When I was a kid back in the 1970s and 80s and my friends and I would traipse around the woods at our hunt club hunting squirrels and birds and ultimately settling for blasting pine cones, cans and milk jugs filled with water, hearing protection was typically an afterthought. Even as we became more educated on the importance of protecting our hearing, we still only sometimes remembered it, and most often tried to feebly limit our exposure with industrial foam plugs from my dad’s tool box or a wadded-up piece of tissue or toilet paper.
