We’ve assumed we needed to preserve the outdoors for future generations, but we may have been hasty. These are urban sophisticates raised on Xbox and Halo, and angry bears and bolt action rifles may be too tame to sustain their interest for more than seven minutes.

Thanks to science, I’m not even sure I want to go fishing anymore – now that I’m “heeled” with my handheld mosquito laser.

I can remember the first time I saw the cold blue light of the BugZapper, how I howled in glee with every burst of sparks, and the smoky spiral of another victim. It was awful tempting not to drop trousers and moon the bloodsucking squadrons destined for my tender posterior.

Gleeful cries of “you want summa this?” and “come get some” were mingled with the steady “bzzzt”, “bzzzt” of six legged executions. When the power went off – we ran inside and hid, shivering.

Now, we’ve got options:

In experiments, the system could target mosquitoes with a flashlight, and then uses a zoom lens to feed the data to the computer, which fires at the insect. Each time the laser strikes a mosquito, the computer makes a gunshot sound. When the mosquito is hit, it bursts into flame and falls to the ground, and a thin plume of smoke rises.

Call me the Two Gun Kid. I may even return to guiding so’s I can protect wagon trains of tenderfeet from marauding wildlife, “… the Kid’s hammy hands were a blur in the noonday sun, twin Colts roared to life …”

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSIWpFPkYrk[/youtube]

What kid would even consider fishing under the circumstances?

For us cagey older types immersed in the Catch and Release doctrine, will we succumb to setting our phasers to Stun, then winging Mayflies and Caddis to create our own hatch?

Nothing like struggling insects on the surface to trigger feeding trout. What dad would have the backbone not to employ Junior as his wingman?