I’m a longtime media guy (47 years of newspapering, radio and now the statewide news site InDepthNH.org), and thus had no problem spending time with Ray Duckler when he called me for an update on the controversy over the proposed trophy hunting and trapping season on the bobcat.
Had I known that he would include an insulting and patronizing quote about me from a trapper who does not know me and I do not know from a fencepost, I’d have never wasted my time or energy.
This trapper said, “John Harrigan is a lovable guy. He loves to write articles about stacking firewood and preparing a frying pan, but I look at him like he’s a weekend warrior. It could be his age. You get older, you get softer. Maybe he’s at the grandfather cuddly age.”
Talk about dismissive, presumptuous, marginalizing and disrespectful.
I’ve been a columnist ever since I walked out of a lumberyard in Milford and into my first newspaper job at the Nashua Telegraph in 1968.
I’ve written many paragraphs like that when I was feeling cocky and/or overly judgmental or didn’t have the facts to back up my side of the issue, and instead felt tempted to insult the other side. Fortunately I yanked those paragraphs before the columns ran. But, in fact, I missed one, and it embarrassed and insulted a good guy who did not deserve it, and it has haunted me ever since.
So here is what I would say to Ray Duckler:
I’ve spent a lifetime in the woods in the far northern part of the state I love. But I’m 68. As a four-decades distance runner, I’ve pounded my feet to smithereens and they’re getting even by crippling me up for a while. But I’m back, and will soon resume hoisting my pack basket for hikes into my backcountry camp.
I do write about the care and feeding of good cast-iron frypans and splitting cedar butt-ends into celery-like kindling, but I write a lot else about the great outdoors. Most recently, I’ve written a lot about a proposal to allow the hand of man to sully the poor bobcat, which is no nuisance and poses no threats and does not “need” what passes for “management,” and does not produce a “surplus” each year (let’s call that a safety net) to be “harvested” (are we talking about wheat here, or bobcats?), especially considering the 40 or so that get killed in the road.
That’s what the bobcat fight is all about, and it’s a test of whether we can think a situation out on moral grounds, with a touch of good science.
My take on this from the very start, when I first wrote on it way back in October, is not whether we “can” hunt, trap and hound the bobcat, but “should.”
That is what this issue is all about, and that’s what I wish Ray had written about, because it’s not about me.
(John Harrigan lives in Colebrook.)