10/02 © Ronald L. Moody (2002)
All rights reserved.
Reprinted here with permission.

Your Hunting Future
Rests On A One-Legged Stool

A bighorn ram paces the Montana spine of the continent -a whitetail buck ghosts through a Dixie hardwood bottom - a mallard hen leads her yearlings high and fast south out of Canada.

In their existence today, all such wild creatures are threads woven into what remains of our wild cloth - a fragile fabric on a conservation loom crafted by modern hunters.

A glaring truth shadows our modern wildlife miracle, however. When the weaver's hand leaves the loom, the cloth unravels.

The human support system that underpins the preservation of our 21st century wild heritage is inextricably dependent on the North American hunter picking up the bill - and paying her dues.

Many hunters want "to give something back;" they donate generously to organizations that proclaim a mission of habitat preservation. Everybody knows that wildlife cannot live without a place to live. So hunters have become obsessed with saving and improving habitats.

The problem in this focused generosity is that habitat is actually only one-third of the conservation equation. Indeed, over-emphasis on habitat funding has resulted in conservation being propped up by a one-legged stool. That conservation stool actually has three legs. Scientific management of the wild animals, themselves, is the second leg. Leadership of people through law and ethics is the third leg.

Whatever the success of habitat preservation, both the wildlife and people legs of the stool are rapidly becoming toothpicks.

The social equation that produced the almost miraculous restoration of North American wildlife is, today, in serious jeopardy. Extinction of the hunting tradition among ordinary people is a real possibility in the 21st Century. All that may remain will be a residue of the old European-style of hunting as the privilege of the new American aristocracy.

Social extinction happens in human cultures for similar reasons that species become extinct.

Hunters lose their hunting grounds and become discouraged. They become socially isolated and fail to adapt to a changing environment because they cling to an obsolete status quo. Recruitment of youth dwindles because adult hunters are too busy chasing their own dreams. And so on.

But the real, core reason for extinction will be that hunters simply lose the will to keep their tradition alive.

Character, Courage and Commitment kept Rome on top of the world for more than a thousand years. When those social qualities faded, so-called eternal Rome, an empire still financially rich, fell.

Thousands of American hunters write checks for millions of dollars every year to buy and improve wildlife habitat. This accumulation of financial power, like the wealth of Rome, however, will prove meaningless if only a few aristocrats remain in the field to enjoy the fruits of conservation.

Indeed, current trends in the organizations dedicated to funding of habitat may speed up the end of democratic hunting. More and more, tycoons take over these foundations and direct the investment of publicly raised funds toward habitats locked up exclusively for those who can afford to pay.

Ordinary public hunters should know before they write their checks whether their donations will fund habitats open to public hunting. Otherwise they are likely buying their own eventual social extinction.

An even greater irony lies in the contrasting financial starvation of the few state and local hunter-conservation organizations that are leading the charge for protection of our democratic American hunting tradition.

More public access to public land is locked up every year. Bad laws harming public hunters are passed every year. All because hunter conservation groups get no money from public hunters - the same public hunters who have, in recent years, written more big checks to buy habitat, some of which will be closed to the public.

The democratic principle of wildlife being owned by the people, and managed by public hunting under rule of public law is under general attack across America - both in state legislatures and in Congress.

Hunters who thought their habitat funding donation paid their dues to wildlife are getting a rude awakening. Each fall, they find access fees and trophy hunt prices are further beyond their means. They often discover, unknown to them, that a law was recently passed that made it easy to price them out of fair hunting opportunity.

Yes, they paid their dues, but they are functionally extinct as hunters just the same.

The majority of nimrods in this situation don't even know that groups of organized hunters are trying to save their way of life. Political activism, however, is a lot less fun than bidding on auction items at a banquet. If they ever heard of such a thing as a state wildlife federation they may actually have avoided it because they shy away from "controversy."

In America, public leadership always is controversial. And controversy, everybody knows, cannot be resolved with only a checkbook. Courage, Character and Commitment (and that most precious resource - your time) are needed.

For more American nimrods every year, apparently, it's becoming easier just to go bowling.