Hunters and the Services they Provide

I recently came across this story on NPR. I found it to be very well written and informative.  We need hunting to manage our deer population.  Hunters provide an invaluable service for our forests by helping to reduce deer impacts on tree seedlings and other plants.  As forest advocates, we need to be advocating for hunting as well.  It is not just the forest that hunters provide this service for; it is many other species of wildlife, our safety while driving, agricultural crop production, and suburban landscapes. Not to mention all the conservation programs hunters continue to fund through hunter generated dollars.  Hunters provide a service to society that is difficult to measure.

Here is a great publication put together a number of years ago for the Ecosystem Management Project.  It directly addresses the issue of deer abundance.  It is called; Deer, Communities, and Quality of Life.

Decline in Hunters Threatens How U.S. Pays for Conservation

March 20, 2018

By Nathan Rott

Tom Wrasse is at his hunting shack alone. Light pours into the small room from a window framed by antlers, harvested from the surrounding central Wisconsin woods. On the opposite wall is a collage of fading photos, showing how big the hunting parties out here used to be.

"I try to keep the tradition alive," Wrasse says, looking at the photos over a cup of coffee. "But no, they've all gone their separate ways."

In rural Wisconsin, the passion for hunting still appears to burn as bright as the blaze orange jackets you'll see stalking through fields or clambering up into trees during deer season. But stop into a meat processing center or a sporting goods store, ask about it at a bar or a hunting shack and you'll hear from people like Wrasse: Fewer people are hunting. "It's just kind of fading away," he says.

A new survey by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service shows that today, only about 5 percent of Americans, 16 years old and older, actually hunt. That's half of what it was 50 years ago and the decline is expected to accelerate over the next decade.

Meanwhile other wildlife-centered activities, like birdwatching, hiking and photography, are rapidly growing, as American society and attitudes towards wildlife change.

The shift is being welcomed by some who morally oppose the sport, but it's also leading to a crisis.

State wildlife agencies and the country's wildlife conservation system are heavily dependent on sportsmen for funding. Money generated from license fees and excise taxes on guns, ammunition and angling equipment provide about 60 percent of the funding for state wildlife agencies, which manage most of the wildlife in the U.S.

This user-play, user-pay funding system for wildlife conservation has been lauded and emulated around the world. It has been incredibly successful at restoring the populations of North American game animals, some of which were once hunted nearly to extinction.

But with the slide in hunting participation expected to speed up in the next 10 years, widening funding shortfalls that already exist, there's a growing sense of urgency in the wildlife conservation community to broaden that funding base. Congress is looking at tapping oil and gas revenues. Some states are adding general sales taxes, while others are looking for ways to tweak the user-play, user-pay model to better represent how today's society interacts with wildlife, monetizing activities like wildlife-viewing.

Those efforts are running into a larger question: Is the greater public willing to pay more to protect wildlife?

To read the rest of the article click here.