By Kathleen Janz, Ainsworth
Jodeane Cancilla and Flora Cassiliano of Iowa City also contributed to this letter.
A major part of the thrill of watching football is the spectacle, both in the game and around it. Two years ago, the University of Iowa introduced “a new tradition” to Hawkeye athletics: bringing live hawks to home football games to fly around in the stadium.
Anyone who has observed a hawk fly in the wild has most likely felt the thrill of watching a wild creature perfectly suited to its purpose, soaring above a field, its senses attuned to discovering its next meal. The temptation to share in the splendor of a wild raptor through association with your favorite team is understandable.
But let’s look at this phenomenon from the altitude of the hawk and get a bigger picture.
The hawks released before home games, trained by falconers, are part of the Raptor Ambassador Program, a partnership established between University of Iowa Athletics and the Iowa Raptor Project. The press releases emphasize that this new tradition is to educate the public regarding conservation by showing off raptors to thousands of football fans, a laudable cause.
Unfortunately, the cause is mostly hollow when it comes to the UI’s real relationship to raptors. The hawks used for entertainment at Kinnick were raised in captivity in another state and purchased by the University. UI no longer has access to genuine Iowa hawks because eight years ago it discontinued its raptor rehabilitation clinic which had nursed injured and sick raptors and re-released them to the wild.
While fans might relish what feels like a “wild” football game, a hawk has a very different understanding of what it means to be wild. Their instinct is to avoid humans. The wildness we so admire is precisely what makes a hawk suffer intense stress when forced to perform for 70,000 of us yelling at the top of our lungs. We may mean well but we are doing great harm to that hawk, not to mention to our definition of “conservation.”
People who point out problems in sporting traditions are often perceived as killjoys, intent on stealing the fun from innocent fans. But we hope that this new practice at home games can be remade to better serve its purpose, including entertainment.
The most important change would be for the University to restore the Raptor Program at MacBride Field Campus and once again rehabilitate raptors while educating the public about these creatures and the environment we share with them, thereby actually practicing conservation rather than simply promoting it.
And we should bring back an old tradition, an authentic Hawkeye tradition. The Iowa mascot originated from James Fenimore Cooper’s novel about the revolutionary-era scout with an eye as sharp as a hawk’s. Later, Iowa’s Hawkeye became a cartoon image of a hawk with arms and legs. Later still, the image was streamlined as a tiger hawk. Hawkeyes have never been living wild birds.
We urge Iowa fans to persuade the University to stop using real, sentient creatures whose purpose is to soar in the wild and replace them with something more traditional, created for the specific purpose of exciting football fans.
We need fewer hawks flying and more touchdown passes. What a genuine joy that would be.
