Kara McDonald wanted to spend Saturday tromping through fields near Corvallis, shotgun in hand and teenage son Marvin at her side, together learning the nuances of shooting, field-dressing and cleaning wild rabbits.

But the McDonalds and their shotguns instead will remain home in Stayton this weekend, grounded by political ballyhoo over whether state-organized hunts aimed at recruiting women and children to the shooting sports have a place in the 21st century.

The McDonalds were two of 27 people scheduled to take part in the special Family Rabbit Hunt workshop Saturday at a state-owned wildlife area. It was billed as a way of giving families a new outdoor opportunity.

But the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife canceled the hunt Tuesday amid protests from animal-rights activists that teaching women and kids to hunt rabbits for sport fosters disrespect for wildlife and promotes using firearms for violence.

"Women and children are being taught to kill rabbits strictly for sport," says Sally Mackler, a Ruch woman who is one of several animal-rights activists who lobbied against the hunt.

"This is a time when we think it would be better if fewer people, especially children, would be encouraged to use firearms and kill for fun."

This sentiment bristles McDonald, a 43-year-old widow who believes Mackler’s ideas are sexist, are based on a "fairytale idea" of rabbits and wrongly associate teen hunters with Columbine High School murderers.

"Hunting rabbits for food is not a bad thing," says McDonald. "Mothers spending all day with their children is not a bad thing.

"How do you make something you do all day with your mother suddenly turn a kid into someone who’s going to take a gun into school and start shooting?"

ODFW officials say they canceled the workshop mainly because the animal-rights group In Defense of Animals is organizing a Saturday protest at the E.E. Wilson Wildlife Area. Agency leaders were concerned about the safety of protesters intermingling with shooters as well as subjecting participants to verbal abuse.

"You’ve got somebody’s first opportunity to hunt; what kind of message does it send to them when they have to drive through a protest to get to one of our wildlife areas?" says Ron Anglin, the ODFW’s wildlife division administrator.

Officials within the ODFW, which long has supported hunting, have invited animal-rights activists and others to Friday’s Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission meeting in Portland to argue the merits of state-run hunting workshops for women and children.

"This is unusual, the first time I’m aware of anything like this happening over a rabbit hunt," Anglin says.

For several years, the ODFW has offered its Becoming an Outdoors Woman hunting and fishing workshops to give women a chance to learn outdoor skills in a more comfortable atmosphere — from women instructors and away from the traditional testosterone-laced world.

The agency also operates a hunter-education program that kids ages 12 to 17 must complete before they are allowed to hunt, and it promotes annual hunting clinics strictly for teens.

But the "family rabbit hunt" is the first in which the women-related and kid-related focuses meshed.

Animal-rights activists balked, irate that women and kids would use hunting dogs to flush and shoot wild rabbits, which are classified as a predatory species with few hunting restrictions on them.

"The specter of the combination of women and children being encouraged to do this was pretty shocking," says Mackler.

It also drew the interest of Matt Rossell, who runs the Portland office of In Defense of Animals and who once worked undercover at the state’s Oregon Regional Primate Research Center to investigate animal-abuse claims there.

Rossell organized a Wednesday protest of the ODFW’s Portland headquarters as well as a protest at the actual rabbit hunt, and spoke last week with ODFW Director Lindsay Ball demanding the hunt be stopped.

Agency leaders will seek direction from the commission Friday on whether the ODFW should reschedule the rabbit hunt or wipe it from the Becoming an Outdoors Woman slate.

"We’ll see if this is the type of hunt the commission wants us to have," Anglin says.

Rossell says he’s not trying to ban hunting, just that he’s concerned that the recruitment of children to hunting is dangerous amid media coverage of school shootings involving teens.

"With the headlines about children and guns, I think it’s a very dangerous proposition for the state of Oregon to promote children and guns when we know what has happened," Rossell says.

McDonald considers that a Herculean leap in logic.

An operations clerk for a Stayton electrical utility, McDonald is a lifelong hunter who enjoys the women-only workshop and relishes new ways she can spend outdoor time with her son.

She’s one of about 36,000 Oregon women licensed to hunt, and she is flabbergasted that anyone would see shooting one’s own food as anything more than that.

"The whole mentality is different to use a gun as a tool to put food on the table as opposed to being frustrated and using a gun as a weapon for violence," McDonald says.

Regardless of how Friday’s meeting goes, McDonald says she’s disappointed that she, her son and their shotguns will remain in Stayton.

"These are, like, special moments that now I can’t have," McDonald says. "It was a chance to spend all day hunting with my son. I’m totally blown away that someone can think there’s something horrible in that."

Reach reporter Mark Freeman at 776-4470, or e-mail mfreeman@mailtribune.com