From the Editor - In June 2004, the board of Montana Wildlife Federation adopted a new 5-year Strategic Plan. The Plan directs MWF to develop and launch a substantial program that will improve and educate hunters and anglers on ethical behavior. One core component of this program is to develop a ‘Code of Ethics’. A MWF committee is seeking hunter and angler engagement, gathering ideas and will then formulate vows of ethical conduct, an oath of behavior, a “code of ethics” that we hope all Montana hunters and anglers can take pride and ownership in and live by. Please,see the related story on Page 9.

As a stimulus to generate progressive ideas and submittals to MWF, we offer this article by noteworthy outdoor writer, Ted Kerasote. Ted is the author of four conservation, hunting and fishing related books and has written for over 50 periodicals, including Sports Afield, Outside and Audubon. The article is the sole opinion and point-of-view of the author and we hope it will trigger some thoughtful responses. This article originally appeared in the September 2004 issue of Petersen’s Hunting magazine.

Hunter Ethics Is More Often About Values Than Right or Wrong

By Ted Kerasote

For as long as people have been writing about the ethics of hunting, they’ve been bemoaning the loss of them. Xenophon, an early Greek military historian and a disciple of Socrates, chided the hoi polloi for hunting too close to town and ruining what he called “the sportsmen’s game.” Twenty-four hundred years later, Theodore Roosevelt and George Bird Grinnell, the founders of the Boone and Crockett Club and the inventors of “fair chase,” wrote about how subsistence and market hunting were the scourge of North America’s wildlife. By imposing rules of conduct, for instance not driving animals with fire, and by removing wildlife from the marketplace, they transformed hunting for survival, our most elemental pastime, into one of our most compelling games, one that 13 million Americans still enjoy, dream about, and argue over with a passion rivaled only by the subjects of politics and morality.

Indeed, one can make the case that when we argue over these topics we frequently don’t discuss ethics at all—that is questions of universal rights and wrongs (though we often allude to them in these terms)—but rather we’re debating questions of values and taste, in other words things that are deemed desirable by individual preference. So, too, with hunting. Thus a lot of what passes for conversations about hunting ethics is really hunters and nonhunters saying, “I like this and I don’t like that.” Case in point: When an individual declares, “Hunting on game ranches is unethical,” what he or she probably has meant is, “I find hunting on game ranches distasteful.”

One can, of course, mount arguments about the downside of game ranches, and many have: game ranches have been implicated in spreading diseases to wildlife outside their fences; they have been known to capture and keep the public’s wildlife; they can make hunting the pursuit of the wealthy; too often they present hunting in a diluted form. Respectively, these are ecological, economic, sociological, and aesthetic critiques, not ethical ones, and certainly not ones that are of the same gravity as embezzling money from one’s firm or cheating on one’s spouse. These are forms of breach of contract or, in less legal terms, the breaking of vows to which one has freely consented.

That said, are there ethical breaches in hunting? You bet. Shooting two animals when you have a license for only one. Killing an animal on another person’s tag. Hazing animals with aircraft or ATVs. Hunting before or after the legal opening and closing times. These are all instances of breaking the law—the law a hunter accepts as binding when he or she buys a hunting license. I suspect that everything else we argue over isn’t a matter of ethics, but either of wildlife biology or manners, sometimes both.

Consider the frequently debated question of whether hunting has become too competitive, hunters concerned only with how well their trophies score and going to great lengths to kill record-book specimens. Well, evidence from around the world demonstrates that whenever too many older males—whether they be elephants or wild sheep—are quickly removed from a population, the genetics of that population suffer: fewer grand survivors have the opportunity to pass on their genes. This situation is one of biological concern and can be remedied through more finely tuned hunting regulations. If poaching is also an issue, stricter law enforcement will help. But should we disapprove of hunters who make it their business to pursue these sorts of trophies? Depends on the hunter. A friend of mine, who has a wall of sheep heads, has come home sheepless from his last two hunts. Why? He couldn’t find the ram he wanted. For me, this individual, though competitive, is also choosy and modest. Unlike some trophy hunters I know, he doesn’t go on about how many big animals he’s killed, enumerating their scores until your eyes glaze over. These blowhards may be a bore around the campfire, but, if they’ve hunted legally, they’re hardly unethical. Rather, they’ve confused more with better and quantity with quality.

They’re not alone. Lack of discrimination—the ability to distinguish between what is enough and what is way too much—is a pervasive American characteristic. I believe it’s a leftover of our recent frontier heritage and our four-hundred-year-old experiment in spurning the European civilizations we found too restrictive. We’ve reveled in having lots of everything—from land to wildlife to doing exactly what we want. Like most things, this sort of freedom has been a blessing and a curse.

Hunters—being an inextricable part of American culture, and with the opportunity to participate in an activity that fosters self-reliance—have adopted these mannerisms in spades. Or at least some of them have, which has led to the debate over how we practice our hunting, the factions in this debate divided between the traditionalists (who often claim they’re acting in “good taste”) and the avant-garde (who readily adopt new technology because they perceive that it will improve their take).

One of the most fertile grounds for disagreement between these two camps is the use of tools, particularly ATVs since they increasingly affect the experience of other hunters. I can sympathize with the traditionalists on this issue—those hunters who want to limit where machines can go—for I used to be able to kill elk within a quarter-mile of the roadhead near my home. That distance has now been pushed back to the farthest penetration of ATVs or over a mile and a half from what used to be the roadhead. What then has been gained? Has hunting become easier or more productive? No—not even for the ATV hunters. In fact, a kind of wildlife desert has been created within a mile and half of the road, animals harassed from the country by thoughtless ATV users. The terrain has also been crisscrossed with eroding trails, the creation of which has been illegal, violating Forest Service regulations about using an ATV off the designated travel corridors. This sort of behavior on the part of some ATV hunters is very much the subject of poor ethics.

Granted, ATV hunters can bring back their kills more easily. But they can also do that by hunting closer to the road, on foot, and using their machines only to fetch their kills. However, the temptation to beat one’s fellow hunters has been too great and the tragedy of the commons has ensued: many hunters buy an ATV to keep ahead of the crowd. The staunch traditionalists, of course, leave, finding places to hunt where ATVs are prohibited.

But is this controversy really about poor ethics or a lack of discrimination over what the art of hunting entails? It may come as a surprise that recreational ATVs and snowmobiles are prohibited in the mountains of Europe. This isn’t a function of higher gas prices or the supposed propensity of Europeans to restrict personal freedom. It’s a reflection of how these cultures understand gratifying experiences in the outdoors. What is important to them is process—how one does the activity as much as the goal that’s achieved. Therefore, getting to the backcountry is more valuable, noteworthy, satisfying, if a person gets there under his or her own power, and the value of one’s kill rises commensurately with the difficulties involved in procuring it.

Many other examples of what are ostensibly called “poor hunting ethics” can be similarly examined as issues of taste and skill. Is it better to use motorized or nonmotorized waterfowl decoys? Do portable radios used between hunting partners improve one’s experience of the outdoors or keep one firmly tethered to the very artifacts of civilization that one has been trying to get away from? Does a laser rangefinder and a magnum caliber, both of which help a hunter to kill a deer at 450 yards, make for a more satisfying experience than taking two hours to stalk within 50 yards of the quarry? In short, do we like being afield or is the object of hunting to kill the game as quickly as possible and return to other pursuits? Here, I use the word “game” in both its meanings.

What seems most sad to me about modern hunting is how many hunters choose to shorten the great game of being outside without ever realizing what they’re missing. Buying a hunt on a fenced enclosure, the animals sometimes baited to the blind; driving in a pickup or on an ATV almost to the moment of shooting; setting up with a bipod, a 20x scope, and a rangefinder and picking off an animal at a great distance without having to read the terrain, the wind, and the increasing level of your heartbeat as you draw closer, foot by foot, crawling on your belly—all these attributes of modern hunting tend to make the activity easier. The result isn’t bad people doing bad things, but lots of well-meaning hunters never experiencing the full richness of what can be one of the more gratifying, skillful, enjoyable, and authentic games left on the globe.

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