Time to Step Up
July 29th, 2009
It’s that time of year when serious hunters are winding up preparations for another season. I’ve been making a few scouting forays into the local mountains. On my last scout I thought back to last season and a trip I made with a good friend and his 17-year old son. As we were heading home, the boy’s cell phone rang, and one of his buddies asked him where he had been. “I’ve been out camping with dad,” he said. Not hunting, camping. When his dad gave him a questioning look, the boy simply shrugged his shoulders and said, “It’s just better that way.”
All across America, hunting participation as a percentage of the overall population is declining. According to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, the total number of “sportsmen” — men and women who hunt or fish — is 38 million today, nearly one in five Americans, of which 13 million hunt. Over the past two decades, the percentage of Americans who hunt or fish has tumbled from 26 to 18 percent; the absolute number of sportsmen has fallen from 50 million to 38 million.
As hunters become fewer in relation to the overall population, the public policy question becomes, who will pay the costs of preserving habitat and managing fish and wildlife in the future? Hunters and fishermen now pay the vast majority of the tab, not just through the steep license, tag and access fees they pay, but also by intangible things like the countless hours of volunteer labor they donate to habitat enhancement projects.
Fewer hunters means an incalculable cost of having fewer people in America who are intimate with the outdoors, who understand the beauty of a quiet sunrise, the majesty of a bugling bull elk, the thrill of seeing a mature whitetail buck emerge from the woods on a frosty November morning, people who have put their own meat in the freezer and thus understand that it doesn’t come neatly wrapped from the grocery store. If the numbers of hunters and anglers keep dropping, if fewer and fewer young people head to the woods each fall to hunt, who’s going to carry on the fight for fish and wildlife, for protecting open space, for making sure the environment remains clean and pure?
Of course America is changing. More and more of us now live in cities. Most of the rising tide of immigrants don’t arrive with hunting or fishing traditions. But I believe we must do everything we can to cling to our hunting and fishing traditions. We desperately need people to pass on to their children their knowledge and love for the outdoors.
That burden is falling on the shoulders of all of us who do love to hunt. Are you willing to step up and help meet the challenge?
