-hunting groups like PETA and the Humane Society of the United States love to maintain that blur because it helps them convert the ignorant.

Hunting is hunting. Poaching is poaching. Equating them is offensive. The irony is that the folks at Kalypso designed this game for hunters – the very people they’ve minimized.

A sure sign that they just don’t get it.

OK, here’s a quick quiz. Which of the following would you consider the bigger slob?

a) Someone who shoots a deer just so it can be used as bait to attract eagles for viewing?

b) Someone who shoots a deer out of season for any reason?

c) Someone who uses more than 100 gallons of bait — that’s 50 times the legal amount in the Upper Peninsula — to attract deer?

d) Someone who shoots a deer, strips its backstraps out and leaves the rest.

It’s a tough call. Each of the above behaviors is reprehensible, disgusting and gives legitimate, law-abiding deer hunters a bad name. Well, here’s the good news: YOU DON’T HAVE TO CHOOSE! The very same morons did all those things!

OK, so no one has been convicted yet. But conservation officers from the Michigan Department of Natural Resources and Environment are pursuing charges. They say they received a citizen complaint about a large bait pile in a remote area of Delta County. When they checked out the offending deer camp, they found the massive bait pile, a blood trail and a freshly killed deer on the ice of a nearby lake.

When the owner and his pack of imbeciles returned from snowmobiling, they admitted the whole thing. And they still had the backstraps.

Genius.

I’ve never really understood the gap that sometimes exists between the hooks-and-bullets rednecks and the greenie tree-huggers.

I’m positive there are people who would consider me one or the other. I tend to think of myself as both. I love to hunt and fish, and I make no apologies about killing animals so I can eat them. We as a species are hard-wired to do that. Meat nourishes us. It’s why our ancestors invented weapons. It’s why they had opposable thumbs with which to grasp them.

But it’s important for us to take care of our planet. Acid rain is bad. Mercury emissions that land in lakes and contaminate fish are bad. Human decisions that compromise habitat are bad. Take your trash out of the woods. Reduce your carbon footprint. Recycle.

So let’s hear it for Minnesotans, who realized en masse that those two worldviews do not exclude each other. Thanks to a coalition of old-school outdoors folks and new-school environmentalists, Minnesotans last year voted to tax themselves — it’s a 0.375-percent sales tax — so they could protect wildlife habitat and keep their state clean.

They’ll keep huge forests undeveloped, restore critical wetlands and clean up lakes and rivers. Some people will enter the food web to hunt and fish there. Others will just observe.

And they can all take credit for doing the right thing.

Bravo.

Dear Minnesota, Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin and both Dakotas:

On Tuesday, all of you will open another dove season and scores of dads, sons and daughters will take to the field for some good old togetherness.

It’s a near-perfect setup. No one will complain about cold feet because it’s still summer. There will be enough shooting to keep everyone entertained. The shooting will be fast, frustrating and educational. The quarry is plentiful enough that its populations can withstand everything you can throw at it. When it’s over, proud kids will beam over the tasty meal they helped provide.

My people don’t hunt doves. They tried to make it happen, but some deep-pocketed anti-hunting groups managed to bamboozle voters with a lot of half-truths, sleight of hand and outright falsehood. They spread the lie that doves would be shot from backyard feeders. They said doves are too small to eat. They put actors in Detroit Tiger caps to make them look familiar, then paid them to say that yes, they’re hunters, but no, they could never hunt those cute little birds. They called them birds of peace, a purely human concept.

It worked. My voters ignored the fact that doves are so prolific they can lose nearly three-quarters of their population each year to a variety of causes - including your hunters — yet still bounce back strong. They ignored the fact that dove hunting happens in open fields where a startling number of the birds are fast and elusive enough to dodge even the sharpest shooter. They ignored the fact that doves are not really smaller than grouse or quail, and certainly much larger than shrimp. They ignored the fact that if you interviewed 1,000 doves about what peace means to them, you’d get the exact same answer 1,000 times: They would want to eat and mate. It’s all they know. Peace? Not so much.

The antis won here. But they didn’t win there. So be safe, shoot straight, shoot lots and have fun. Wish I could be there.

Your friend,

Michigan

I was reading one of the bigger outdoor magazines last night when I came across a passage that stopped me cold. It said “13 anti-hunting groups” had sued to put the gray wolf back on the federal endangered species list.

That statement is true for the most part. It’s the other part I’m worried about. This whole wolf debate is very heated, and it has become de rigeuer to use half-truths and inflammatory language to forward the cause, particularly by those who want the gray wolf to remain under federal protection.

I believe the science is there to show that the wolves have recovered enough to let the states manage them. It’s unrealistic to think the Western Great Lakes population of gray wolves should colonize outside the big woods up north, and they’re clearly doing just fine there. Thanks to the Endangered Species Act and the end of bounties, the gray wolf population of Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan has grown from a couple hundred animals in the mid-1970s to around 4,000 today.

The fact is they’re filling up the available habitat and reaching a balance with their food supply. Conflicts with humans — read that as attacks on pets and livestock — can’t help but increase with the wolf numbers. By giving those controls back to the states, problem wolves can be eliminated and the people who have to live with wolves can be placated. It’s a kind of empowerment that can help build tolerance of wolves in places where that is scarce, and that can only help the wolves in the long run. It’s a practical way to let wolves and humans share the landscape.

Those who oppose letting states manage wolves disagree, and they’re not shy about bending the truth. When a court ruled that wolves should go back on the list because the U.S. Fish and Wlidlife Service didn’t hold a proper public comment period — clearly a technicality – the Humane Society of the United States web site crowed “Feds cry uncle in wolf lawsuit,” as though the USFWS had just given up because it was so incredibly wrong.

Later they describe state management plans as “killing plans” because they include allowing landowners to kill wolves caught in the act of attacking livestock, and they include the possibility of sport-hunting wolves. One HSUS lawyer calls state management “reckless plans to start sport hunting and trapping imperiled wolves.” That’s just silly. The scientists who put together the wolf management plans have spent years listening and learning how to make wolf management work for everybody, most notably the wolves themselves. They’re anything but reckless.

And keep in mind that the Michigan and Wisconsin legislatures would have to pass laws making wolves a game species before any sport hunting can happen. And keep in mind that Michigan couldn’t even get that designation for mourning doves, which already are hunted in dozens of states. Wolves? Yeah, right.

Another group, the Center for Biological Diversity, isn’t against hunting at all, according to Michael Robinson, its wolf expert. It just believes that wolves haven’t recovered enough to be de-listed, and that the USFWS is applying the Endangered Species Act illegally. It claims that the Western Great Lakes wolves are too genetically isolated to be viable and could be susceptible to disease or hybridization. Those sound like compelling arguments, but they ignore the fact that wolves don’t recognize international borders. That western Great Lakes population of wolves is really just the southern arm of a huge Canadian population that includes some 50,000 animals. They come and go between the U.S. and Canada at will, mixing their genes and everything. Isolated? Hardly.

Which brings us back to our outdoor magazine’s claim that “13 anti-hunting groups” filed the suit to keep wolves on the Endangered Species List. Remember the Center for Biological Diversity? They may be anti-wolf-hunting, and they may be in bed with a bunch of anti-hunting lunatics, but they’re not anti-hunting.

A minor distinction? Probably. But in the circles I travel, there isn’t much that can rile folks up like the term “anti-hunting.” Hardly anything is as inflammatory as that. It’s a blanket statement that describes an unbending, systematic attempt to strip us of our rights, extinguish our passion and shut down our lifestyle.

When it’s true, use it. When it’s sort of true, don’t. In the hunter/anti-hunter argument, we have to be right. And saying things that are wrong, even a little bit wrong, makes that a lot harder.

Right?

If you haven’t had a chance to visit Lake Superior State University’s fish cam, you should. When the fish start stacking up, it really is fascinating to watch.

The cam is located in the St. Mary’s River, the outlet that carries Lake Superior’s overflow into Lake Huron and on to the Atlantic Ocean. It’s also home to runs of steelhead in the spring, Atlantic salmon in the summer and chinooks — what’s left of them — in the fall.

Activity varies — it’s nature, after all — and it’s not unusual to see whitefish, suckers and other river inhabitants. Today it looks like the Atlantic salmon are making their way in from northern Lake Huron. Numerous fish swim right in front of the camera, giving you an up-close look at what life in the big lake does to a fish. You can see the clipped fins that tell what year the fish was stocked. Many have lamprey marks on them.

Worse, a disturbingly high number of salmon are actually carrying those vile bloodsuckers. I saw one fish with two lampreys on it.

There’s no two ways about it: Those are nasty critters. I mean, we know they’re out there. We know what they do. But seeing so many of them on fish is pretty disturbing. Efforts are ongoing to rid the Great Lakes of sea lampreys. But clearly there’s plenty of work to do.

You are certainly free to think what you want about Barack Obama. As president he’s pretty much fair game for criticism.

You can disagree with his stimulus plan or his approach to health care. You can worry about how his policies will affect lawful gun owners. You can wonder whether he’ll be tough enough on terrorism or how he’ll handle Iran.

But today he’s catching grief because … drum roll, please … he swatted a fly.

You read that right. In a television interview, a fly buzzed Obama. He waited for it to land, then nimbly and accurately … oops, I mean cruelly and thoughtlessly … swatted it. To death. That’s right. He took its life. The horror. So PETA jumped at the chance to lecture the president about being more humane.

I once witnessed such senseless violence hanging out in a barnyard. This steer, this vicious, blood-thirsty steer, was chewing away and very carelessly flopping her tail back and forth. You can’t tell me she couldn’t see or feel all those flies hanging around her flanks. I think she might have been doing it on purpose, because she repeatedly came very close to hitting them!

I was about to warn her that I didn’t appreciate her reckless behavior, and then it happened. So fast. That hairy, matted end of her tail caught a fly flush. It fluttered to the ground and lay motionless. “How could you? You beast!” I shouted. The killer played dumb, just staring back at me, chewing, chewing, chewing, that tail still swinging defiantly. So callous. What an animal.

I picked up the fly and stroked its head. I held it to my breast. I spoke to it softly. And then astonishingly, it twitched. It twitched again, then righted itself. It did that little fly thing where they rub their wings with their back legs. And then it flew over onto some poop. It was a miracle!

But that didn’t excuse that damned steer. There’s no reason to be so hateful.

So I had her slaughtered. And man, was she tasty.

Oops.