Not often, but every now and then, a hiker in the woods or a or stroller along the shore of a pond or river will come across a particularly distasteful sight.

Not to mention smell.

A dead animal, killed by gunshot, festering on the forest floor. Or a pile of small fish – ten, fifteen, maybe even twenty of them – rotting on the bank, obviously not washed up by some natural occurrence, but put there by some deliberate human.

Who would do such a thing? Hunters and anglers, obviously.  The fish would probably be perch or some other species not as much fun to catch as trout. Rather than release the perch back into the water (where it might again annoyingly take bait, lure, or fly) some fishermen (and women, too) just throw them on the ground.

The animal, according to wildlife biologists, might be a deer that the hunter didn’t want to bother with, but it is more likely a smaller beast – a snowshoe hare, or even a crow – shot by a hunter who was after bigger game and didn’t want to be bothered with the small stuff.

Or a coyote. Some Vermont hunters really hate coyotes.

Do very many Vermont hunters and fishers behave this way? Almost surely not.  Kim Royar, a Department wildlife biologist, said  leaving dead animals in the woods was by no means “a common occurrence.” From talking with Fish and Wildlife law enforcement officers, she said that “anecdotal evidence indicates it’s  60-to-100 events a year.”

An indication that only a tiny percentage of anglers and hunters are guilty. But that could be enough to tarnish the image of the entire outdoor sportsman community.

Such, at least, is the view of the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department, which has proposed making such activity illegal.

Under a proposed ” regulation on retrieval and utilization of wildlife,” a hunter would not be allowed to “take any game…by means of hunting and abandon the carcass,” without making a “reasonable effort ” to retrieve it, and “the retrieved animal must be immediately made part of the daily or seasonal bag limit.”

Nor could any “person… take any fish species by legal means and abandon it on land or on top of any frozen body of water.” Any fish “that is not retained as part of a person’s daily creel limit shall be returned to the water body from which it was taken, using reasonable care to keep the fish alive.”

That’s straightforward enough. It’s also similar to regulations already in place in several states and many Canadian provinces. In fact, it’s the law right here in Vermont when hunting migratory waterfowl, which comes under federal jurisdiction.

So no big deal, one might assume. Fish and Wildlife has proposed a reasonable regulation that would affect only a handful of people, mostly people who wouldn’t admit to be doing what they did and who therefore wouldn’t dare to come out in opposition to it.

A done deal, one might assume.

Only if one were unacquainted with both the politics and the psychology  of the  blood sport community.

(Of which – full disclosure – I am a part. Fishing is my past-time of choice. I haven’t hunted in years but might again, and am on record in the public prints of favoring it as a socially and environmentally beneficial activity).

So angry are some hunters and anglers about the “retrieval and utilization rule”  (also known as the “wanton waste rule”) that at the December meeting of the Fish and Wildlife Board,  Dana Kittell, then the Board  chairman, called it (according to the minutes of the meeting) “an insult to the hunting and fishing public.”

The Fish and Wildlife Board, by the way, is not to be confused with the Fish and Wildlife Department. The Board is  made up of 14 members appointed by the governor, one from each county (though the Franklin County seat is now vacant). It is autonomous and quasi-judicial. It is empowered to adopt regulations for hunting, fishing, and trapping, and its decisions are almost final.

The “almost” is because the Board’s decisions are routinely reviewed by a little-known Legislative Committee commonly known as LCAR, the Legislative Committee on Administrative Rules. But according to the current Board Chairman, Brian Ames of Windham County, the committee only “looks at whether we’ve exceeded our authority,” not at the wisdom or merits of the Board’s decisions.

At that December meeting, the Board gave the proposal initial approval. But only by a seven-to-five vote, and Ames cautioned that the vote “shouldn’t be construed too heavily; it just gets it out for public comment.” The comment will come at three public hearings – March 10 in Essex Junction, March 11 in Montpelier, March 12 in Castleton.

They could be interesting evenings. The outdoor sportsmen themselves are divided on the issue, and their passions run high even though the issue itself comes close to being inconsequential. After all, the regulation would affect very few people, and it could only be sporadically enforced

It is, as Fish and Wildlife Department officials candidly concede, all public relations.

“It’s to help the reputation of hunters and fisherman,” said Department spokesman John Hall. “We want to prevent these rare occurrences in which people might think an animal is being wasted. It’s in the best interests of hunting and fishing to remain viable in the eyes of the public.”

There is no mystery about the concern of hunting and fishing enthusiasts. They are becoming an ever-shrinking minority.  Nationally, only about seven percent of the people hunt. In Vermont, the percentage is higher, but not as high as it used to be. Hall said the number of hunters declined from almost 94,000 in 1983 to 83,000 in 2007, and the number of fishing licenses sold has also plummeted.

Not surprisingly, the hunting-fishing community is split over how to react to this decline. The Department, backed by some hunters and anglers, is sensitive about the image sportsmen present to the general public. If there are anti-hunting  forces out there, this faction believes, don’t give them any ammunition.

These sportsmen also tried, with partial success, to ban “high fence” game farms in Vermont, where hunters pay thousands of dollars to shoot fenced-in elk. And they did not oppose efforts to ban coyote hunting competitions which many non-hunters find distasteful.

But there is another faction of organized hunters and anglers that takes a no-compromise attitude. They are motivated partly by political strategy,  apparently believing that any accommodation to the hunting opponents would be a sign of weakness. The web sites of Vermont hunting organizations regularly warn of the threatening power of “anti-hunting forces.”

Besides, these hunters  just resent being told what to do or what not to do.

“This is a moral issue that should be taught in hunter safety classes,” said Ed Gallo, vice president of Hunters, Anglers, Trappers of Vermont (HAT), which opposes the new regulation. A hunting instructor himself, Gallo said,  ”a sportsman who doesn’t play by the rules isn’t a real sportsman,” but didn’t think the state should enforce this rule.

Brian Ames favors the proposed regulation, concerned that “this small percentage can really hurt the image of hunters among non-hunters. Most hunters are real conservationists.”

Ames acknowledges that some of his associates oppose the regulation. One big reason, he thinks, is the coyote, which some hunters hope to exterminate..

“A large contingent of the sporting population blames them for the perceived or actual decline of the (deer) herd,” he said, even though “modern science has pretty much disproved that. My belief is that the coyote is part of our ecosystem.”

Objective political analysis has also pretty much disproved that opponents of hunting are either very numerous or very powerful (though they can be very vocal, or just loud). But some hunters – like some businessmen, college professors, and politicians – luxuriate in the role of misunderstood minority. Modern science and objective analysis can’t trump that.