Reduction in Hunting Numbers Threatens Conservation Efforts

By Patrick Richardson

A piece on NPR’s website — a surprisingly balanced piece — entitled “Decline In Hunters Threatens How U.S. Pays For Conservation,” points out a troubling trend, a trend that many of us have been aware of for years: hunting is on the decline.

The problem here is that hunting and fishing licenses represent the bulk of wildlife management agencies’ funding.

Back in the early 1900s, overhunting and overfishing had reduced many game populations to almost unsustainable levels.

As NPR notes:

George Bird Grinnell and Theodore Roosevelt, along with others like John Muir and Gifford Pinchot, helped establish the American conservation movement around the idea that wildlife and other natural resources, belong to all Americans – current and future. As such, they needed to be preserved or conserved.

That group was able to convince hunters and fishermen they should help pay for conservation efforts so that their children and grandchildren would have better opportunities than they did.

And it worked:

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.

Indeed, within a few decades, deer numbers had rebounded …Read the Rest

Source:: Bearing Arms