12/01© Ronald L. Moody (2001)
All rights reserved.
Reprinted here with permission.

Me-First Hunters? What a Way
to Ruin an Inheritance!

The scene is still clearly in mind -- indeed, clearer because I've seen it more than once, with confidence I will see it again. I'm sitting in a long, large public meeting room. A rectangular table is up front; behind the table sits a row of state game and fish officials.

Across the table -- all around me, sits and stands a roomful of American hunters with a bone to pick.

A multitude of possibles bring these people together. Invariably, one part of any issue that raises such a crowd is a proposal to reduce or reallocate some privilege or benefit the hunters have enjoyed from public resources.

A proposal to reduce bag limits or season days will be opposed by hunters. Increased restrictions on high-tech, highly-lethal equipment will be lambasted by many hunters who want easier kills. Proposals to reduce motorized vehicle use in order to improve wildlife habitat will be savaged in public hearings. The list goes much further. The point is that our current generation of American hunters can be trusted to follow a "me-first, gimme-more, don't-get-in-my-way" attitude toward management of public wild lands and wild life.

The individual hunters who are exceptions to this broad indictment can be readily identified by their personal actions and attitudes. True hunter conservationists can be found in every community, but their minority status is made clear at such public hearings.

The result of this self-serving attitude, is a slow, steady loss of hunter power and prestige among the American general public, and lessening of ability by hunter-conservation organizations to influence public policy. This power is flowing away toward non-hunting conservation and environmental organizations.

A wake-up call came recently when the Province of Ontario, after an arduous public process, issued a list of recommendations to guide the future of public resource management in that region of Canada. No place in that list was any mention of conservation leadership on the part of organized hunters and fishers.

The reason was simple, an Ontario official told me. "Sportsmen are part of the problem, not part of the solution. This is because sportsmen are always trying to protect a status quo (something they have now that they want to keep)."
Missing in the shared character of contemporary American hunters is a "first allegiance" to conserving and improving their wildlife heritage. Hunters make it obvious their first priority is their own pleasure and success. A portion of hunters, usually veteran Nimrods, realize that "giving something back" is a good thing to do; they will "give back" most frequently by mailing a check or by spending money at fundraising activities of habitat conservation organizations. But this giving is obviously a cultural afterthought.

American society is grappling with the problem of maintaining a wild heritage in a rapidly changing and crowding world. The general public is finding less reason to consider the counsel of hunters who have nothing to say except, "leave me alone, I'm having fun the way things are."

It has taken most of two generations for American hunters to arrive at this ethical empasse. The general path was one of never asking questions about who hunters really are and what is really important about them. Post World War Two American Nimrods became infatuated with velocities and bullet weights, catalogs bulging with gadgets to "increase your success," and, perhaps most importantly, the all-surpassing quest for antlers -- hopefully big enough to get your name in "the book."

As in American society as a whole, the identity of the hunter became some quotient of what the hunter owns or possesses. Under this approach to identity "having" defines "being": If a person can own enough great stuff garnished with honor tokens such as a high-scoring trophy heads, then who that person is -- somehow (supposedly) -- becomes known.

Once upon a time, about five generations ago, such opportunities for possession were not available to hunters. Game had been depleted across North America. Hunters organized to restore wildlife because they had no choice other than abandoning hope for the hunt.

From the time that Teddy Roosevelt created the Boone and Crockett Club as the lead organization of a new conservation movement, until the Second World War, three generations of conservationist hunters were focused first on their personal role as steward of the resource. Even then they were in sharp conflict with old-school subsistence hunters who opposed any restriction on opportunity as an attack on their "right to hunt."

Today is high time for leaders among hunters to call for allegiance to a hunter identity centered as stewards of the resource -- who they are, not what they have, should identify the hunter. We must give honor to hunters based on "the content of their character" not their efficiency at killing or their financial ability to buy a chance to kill big-horned trophies.

The game you hunt today is not your property by some divine right. Instead, it is a gift from hunters -American Citizens- who are dead now. When they made the effort to start restoring wildlife to a raped continent they knew they would be dead before their work bore its full fruit. They sent the gift into the future -- to you. But they sent it on with a lien attached to it.

The moment you call yourself a hunter, and set out to take part of the great conservation gift, you shoulder the debt of sending the gift on in time beyond your own life. And the debt is not fully paid if the gift is reduced in value during your life. The difference will be subtracted from your personal honor as a hunter.

By taking this path less traveled you will give your great grandchildren a good reason to remember your name with pride. Who you are will be important to them.