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Nice philanthropy if you don't have to eat it.
Nor do states only pander to deer hunter dollars.
Illinois spends over a $1 million a year to mate, hatch and raise ring-neck pheasants for "sportsmen" to hunt at 14 taxpayer funded recreation sites.
Four sites even cater to children 10 to 15 though the eight-year-old Arizona boy who grew up shooting groundhogs and killed his dad and another man in November wouldn't make the age cut.
"They are the only places these young men and women can hunt and be assured of a good shot," Jerry Rodeen of Pheasants Forever, a national group which lobbied to keep the Illinois program funded in 2008 despite the recession, told the State Journal-Register in April.
150,000 pheasants a year are bred at the high tech 20,000 square foot Helfrich Wildlife Propagation Center with 12 acres of outdoor pens on the southern edge of Edward R. Madigan State Park near Lincoln, IL.
The facility is "very similar to a chicken or turkey farm," site superintendent Ron Willmore told the Pantagraph in 2004-- pheasants wear plastic blinders on their beaks to keep from attacking each other in the crowded conditions now illegal in California--"except for what happens to them."
What happens to them, of course, is the birds that hunters don't pick off, die from other causes like predators and the elements. Soon there is not a trace of them.
Kind of like the fish in South Pond
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