I don't know Aron and don't know BP. I live in California and have grown up spearfishing since I was four and started hunting big game when I was 13. As a California resident, hunting and fishing are hanging on by a thread. This is not the fault of the hunting community, but things like this video certainly don't help. As hunters, I believe that we have a responsibility for the way that our society perceives what we do. Whether we like it or not, there is a much larger group of people who know very little about hunting that we depend on (votes, land access, blocking ridiculous predator initiatives, marine protected areas, etc).
I don't really care for social media, but a lot of people do. There are a lot of people who get their information about hunters that way and for every post that portrays hunters in a negative light (like the Aron/coyote one), it takes thousands of good ones to spin the narrative back into the positive side. And unfortunately at this point, its pretty hard to not see that a lot of hunters trying to make it big on social media are going to bring the whole damn thing down on all of our heads.
My dad always used to say about professional athletes that "we really don't know any of these guys." The same is true in the hunting community. I get that the video is old, but I had a neighbor ask me if "I heard about that guy in Wyoming who got caught torturing the coyote." Low and behold when I went on the internet this afternoon, I saw all of this.
Snyder, Hanes, Bowmar, that dude that calls himself the healthy hunter or whatever and a bunch of other "influencers" whose names I don't know, have done things that brings negative light to something that we all enjoy. Whether society is "soft" or not (and you can certainly argue that it is), it doesn't matter because that same soft society is going to shut everything down on us and we're all going to get screwed.
I am not perfect and don't claim to be. I've made my share of mistakes for sure. However, the second you start filming everything, its like having a loaded gun. It's brought down many and it looks like it has unfortunately taken Aron down too. I do not wish bad on anyone. The whole situation sucks. What is a huge bummer however, is that this now sucks for all of us, not just Aron.
