Pennsylvania Game News - October 2011 - 49

DON’T let the fawn, dozing among the milkweed, fool you. It’s got animal smarts. By hunting season, it’ll be savvy enough to give us the runaround.

of the brain and our powers of reasoning and logic are highly developed. We are adept with our hands, have developed not only spoken, but also written words and language, and are good with numbers. This all serves us well in the world we navigate daily, which is largely human-affected, human-determined and human-made. We know how to use the computer and our cars and cell phones. We figure we’re pretty smart. Then we go hunting and we get our comeuppance. The young-of-the-year turkey, scarcely out of poult stage, simply will not come to our calling, even if we thoroughly scattered the flock. Or the jake gobbler comes in silently behind us and we only know it was there, and is now leaving, by the sharp, derisive, Putt! And yet we talk about being “bird-brained.” We think we’re sneaking through the woods and the red squirrel, its brain scarcely as big as the nuts it eats, spots us and chatters and chirrs to anything that will listen. We’re being watchful and the buck bolts out of the brush we just passed. Or the grouse flushes wildly out of gun range. Or we can’t even get the lowly opossum to step into the trap. In this world, there are all kinds of smarts. Ours is one; wildlife’s is another. When we go hunting, most of our human smarts are worthless. True, we carry with us or wear items that human intelligence conceived and created. Items such as firearms, telescopic sights, binoculars, compound bows and crossbows. We wear high-tech sporting clothes of synthetic materials. Or we wear shorn, woven and dyed wool or grown, picked and processed
OCTOBER 2011

Bob Steiner

cotton, natural materials repurposed by human ingenuity. When our smarts are tested against that of wildlife on their home turf, we’re the dumb ones. They could not compete with us where and how we live, they can’t drive a car or solve a Sudoku puzzle, but neither can we equal their abilities in the wild. The smarts we’re so proud of let us function as people in a people world. But when we hunt, we are in the animals’ world. We hunters are tasked with besting wildlife in smarts. Trouble is, we have to do it on their terms. To get the game we’re after, our smarts won’t work. We have to be smart like them. This is what makes hunting such a change from what we do every day and such an intriguing challenge. We’re faced with thinking differently, paying more attention to what other parts of our brain tell us. We have to listen to something besides our brain’s frontal lobes. We come away from a day of hunting tired, but also rested and relaxed. I believe part of that is because we have let our reasoning mind take a break. For a day, we “thought” like the animals. What kind of smarts does wildlife have? I’m a hunter, not a scientist, but I’ve been out there and seen and tried to understand. Wildlife has the kind of smarts that comes from superlative senses and reactions. Take that young doe that flummoxed my best, sneakiest bowhunting attempt. Its smarts come from what its better scenting ability
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Pennsylvania Game News - October 2011

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