02/03 © Ronald L. Moody (2003)
All rights reserved.
Reprinted here with permission.

New Survival Skills to Save Hunting
in the 21st Century

Join any campfire circle where hunters swap their yarns and you will hear certain universal truths voted on and passed by all nimrods present.

Elk don't bugle the way they used to, quail don't hold the way they once did, and hunting isn't the popular sport it was "when we were kids" are high among recurring verities.

Truth, in these discussions, is traditionally no more than a coincidence. But hunters are nothing if not observant of their surroundings. The talk about the distress of our hunting tradition takes on a nervous quality: the same kind of tension evident when the Zambian tracker points into a heavy thicket and whispers "simba."

As usual, every hunter has an opinion. Hunting is under attack by "anti-hunters." Kids are doing too many other things. Habitat is being developed. Rich people lock up the best opportunities. There are too many people in the world -- and so on. These jawbone sessions invariably end with all nimrods waving their beer and declaiming that "they" or "somebody" needs to encourage youths to go hunting, fight foes, save habitat . . . .

I have yet to sit at the fire where hunters were talking about the way the world will be in the 21st Century and what hunting must become in order to keep a place in that world. This is a strange omission since hunters are so close to the natural world where survival depends on adaptation to changing environments.
Like all people, hunters are afflicted with 20-20 hindsight, which encourages them to keep doing whatever worked well in the past. The 21st Century, however, is a time of radical change in human life. And institutions such as hunting and family farming that matured in the 18th Century will be sorely tested. To re-focus our perspective, a new hunting leadership must present a vision of a crowded, urban 21st Century and how hunters and wildlife can prevail in that vision.

I shall forthwith wave my beer and offer a short list of survival tactics I believe will make a place for hunting in a human society that is becoming much more urban and alien to the wild. Let's visit the year 2025 and see how it can be.

2025 - FROM COMPETITION TO COMMUNITY

Taking their queue from other human cultures which have survived in hostile environments, hunters place much greater importance on institutions that pull them together for mutual strength and support. Hunters are forced by social pressure to give up much of the me-first, status-seeking consumer individualism of the 20th Century. Hunting clubs and organizations evolve into organs of a true cultural community. Such groups both hold open and guard the entrance portal to the sport.

Just as in all other human cultures, hunters keep their membership in the hunting community by participating in organized education activities, political leadership, social connection and hunting opportunity. To be a hunter is to be one of an inter-connected network of other hunters. To leave this community is to leave behind the identity of hunter. The days of the hunt as a mythic escape of the individual from social responsibility are now history.

2025 - WHO WE ARE -- A NEW IDENTITY

The importance of the 21st Century hunter in world society is based on what the hunter gives, not what he or she gets from the hunt. Maintaining large landscapes of wild and natural lands will become more difficult and expensive in the future. All people want to conserve natural resources. But all who place value on those resources are not equally willing to pay for them. The hunters' key contribution to society will be their willingness to pay the bills of real conservation and to fight tough political battles to preserve wild lands. 21st Century hunters will shun the image of self-serving recreationists. They will hunt for reasons of being part of a much larger human commission -- one that non-hunting people can admire and support.

Within this context the hunt will continue to offer opportunity to test oneself against nature for attributes such as strength, fortitude, endurance, skill and courage. But the measures of the hunt will change dramatically for 21st Century nimrods.

SOCIAL ASSERTIVENESS, NO RETREAT

At the time I am writing "leave me alone" is the social and political passion of the moment. Even a small study of history tells us this survival strategy is a roadmap for cultural extinction. Therefore, by 2025, much of our culture that is familiar today will have disappeared as baby boomers fill the cemeteries and rest homes. After the vast majority of the13.5 million hunters who began the century have taken up bowling, the survivors will rebuild by sharing the identity I describe above. They will foster a new hunting tradition by networking in the larger society.

Most importantly, they will not try to hide in the cracks and crevices of the 21st Century. Instead, they will talk assertively about the virtues of who they are, the history of their tradition and the value they offer society. At all times they will be in touch with their non-hunting neighbors. Do not confuse what I'm describing with some kind of public relations campaign; it will be a way of life, the way hunters are.

EDUCATION A LIFETIME PROCESS

Today, Hunter Education is a few hours spent in a state-sponsored class -- which is expected to be enough "book learning" for a hunter's entire lifetime. This will change. In 2025, formal learning, as a means of making a hunter sufficiently knowledgeable and skillful to function in the hunting community, is a continuing process over the span of a person's outdoor career. Any of several education systems may become reality. But the basic beginner Hunters Education course with which we are now familiar will be only the portal to a recurring teaching and testing system. The margins of error for hunting survival in the 21st Century will be far to thin to tolerate hunter incompetence and irresponsibility.

CHAMPIONS OF THE WILD

The core effort of the previous survival tactics is directed at making the hunter valuable to the larger human society in an urban, industrial environment. The hunter, however, also must be valuable to the wild animals he and she hunts. Keeping valid science as the basis for wildlife management will be more difficult as time goes by. Individual hunters will know more ecology and biology in the future. This will be part of their continuing education. More difficult yet for hunters will be serving as the bridge over the gulf between wild as wild truly is, and wild as portrayed in the TV, cinema and art of the media saturated city.

Obviously, all of these survival adaptations are interconnected. Taken together they describe a new character for the 21st Century hunter. Ironically, as if to prove nothing is new under the sun, everything anthropologists learn about our Paleolithic hunter gatherer ancestors indicates their social character was closely kin to what hunters must become in our brave, new world.

Ancient people did not have to champion the wild because they were part of it. Perhaps even that is a destination whose logic is just out of view over the slope of the future.