The Role of Hunters In Conservation in the 21st Century (Part 2)

An old friend (and one of the great voices of wildlife conservation in America) Chris Madson says:

“Over the last hundred years, hunters and anglers have proven to be exceptionally motivated and reliable supporters of conservation, partly because they have a strong self-interest in maintaining abundant, widely distributed populations of game and partly because their connection with wild places leaves many of them with an unusual appreciation for wildlife, whether it’s game or not. When it comes to the heavy lifting of conservation, the funding of day-to-day wildlife work and the political backing for conservation legislation, hunters and anglers have done far more than their share.”

This wasn’t done by accident. It was done by people – hunters and anglers working hand in hand with the likes of Teddy Roosevelt and George Bird Grinnell (both of whom, by the way, were naturalists first and hunters second) with Albert Nelson and D.C Nowlin. It represents the greatest conservation success story on the face of the earth. And we – you and me – hunters and anglers and people who care about wildlife were then and are now at the center of it. Wyoming enjoys the fish and wildlife we have today because of us, and the dedicated stewards who have served us.

This is a noble history. It’s good to “remember who we are.” But it’s even more important to BE who we are. And that brings us to today. Who are we? Why do we hunt?

Jose Ortega, in his classic Meditations on Hunting (1942) says that hunting is different than most other human pursuits in one important way: That most things that people do are a means to an end – we work in order to get something. “But in hunting…this order of means and end is reversed. To the hunter the death of the prey is not what interests him. That is not his purpose. What interests him is everything that he had to do to achieve that death – that is, the hunt.” In short, we hunt not to kill, but to have hunted.

If that’s true, or if it is even marginally true, what does it mean to have hunted? What factors create this experience we crave? In recent years, conservation has spawned a field of applied social research – the “human dimensions” discipline that has sought to answer this question, and as researchers are prone to do, they have offered a host of sometimes complicated and often conflicting answers. Hunters say they hunt to be close to nature, to share the experience with friends and family, to “get away from it all”, etc. But at the heart of it, there is something deep, something old, something that in the 21st century we may struggle to put words around. It is something that may be as old as we are, something that we sought to express in the cave paintings of Dordogne or Altamira, in the Arizona of Zane Grey and the Africa of Karamojo Bell, in the tight prose of Hemingway or the ponderous paragraphs of William Faulkner.

Speaking only for me, it is about life and death. No more, no less. It is about my life, about my deep and spiritual connection with the life of wild lands and lives of wild things. It is about my birth, my passage through this world, and the legacy I hope to leave behind when my time here is done. This is not romanticizing it. I am not one given much to romanticizing, and I grow even less so with each passing year. But eve3n if we fail to adequately put words around the “Why?” it sees reasonable to make a few observations about the role of hunters and hunting in wildlife conservation.

Walt Gasson
Executive Director