J.Wesbrock wrote: Steve McD,
If it’s not broken, don’t fix it? Indeed.
A pass through is a pass through, and if the only way for me to quantify an increase in penetration is by measuring how far my arrows burry in the dirt after going through an animal, I see no reason to change what I’m doing.
This debate seems to rear its head on a regular basis, and personally, I feel like it gets pretty tiresome. I don’t feel that making a choice to shoot a trad bow means we all have to sign on to the same, set-in-stone mentality, nor does it have to mean consigning oneself to a static, un-evolving way of doing things.
Traditional archery is not fixed at some arbitrary moment in history….or at least in doesn’t have to be. If you consciously make the choice to adhere to some point in our history that you feel was the apex of our sport, and not entertain anything that may have been developed since, that’s fine, and I really don’t care what others choose. But saying that there is no need to do things any differently than how you’ve chosen to do them, and at the point in our evolution that you’ve chosen to stop evolving at, is no less dogmatic than what you’re purporting to be reacting against.
Personally, I see our trad history as something that continues to be dynamic – not fixed, and that has been continually evolving since the first time someone affixed a string to a pliable piece of wood (or horn, or…), and will hopefully continue to do so. I think that tinkering and evolution are generally good things, if they stand up against the test of usefulness. And if they don’t? Then the over-arching rule of practicality that guides our sport will eventually consign them to the dustbin.
But this mentality that “everything has already been figured out” and that there is no need to try anything different anymore, baffles me. There are so many innovations that many of us “traditionalists” currently enjoy, and that get defined as “traditional,” that we wouldn’t have if this peremptory mentality ruled the day. Fastflight? Modern composite wood construction? Non-wood shaft options? Ever-evolving bow designs? Unless the folks espousing this, “no need to innovate” mentality are purely using self bows with handknapped heads and sinew, I think this point of view is rather inconsistent and arbitrary, to say the least. History is, by its very nature, dynamic and ever-evolving. Nostalgia, on the other hand, tends to breed just the opposite.
