This bowhunting vs rifle hunting topic gets old;particularly listening to a lot of the elitism spewed by bow hunters in that they somehow occupy a higher moral dimension than knuckle dragging rifle hunters.I have to listen to this silly nonsense from Orvis-clad fly fishermen because I pitch jigs under boat docs and haul 5# bass out with 17 pound test P-line...a real gentlemen would use poppers on a fly rod and extricate those bass from lilly pads with 2X tippets...nonsense.
The equipment and skill sets are completely different;a bow hunter "lives" within the narrow confines of his limited "reach",and there is nothing wrong with that.He has to be very stealthy and use tactics that some rifle hunters would do well to emulate.
OTOH the rifle hunter has a much broader territory to cover due to the added reach of the weapon.He has to pay attention in a lot of different directions at once, out to his maximum sure-hit range. Nothing wrong with that either,and the rifle guy is no less a "hunter" because he uses a rifle responsibly.
Which one is more difficult can be called into debate,because a lot of mid-western bowhunting(in farmland with abundant deer,lots of mature bucks,limited size woodlands,and restricted firearms seasons)strikes me as a lot easier than getting on the ground in the vast Maine forests and trying to kill a mature buck with a rifle,just to make an analogy.Ditto the ridiculously simple expedient of hanging a tree stand in Vermont or New York and skewering one of those very abundant does,vs trying to kill a mature trophy mule deer with a rifle at 8-10,000 feet.
If I were King of the World,there would be no "archery season" or "muzzle loader" season(a real joke in the wake of todays technnology); there would only be "deer season",...Gentlemen,choose your weapons..!
How did we get to this from a simple conversation about the merits of two great big game cartridges!
