From Delta Waterfowl,



The Vanishing Hunter, Part II

How the ‘King’s Deer’ became the ‘People’s Deer’

Hunters like Teddy Roosevelt saved hunting from extinction a hundred years ago.

But with hunter numbers in decline, who’ll save hunting in the 21st century?

Why the North American Conservation Model is so important.

By Jim Posewitz


For several years residents near Loch Coille-Bharr in Scotland have debated the possible release of the largest mammal to be legally reintroduced in Britain. The project failed in 2005 as critics called it a menace and landowners vigorously opposed the project. Scottish conservationist Simon Jones describes the beast as “a relatively big animal…a large tubby squirrel with short legs and big teeth. The beast is the beaver, it has been extinct in Britain for 250 years, and conservationists are trying to bring it back, welcome to the European Model of wildlife conservation.

Most of us were born into a place and time that included an abundance of wildlife. It is difficult to imagine the landscapes we know without beaver, deer, elk, wild geese and the wily coyote. The truth is, however, the lower forty-eight states of North America were once virtually stripped of all the animals that had a market value.

In 1885 Theodore Roosevelt described the commercial carnage with a story of a northern plains cowboy who had just ridden a thousand miles, and then told TR that he “was never out of sight of a dead buffalo and never in sight of a live one.â€

Our hunting heritage sat on the brink of oblivion. The buffalo, elk, bison and other animals were indeed in peril and could have passed to extinction here, just as the aurochs, boar, bear, wolf, reindeer and beaver did in Britain. Our American wildlife legacy might have ended late in the 19th Century were it not for the emergence of a new deal for wildlife—and for people. In time, that deal would be described as the North American Model of Fish and Wildlife Conservation.

Simply put, the North American Model of Fish and Wildlife Conservation (the Model) is how our society found a way to value, restore, conserve and share the wild resources of a continent. The Model is rooted in our legal system, our political system, and our cultural will.

Since none of our nation’s founding documents addressed fish and wildlife, it was left to the courts to define our relationship with the wild. In a long series of decisions dating back to 1842, fish and wildlife have been defined as public resources held in trust by the states, for all the people. In that first case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that by virtue of the Declaration of Independence the people in our democracy were the sovereign. What that meant in short was, the king’s deer became the people’s game.

Learning to live with this new reality was difficult, and America went through a very dark time when commercial interests slaughtered wildlife for the market, and by 1885 game populations were near collapse.

In 1887, Theodore Roosevelt, George Bird Grinnell, Gifford Pinchot and others formed a club for the restoration of wildlife to America. When TR became our president he used the ‘bully pulpit’ to embed a conservation ethic in our culture, setting aside roughly 84,000 acres a day for every day he held the White House.

When wildlife restoration faltered, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called the first North American Wildlife Conference in 1936. He called upon the people to unite in the fish and wildlife conservation effort. The people responded by creating a national affiliation of sportsmen’s clubs, and within a year won landmark federal legislation to fund the recovery. Back in their communities these hunters and anglers went to work on the restoration of habitat and the protection of wildlife, while enriching the conservation ethic in the people.

By the time the 20th Century came to a close, three generations of those sovereign people had successfully restored wildlife across the country: When Theodore Roosevelt entered the White House, there were about half a million deer in the nation; today there are more than 30 million whitetails alone. In 1907 the nation’s elk population stood near 40,000, there are now at least a million. When Franklin Roosevelt called the hunters together, there may have been a million Canada geese on our continent. By 2003 the annual goose harvest was climbing toward 3 million.

This massive restoration of wildlife was probably the greatest environmental achievement in human history.

In England, where ‘the king’s deer’ passed to private property, the aurochs, boar, bear, beaver, wolf and reindeer went extinct. In America, where wildlife became the ‘people’s game’ we have deer in our suburbs, bears in our orchards and goose dung on every golf shoe in America. None of this happened by accident.

Finding our way to a conservation ethic that would work wasn’t easy, we had to hunt for it. In the process, we learned that if we were to hunt at all, we all had to conserve and share. That is how—and why—it worked.

In 2001 three wildlife biologists described the Model in a professional paper titled: Why Hunting Has Defined the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation. In 2002 the International Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies endorsed the Model and its seven basic principles:

Wildlife as Public-Trust Resources
Elimination of Markets for Wildlife
Allocation of Wildlife by Law
Wildlife Can Only be Killed for a Legitimate Purpose
Wildlife is Considered an International Resource
Science is the Proper Tool for Discharge of Wildlife Policy
Democracy of Hunting
It is, however, still up to the people in our democratic form of governance to embrace and protect these fundamental principles that brought wildlife to our time.

History teaches that those who would privatize and commercialize the people’s game, or dredge up an aristocracy of hunting, are not new. They were around in Theodore Roosevelt’s time and he left us some guidance. The following passages are his:

“The movement for the conservation of wildlife, and the… conservation of all our natural resources, are essentially democratic in spirit, purpose and method.â€


“We do not intend that our natural resources shall be exploited by the few against the interests of the many. Our aim is to preserve our natural resource for the public as a whole, for the average man and the average woman who make up the body of the American people.â€


“Above all, we should realize that the effort toward this end is essentially a democratic movement. It is… in our power… to preserve game…and to give reasonable opportunities for the exercise of the skill of the hunter, whether he is or is not a man of means.â€


“There have been aristocracies which have played a great and beneficent part at stages in the growth of mankind; but we had come to the stage where for our people what was needed was a real democracy, and of all forms of tyranny the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of a plutocracy.â€
For three generations, conservationists addressed habitat challenges, biological puzzles and law enforcement issues to bring the people’s game into a new century. As we entered the 21st Century, we noted with alarm that the component of our culture responsible for this wildlife renaissance, the hunter, was in decline.

How could an activity so profoundly linked to our lifestyle for a century find itself fading from our culture? Since this unique North American Model and the abundance it has restored are worth keeping, we need to examine the various social influences impacting hunter numbers.

The impact commercialized hunting is having on opportunity and recruitment has received precious little attention.

Commerce, or some form of exchange involving dead wildlife, has been a constant in our human evolution. At times our commercial companions have been fundamental to the success of fish and wildlife restoration. The best example of their positive potential remains the Pittman-Robertson and Dingell-Johnson Acts, excise taxes on hunting and fishing equipment that are returned to state wildlife agencies.

However, to see the dark side of commerce, simply check the advertisements for exclusive hunting experiences found in most sporting journals. None of these advertisements include the words: the public is welcome to share the abundance. A new plutocracy of the hunt seems to be emerging, and like the aristocracy of previous times, it is not likely to honor that democracy of the hunt principle basic to the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation.

Historian Daniel Justin Herman wrote an article titled Hunting Democracy in which he stated, “American citizens, not those who governed them, were sovereign. In the U.S., moreover, every adult … enjoyed another right that only kings and aristocrats had held in earlier centuries: the right to hunt … The right to hunt and the right to make political choices (vote) emerged simultaneously in the U.S.â€

Herman went on to observe: “At one moment, hunting has operated in American culture as a rite of democracy and at the next, as a rite of aristocracy. That pendulum swing continues today.â€

As that pendulum swings toward aristocracy, it knocks more hunters out of field than the anti-hunters could ever have hoped to. The problem with many forms of commercialized hunting opportunity is not that they seek some compensation for the landowner or for services provided. The problem is their own belief that they must exclude every common or aspiring hunter unable or unwilling to pay the toll.

The North American Model worked because we the people willed it, and then made it happen. Let us aspire to sustain the model and the seven principles that make it work. Perhaps it would not be unreasonable to have paying clients and free hunters hunting the same marsh, both taking time to learn and appreciate why the other is there.

Perhaps we could choose to not confront an aspiring hunter with a sign declaring hunting as private. As never before, we need to protect the two special pillars of the North American Model that made the whole process work: wildlife as a public trust and the democracy of the hunt.

In 1883, on his first trip to hunt buffalo on the vanishing American frontier, a 24-year-old Theodore Roosevelt spent several nights in Gregor Lang’s cabin on North Dakota’s Cannonball Creek. They held spirited discussions on topics important to our young nation. Gregor’s son Lincoln listened from his bunk as the men talked late into the night.

Years later Lincoln would write: “It was listening to those talks after supper in the old shack on the Cannonball that I first came to understand that the Lord made the earth for all of us and not for a chosen few.â€

Now, 115 years later, that is a perspective worth hanging on to and taking to the field, forest and marsh. The future of hunting in America may depend on it.

The list of reasons for the decline may be long, with some being obvious and others simply superficial distractions. For example, much has been said about the many influences competing for the attention of our youth. This issue is among the obvious and many hunting organizations have launched excellent youth programs. These programs are necessary, and we all need to pitch in and help make them work.

Since the word superficial was used to define the other end of the spectrum, let me suggest that anti-hunting groups and their campaigns occupy more of our time and attention than they deserve. They have been around for a century, and while they raise a lot of money and live well, they have not damaged hunting. Hunting is still clearly okay with most Americans. Even those aspiring to be our nation’s president continue to create photo-ops with dog and gun.

Nice article. It does a good job of telling where we came from. The problem however is where are we going.
In my own state one can take six antlered and 30 antlerless deer (in some counties there is NO limit on antlerless). Yet even those hunters like myself who remember not all that long ago when the limit was ONE antlered deer and you frequently hunted all season without seeing a legal animal, still complain about "the lack of game."
The real threat to hunting however is the dismal recruitment of young people into the sports. We continue to see states enact and enforce minimum age laws. Fact is the under-twenty catagory is the safest of all!!! The fact that few if any kids under 12 would be out alone in this day and age makes such laws even more rediculous. Kids mature a lot youger than they used to and by the time a kid reaches 12, unless he's from a VERY active hunting household, the chances are he's already lost interest. Which comes to the next and perhaps the biggest threat, the lack of hunting mentors and role models. If a kid doesn't have a dad or grandad who instills an interest the chance he'll ever take up a gun or bow and go afield is slim indeed.
Finally there is that ever-present modern day need to compete. How many hunting shows have you seen the host take a doe, a scrub buck, a jake turkey or less than a limit of ducks or geese? After soccer, football, little league, etc. kids today more than ever are taught that winning is everything. In hunting, if they don't take a big buck, limit of birds, etc. they think they've done less than good. Worse, too many mentors reinforce that very feeling - remember the "lack of game" guys from the first paragraph - inspite of more oportunities than ever before.
Sure there are lots of folks who enjoy a day afield game or not. Many who teach the joy of success in taking ANY game and the importance of appreciating it. With the dwindling overall numbers however we can hardly afford to lose even one perspective recruit.

There are other factors, such as the "urbanization" of the population even in rural areas thanks to TV, etc. but the above are some of the biggest factors we need to combat or the NAM will eventually be kicked to the side in favor of government funded population management to control (for instance) over-populated urban deer. Think not? Well the fact is cities, counties and states have been using baiting and shooting to cull such animals for years!

Great points.

But the hunting shows and "canned" hunts have changed things for the worse. How many kids will be content with a doe after seeing all the bucks on the hunting shows? One my friends cousins are like that. They hunt one day a season, and complain if they don't shoot a record buck (of which Nebraska doesn't have many).

Skinner:

I'm 78 years old. When I started hunting on our property in NY State, I was perhaps 10 years old and shooting at woodchucks. (My father forbade me to hunt off our property until I was 12) I could step outdoors until I was nearly 25 years old - and be looking for deer or be shooting at ruffed grouse and pheasants.

My point? Today, what was my family property is overrrun by suburban housing developments - and none of the residents could remotely imagine such wild life. In short, I'm afraid that mine was the last generation to see unrestricted hunting in America. (Preserve hunting, whether for birds or animals, is simply not the same and I hasten to say that I'm not seeking an argument. I'm simply saying that the experiences are totally different. I'm sorry for younger generations. Their hunting experience is not what mine was)

gerry, I couldn't agree more about the type of experience available to the present generation. I to remember hunting from the back door but today for most, even if hunting private property or public land there's usually a drive involved. That means a lot more forethought and planning goes into even a short smallgame outing. In our busy world making time to go hunting often equates to simply not going for too many.