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.
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.
