Quit Expecting Every Hunter to Be So Hardcore. We Need Casual Hunters, Too

[SNIPERBBB]

Careful what you wish for with a draw system. It's a system that can be easily abused by antis.

 

[BTaylor]

- most americans aren't into casual activities where the likeliest outcome is 'skunking' (how many people would be into casual sports if 95% of the time they lost?)

First off, THANK YOU for not calling hunting a sport. Whoever coined that phrase deserves a flush and full force throat punch. To your point though with all those other pursuits, golf, basketball, baseball, etc., the elite have a league of their own and get paid to play. That doesnt and shouldnt exits with hunting with the exception of guides to an extent. The death of print media in my mind is largely responsible because media shifted to pretty much anyone with internet access minus editorial oversight. All indians and no chief makes for a clusterfrick which is what we have been and likely will continue to see. In my mind the only way it gets better is for industry businesses to massively tighten the reigns on who they support and to have a strong hand in leading what is and is not acceptable content in whatever format it is pushed.

 

[HuumanCreed]

Her premise is wrong. No one is expecting that. This website and hunting beast are the sites I go to for knowledge and advice (even if I don't take it) and I have never seen what she is talking about around here or hunting beast. Sometimes, those articles are inflammatory on purpose for views.

Ok, I had a few paragraphs basically saying I agree with you. But as I try to provide points to back up my view, I realizes I was actually wrong and its not a clear black and white view.

Since I have dive deep into traditional bow hunting lately, I don't know if I can embraces the idea of a 'causal' traditional bow hunter. I can accept those without actual 'hunting' times like myself who actually hunt 5-10 days a year using firearms, crossbows, or compound bows. But I would advocate that they should be practicing with their recurve or longbow year round at least 2-3 times a week if they plan to hunt with a traditional bow. That time and dedication would not be consider 'casual' to me as I myself find it hard to get in practice time due to life.

The traditional bowhunter community is very welcoming to new 'archers', but once you cross that line in the sand to hunt with the longbow, they expect more then casual dedication, which I think is valid.

But overall, I don't think there is a drive to keep out casual hunters, or at least that is not the vast majority of the community or social media platform.

Shout out to Steve Rinella who I think is a great ambassador to the outdoor community.

 

[BTaylor]

Careful what you wish for with a draw system. It's a system that can be easily abused by antis.

I agree but it is the best option currently available. They definitely have impacted draws for predator hunts but how effective or how much impact do you think would have if all game currently on a points system went to a straight draw?

 

[SNIPERBBB]

I agree but it is the best option currently available. They definitely have impacted draws for predator hunts but how effective or how much impact do you think would have if all game currently on a points system went to a straight draw?

A point system probably works better if its open to everyone. With a straight draw, you would have to have to almost do a slot based draw where you draw for a say a 2 week time period for bow hunting. And you'd have to draw for units. And if you draw...you have to kill something or you get banned for X number of years from drawing. We do some limited draws here for certain animals here and other than for deer, these are in-person drawings where you have to show up at the draw site to get drawn.

 

[NMSbowhunter]

I think we have enough casual hunters. Heck, everyone I know personally who hunts is, in my opinion, a casual hunter. Maybe I am obsessed? Hey, there are a lot worse things I could be pursuing with a monomaniacal passion, lol.

I rank the vast majority of the orange army into the casual camp. They dust off the deer rifle the night before the gun opener, ask their wife where she hid the orange vest, and maybe, just maybe go check the zero on their rifle (if they can find more than 4 cartridges). A quick stop at the Co-op for a couple of bags of corn and a scent wick to hang in the tree and they are off to the races. This represents basically the MO of almost everyone I know who hunts around here. Are they bad people? No. They just have jobs, and kids, and want to watch football and drink beer more than they want to sit in a stand or ground blind.

I do like how the article pointed that casual hunters are hunters...not antis. That alone makes them valuable. The undertone of so many of these articles that I pick up on is the, what was the term used above?... "hunting industrial complex" mentality that so many authors can't seem to divorce themselves from even though they try hard to mask it. They are so immersed in it that it bleeds through just under the surface and you can spot it. The "how do we get more almighty $$$$$$$$$$$ out of the masses? If we can just get more of them to play we can make more money. Then we can afford all these expensive hunts we tell them they don't want and shouldn't need....buts lets whisper that.

 

[NMSbowhunter]

A point system probably works better if its open to everyone. With a straight draw, you would have to have to almost do a slot based draw where you draw for a say a 2 week time period for bow hunting. And you'd have to draw for units. And if you draw...you have to kill something or you get banned for X number of years from drawing. We do some limited draws here for certain animals here and other than for deer, these are in-person drawings where you have to show up at the draw site to get drawn.

Good idea except maybe not get banned if you don't kill...just make it known that X number of animals will be killed for management purposes, and if not by hunters, then shot by state agency personnel.

 

[SNIPERBBB]

Good idea except maybe not get banned if you don't kill...just make it known that X number of animals will be killed for management purposes, and if not by hunters, then shot by state agency personnel.

that threat hasnt worked in our beaver drawings. heck i got paid to go back and kill beaver on a place i drew and trapped a bunch of beaver on a few months after season was over

 

[NMSbowhunter]

that threat hasnt worked in our beaver drawings. heck i got paid to go back and kill beaver on a place i drew and trapped a bunch of beaver on a few months after season was over

Heck, maybe somebody will pay me to go shoot deer or elk in March or April, lol.

 

[SNIPERBBB]

Dealing with the state system to get paid isnt worth it unless you can make it your primary income source. Or you go work for the USDA Wildlife Services

 

[NMSbowhunter]

Dealing with the state system to get paid isnt worth it unless you can make it your primary income source. Or you go work for the USDA Wildlife Services

I'm sure you are right. I'm just thinking there is a big "desirability gap" between deer and beaver. Almost everybody wants to slap a picture of themselves up with a 140 inch buck. Probably a lot less gripping and grinning pictures with beavers.

 

[SNIPERBBB]

Youd be amazed...my district is always standing room only for the draws. Doesnt matter what fur prices are. Good year, bad year, its still packed and I'm lucky to get 1 spot of the maximum of 3 allowed.

 

[Nutterbuster]

No real comment on the article, other than I liked Matt Miller's Fishing through the Apocalypse and have read other stuff by the author of the article that I like. OL and Field and Stream have surprised me a couple of times in the past few years publishing stuff that I think is obviously true but equally obviously not popular with their base.

As far as the rest of the conversation...

Hunting is dead. Full stop. It's not dying, it's dead, and we're living off of a corpse.

We do not have enough public acreage to support quality hunting for enough hunters to sustain the model that was envisioned. The men who started the North American Model had an excellent vision, and started the ball rolling. Subsequent generations have failed to continue to accumulate public lands, and at this point I honestly do not think that we can accumulate enough public land to make the NAM work based on hunting/fishing. Pittman-Robertson and Dingell-Johnson funding are mainly supplied by non-hunting firearms/ammo sales and and non-fishing recreational boating fuel at this point, which has served to mask the situation to most outdoorsmen. So even state-level DNR funding (which is only one very specific and relatively small part of conservation spending compared to funding coming from oil taxes, non-sportsmen nonprofits and agencies, etc) isn't even able to sustain itself with hunter participation.

Everybody is worried about anti-hunting takeover of DNRs, but I can tell you that in my state the more insidious problem is takeover by extractive industry. DNR in more rural, conservative states is very much beholden to timber, ranching, gas, mining, etc., The hunting stuff they do is good PR at this point and not much more. If the Men who Matter want to set up a lithium mine on your public land, or graze cattle, or clearcut, or drill for oil, they will eventually. You may have beat them last year, and you may beat them next year, but you have to keep winning, and they only have to win once. It's been this way at the state level (at least in my corner of the world) for a long time, but now we have the director of the EPA stating that their organizational goal is to "unleash American energy." This isn't what they were chartered to do, but here we are. As we continue to develop and use resources (and the AI-boom has greatly accelerated this process) business will come for what is left of public land, and it will degrade in ability to support hunting.

As far as making private land accessible, this is a pipe dream. We have, right or wrong, repeatedly demonstrated that we will brook no talk of collectivism when it comes to acreage. My boss used to work in land sales, and part of my job is editorial teamwork on a recreational property management podcast. I'm pretty familiar with what land costs, and what it costs to maintain that land so that it will support quality hunting. It is currently beyond most family's grasp, and that situation will not be improving.

I say all of this as a lifelong hunter, whose daddy, grandaddy, great-grandaddy, and great-great-grandaddy all hunt(ed). I work in the hook & bullet world, and have for my entire career. I've interviewed state DNR directors and throughout the southeast. I've got friends that work in state and federal agencies from Corps of Engineers to Fish and Wildlife to college research and park biologists. I'm on the board of two conservation groups. I'm young, but I've paid close attention for the last decade, have read up on the last hundred years of conservation history, and have talked to a lot of "old timers" who all say the same thing. The hunting and fishing that they have today (deer hunting aside) is universally worse than it used to be. We broke our arms patting ourselves on the back for bringing wood ducks, turkeys, and deer back, put the shovels down, effed off, and now we're having to acknowledge that duck numbers are free-falling, turkey numbers are dropping, and at least in my state upland bird hunting is a complete non-starter.

It's over. It's done. If you sit on the right side of the income bell-curve, you'll be able to ride out your lifetime. If you're really well off, you may be able to pass it on to your kids or grandkids. But hunting in North America is already irreversibly on its way to being a pastime of the well-heeled, just like it is on every other continent.

R3 won't fix it. Hunt Quietly won't fix it. The people who opposed public lands when folks like Teddy and Muir advocated for them have very quietly but diligently dismantled the institutions that protected them. Case-in-point, there's an extremely good chance that the revisions to definitions of "waters of the united states" will remove protected wetland status from 80% of the current acreage protected. That number is from the EPA. That will have massive impacts on public access, duck breeding success rates, and water quality. It's barely making a ripple in the sporting community, and it's just one of an almost unfathomable number of changes we're making in the name of making the US more "business-friendly."

Deer and squirrels and predator trapping are the last bastions, because those animals can survive in urban sprawl and farm monocultures. But I've watched duck hunting decline from bad to abysmal in the last ten years, haven't seen a good group of snipe in 3, and have never even seen enough rabbits or quail to attempt to hunt them. We have been so lost in navel-gazing and sticking our head in the sand that we didn't see that the habitat loss Aldo Leopold and others warned ourselves about didn't stop, or even slow down, but accelerated in pace.

Again, hunting is dead. It may still be capable of fogging a mirror, but it isn't recovering. It will not get better in a meaningful way for a meaningful number of people. And it's pretty bad right now. The amount of work or money that it takes to be successful now is greater than it ever has been. This is a deer hunting forum, so we have the best of it. But those of us who hunt other species know that on the whole, it's really terrible right now. And we're diligently undoing all of the things we did to salvage the situation.

 

[mschultz373]

@Nutterbuster thoughts on other parts of the world that may be managing better or doing more to conserve their hunting lands? Just curious.

 

[Nutterbuster]

@Nutterbuster thoughts on other parts of the world that may be managing better or doing more to conserve their hunting lands? Just curious.

I'm not knowledgeable about other countries. But I'm not aware of a better system, sadly.

As somebody who brews the occasional carboy of beer or wine, I almost think that what we're doing here is as inevitable as a packet of yeast eating all of the sugar and dying in their own waste. We came close.

 

[SNIPERBBB]

Not too many other countries that manage wildlife well. Canada might be one of the few exceptions. Most other countries hunting is banned or a rich mans sport. The former wildlife is either decimated by poaching or animals are overrunning the countryside. In the latter you have a lot of out of control species.

Talking to Miranda at national trappers convention a few years ago you can do some hunting trips in Africa pretty cheap if you go through their nuisance system. Course he did get shot during one of those trips

 

[mschultz373]

there are, as always, few inevitables and plenty of unforeseen possibilities....
- population collapse to the tune of -32% in USA by 2100 (per current birth rate, this is projected trend absent immigration) means less resource use and more land available for hunting
- AI/technology innovation fuels extreme efficiency in resource development that ends up opening up more land for conservation
- political climate shifts that reverse current trends

we have some evidence that we can in fact reverse trends, too - bald eagle populations, ozone layer recovery, reforestation worldwide, etc. all that to say that hopeless fatalism rarely rules the day. but i could be wrong, too.

 

[Swamp Fox__On The Run]

So, I have to address this part a little. I am actually friends with the editor and yes she has been and I assume still is a R3 supporter. But she is also very much engaged in developing conservationist. While I havent hunted with her, hunting conversations make it pretty clear she cares about promoting ethical hunting and game management. That said, there are articles that make me scratch my head because they dont always seem to match up with the person I know her to be.

Thank you for your insight, and for replying to me.

As you note, one can be personally desirous of greater strides in conservation, ethics and game management, AND a supporter of 3R (aka "more hunters in the woods") at the same time.

The concepts are not mutually exclusive on a personal level.

Whether 3R is a realistic way to get to those goals is questionable, however, given limited and shrinking natural resources and opportunity, as several of the boys have noted above.

And/or But: To my original point, 3R is not about developing (and certainly not prioritizing) these other goals. It is about keeping the money pumping.

Perhaps some pesos find their way to conservation or game management or paying some starving influencers (I almost said "writers" --How quaint!) whose life mission it is to promote ethics and sportsmanship.

But the big bucks of 3R go to bureaucracies and the commercial outdoor industry-- and that's OK. Lots of people need jobs to eat and pay the bills.

But this is how you get people who KNOW more people in the shrinking woods is a disaster cheerleading for more people in the woods.

This is how you get those head-scratchers.

 

[Swamp Fox__On The Run]

First off, THANK YOU for not calling hunting a sport. Whoever coined that phrase deserves a flush and full force throat punch. To your point though with all those other pursuits, golf, basketball, baseball, etc., the elite have a league of their own and get paid to play. That doesnt and shouldnt exits with hunting with the exception of guides to an extent. The death of print media in my mind is largely responsible because media shifted to pretty much anyone with internet access minus editorial oversight. All indians and no chief makes for a clusterfrick which is what we have been and likely will continue to see. In my mind the only way it gets better is for industry businesses to massively tighten the reigns on who they support and to have a strong hand in leading what is and is not acceptable content in whatever format it is pushed.

Lots of wisdom here. Don't skip the parts I didn't bold.

 

[BTaylor]

Thank you for your insight, and for replying to me.

As you note, one can be personally desirous of greater strides in conservation, ethics and game management, AND a supporter of 3R (aka "more hunters in the woods") at the same time.

The concepts are not mutually exclusive on a personal level.

Whether 3R is a realistic way to get to those goals is questionable, however, given limited and shrinking natural resources and opportunity, as several of the boys have noted above.

And/or But: To my original point, 3R is not about developing (and certainly not prioritizing) these other goals. It is about keeping the money pumping.

Perhaps some pesos find their way to conservation or game management or paying some starving influencers (I almost said "writers" --How quaint!) whose life mission it is to promote ethics and sportsmanship.

But the big bucks of 3R go to bureaucracies and the commercial outdoor industry-- and that's OK. Lots of people need jobs to eat and pay the bills.

But this is how you get people who KNOW more people in the shrinking woods is a disaster cheerleading for more people in the woods.

This is how you get those head-scratchers.

Maybe what we need is a push to re-brand R3 to something more of us could likely get behind. How about Retrain, Refocus or Remove "influencers".