Guns and dogs

HASTNGS ISLAND — I spent Sunday in the place I love most, and in doing so, I was surrounded by dogs and guns.

Those who have read this column over the years know dogs and guns are two of my obsessions. I love dogs wholeheartedly and am an outspoken gun-control advocate. I do believe we need to get all semiautomatic guns out of the hands of private citizens, and I abhor the idea of some mental and/or physical weakling walking around like a wannabe tough guy — and a potential fatal assailant to anyone who crosses him — because he’s strapped with a gun.

I am not against people having guns in the homes for protection, as long as those weapons are kept out of the reach of children, and I certainly am not against hunting, as long as hunters eat what they shoot.

So I went pheasant hunting Sunday in the breathtaking Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta where I grew up. I went with one my brothers and Hugh, my brother’s magnificent German shorthaired pointer. I didn’t shoot because that’s not my thing and never has been, but I did trudge the fields with my brother and Hugh, who is a tireless and talented finder and pointer of pheasants. I even tried to help Hugh flush a bird.

As an animal lover, did I feel bad for a pheasant after my brother brought him down with birdshot? Sure I did, but the bird was going to be used to feed my brother’s family, just as a chicken in the store would, so my feelings were tempered by that practicality.

My brother told me the point for most the people out hunting pheasants at this private hunting preserve was not the hunting as much as bonding with their German shorthaired and wirehaired pointers, their Labradors, their Vizslas, their Brittany spaniels and various other types of hunting dogs. But growing up where I grew up, I already knew that. We raised Brittany spaniels when I was a kid, so we were lovers of hunting dogs.

It really is beautiful to watch these magnificent animals display their precise training, and otherworldly instincts, in the field. A couple of times Hugh held a point, with nary a muscle moving, for minutes.

It is obvious the people who bring these dogs into the fields not only love their canine companions but they admire their dogs, too. There is nothing more beautiful than a dog who loves his human and a human who loves his dog, and there is plenty of that on display in pheasant-hunting fields.

Growing up in a town adjacent to probably the most beautiful area in the country, an area known as a haven for outdoorsmen, I was around hunters and hunting from the time I was a young boy. Many of my friends hunted from childhood on, and would go into the waters, islands and swampland of the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta to hunt ducks, pheasant and various other animals. Sometimes I went along, not to shoot but just to be out in the delta I loved so much. Most of my friends and acquaintances, and my brother who is a hunter, ate what they shot, I am proud to say.

So I don’t object to the hunting when that happens. At the same time, I will continue to strenuously object to, and campaign against, the stupidest of our gun laws.

As for dogs and my beautiful Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, those will always be two of the true and deep loves of my life.