Re: Need help to get shooters and off roaders out

[BMcCrary27@aol.com]

In a message dated 2/16/99 5:56:48 PM Pacific Standard Time, Knaptyme@aol.com
writes:

<< My point is, just like inconsiderate drivers we have to deal with this.
The
 best way is through education.  A lot of states now require underage drivers
 to take some sort of safety class.  Maybe we should contact them and put
 horses into their education.  The other way is to spread the word among your
 friends who off road and shoot.  Let them spread the word to their friends.
 
 If we don't find a way to share, we are all losers.
  >>

I will second this post, only I shall refer to mountain bikes.  In our county,
where we are fighting to gain, or save,  access to trails, the bicyclists have
been a great ally.  While it is not my preference to encounter bicycles on a
mountain trail while mounted on a young, green, or otherwise anti-bicycle
horse, it is only fair that we should have to share the limited public trails
we have in this nation.  As I said to a pro-hiker (only) group at a city
council meeting, "it's unfair for any one group to try to exclude any other
group from using public trails (in parks, these were), since we all paid for
them through our taxes."  We MUST learn to get along.  I sometimes wonder if
some groups, whom I can't quite identify, deliberately try to start dissention
between trail users, so the dissention excalates, and "divided they conquer".
Then they get what they want, which appears to be exclusion of all people
(except perhaps hikers) so the land can go back to the "good old days" when
there were only Indians and wildlife.  They seem to believe that the native
peoples were the ultimate custodians of the land, when in actuality they
practiced some rather interesting forms of land care.  Such as burning the
land periodically.  In our area, this meant greater crops of wild berries and
less places for deer to hide.  Also, burning reduced the forest canopy and
allowed the vegetation that deer favored to flourish.  Nowadays, were it the
present inhabitants who set fire to the countryside, we would be considered
criminals and destructors of the environment.  Excuse me for getting on the
soapbox.  It's a tough battle sometimes, and one becomes weary.  But we musn't
quit fighting for what we need, and that is trail access.  It would be a cruel
world without horses and places to ride them.

Barbara McCrary