Is there any pastime in America that stirs up as much
emotion as hunting? As of 2010, according to the 2011 National Survey
of Fishing, Hunting, and Wildlife-Associated Recreation published by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Survey, there were 13.7 million hunters in the United States, a group
spending about $38.7 billion per year on hunting. A great many more people
spend time watching wildlife in the outdoors—the same 2011 report says 71.8
million people pursue wildlife watching, though that number certainly includes
many hunters who go out to observe or photograph wildlife outside hunting
season. Wildlife watchers spend $54.9 billion dollars per year.
One presumes every one of those 13.7 million hunters is
pro-hunting. The wildlife-watching group is more varied, including avid
hunters, avowed anti-hunters, and just about everyone in between.
Hunting and fishing have been part of the fabric of American
life since time immemorial—the source of most of the animal protein eaten by
most First Americans as well as colonists and pioneers. Even as the meat from domesticated
livestock became more readily available, rural Americans maintained hunting
traditions long after many people flocking to cities cast aside rural life and
all it entailed. Of course, many urban Americans escape the big
city as often as they can, some making hunting or fishing trips into a new tradition. Even so, generation after generation, fewer and fewer Americans maintain their close ties with natural places.
Many people have decried the fact that fewer and fewer American children
grow up playing outside and exploring nature on their own. Dan Ashe, Director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife, wrote in
the 2011 National Survey
of Fishing,
Hunting, and Wildlife-Associated Recreation:
When I was growing up, it was
taken
as a matter of faith that kids belonged outside. I grew up with 4
brothers, and during those long, hot Atlanta summers, it was common for our mom
to holler, “You boys get outside, and don’t come back ‘til it’s dark.” It never
occurred to me or my brothers to do anything else in our spare time but explore
the world around us. The truth is, we had little else to do. But those
experiences – waking up on frosty mornings and starting the campfire, scanning
trees for a shot at a scampering gray squirrel in the dawn light, scouring
creek beds for crawdads and other fishing bait, or simply of the fun we had
tramping through the forest – shaped who I am, and drew me to a career in
conservation.
One of my heroes, Aldo Leopold, was an avid hunter his whole
life, but started seeing American Woodcocks a little differently after thrilling
at their spring sky dance. He wrote, “No one would rather hunt woodcock in
October than I, but since learning of the sky dance I find myself calling one
or two birds enough. I must be sure that, come April, there be no dearth of
dancers in the sunset sky.”
I’m a non-hunter, and one who viscerally hates the killing
of animals. I do eat some meat, and recognize that even with the burgeoning
numbers of vegetarians among us, our species is by nature omnivorous. Healthy
vegans must conscientiously and consistently balance various food items to ensure that they get
the proteins meat-eaters consume naturally. Because I do eat meat, it would be
hypocritical of me to hate agriculture, though I reserve the right to look at
it with clear eyes, and to decry dangerous, unethical, or cruel practices.
I have too much love and respect for many of the hunters
I’ve known personally, and too much admiration and respect for Aldo Leopold and
other conservationists, to hate hunting. It’s fundamentally human to feel
empathy and compassion for other humans and for animals. I don’t think people
always recognize or respect this deeply important characteristic, which may be
an essential one for a social species with young that remain dependent for so
many years. But it’s also fundamentally human to enjoy tracking and hunting down animals,
an essential characteristic in a non-scavenging, omnivorous species. Aggression, too, is a fundamentally human quality.
Each of these characteristics may be stronger or weaker in
different individuals. Our society looks down on dysfunctional people whose
sympathy for animals falls at either extreme of the spectrum, from pitiable “crazy
cat ladies” to the pathetic people who torture animals. Healthy levels of
aggression fall in a wide area between extremes, too.
I’m pretty low on the aggressiveness scale and high on the
empathy scale, making me by nature a non-hunter. But I can hardly deny the thrill of hunting to those who enjoy it when I myself enjoy watching Peregrine Falcons in a stoop (as long as I wasn’t first watching the bird at the
bottom of the stoop). In graduate school in the Fisheries and Wildlife
Department at Michigan State, I took wildlife management classes, and I try hard not
to let my natural antipathy color my judgments about hunting and wildlife management. That said, there have been many times when I’ve wished hunters would extend to
me that same courtesy.
The very underpinnings of any democracy depend on
citizens trusting one another and accepting the many differences among
themselves even as they engage in reasoned debate. Our country’s Constitution is grounded in a preamble calling
on “we the people” to “promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings
of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” The wealth of natural resources in
this country, and their use by all of us who observe, photograph, and hunt
wildlife, are certainly among those blessings of liberty. Ensuring that they
remain sustainable for ourselves and our posterity is a fundamental obligation
of our government in promoting the general welfare of every citizen, both for
“use” and because we increasingly understand how the complex interweavings of
plants and animals in every ecosystem affect the air we breathe, the water we
drink, and the food we eat.
Wildlife management was originally developed as a tool for ensuring
the sustainability of game species. The extinction of the Passenger Pigeon and
the Heath Hen were proof that a dangerous combination of overhunting and
habitat loss could be lethal for entire species. Rapidly declining Wood Ducks
at the end of the 19th Century, due to market hunting for meat and
feathers as well as to habitat loss, inspired urgent work among hunters as well
as women concerned about the fashion industry’s use of feathers in hats.
Hunters and various Audubon societies became
important forces behind wildlife conservation. The Boone and Crockett Club,
founded by Theodore Roosevelt in 1887, was an instrumental force behind passage
of the Lacey Act of 1900, which put an end to market hunting; the Migratory
Bird Treaty Act of 1918, which afforded complete protection to most native
American birds and required those birds defined as game species to be managed sustainably
by state and federal agencies; the Migratory Bird Hunting Stamp Act of 1934,
requiring all waterfowl hunters to buy a Duck Stamp, the proceeds going
entirely to waterfowl habitat acquisition; and the Pittman-Robertson Federal
Aid in Wildlife Restoration Act of 1937, which created an excise tax on
all firearms and ammunition, the funds earmarked to manage wildlife and
habitat.
In subsequent decades, the Boone and Crockett Club became
the main American organization promoting big game hunting and maintaining a scoring
system for big game records. This competitive trophy hunting has directly led
to state natural resource agencies building up deer populations to
higher-than-healthy levels, and to game farms where virulent diseases of
captive animals, such as chronic wasting disease, have been transferred to
wildlife. But in 1927, when the Boone and Crockett Club was still
primarily focused on conservation, as wetlands were drained and waterfowl
numbers were dwindling, many members who were waterfowl hunters branched into
a more focused offshoot organization called American Wild Fowlers. In 1930,
they were absorbed into a conservation group called More Game Birds in America.
When Ducks Unlimited organized in 1937, this organization was absorbed into it.
Ducks Unlimited has a wonderful track record in restoring
grassland and watersheds, replanting forests, educating landowners,
conservation easements, and acquiring land. They remained fairly neutral in the
debate to ban lead shot in waterfowl hunting, though when it was passed, they
took a leading role in educating hunters to deal with the change.
Even as conservation became a focus of many hunters, hunting practices and
ethics have continued to evolve. Aldo Leopold wrote about the day he, as a young
man, watched a wolf die, in his essay, “Thinking Like a Mountain,” (published
in 1949 in A Sand County Almanac):
We were eating lunch on a high
rimrock, at the foot of which a turbulent river elbowed its way. We saw what we
thought was a doe fording the torrent, her breast awash in white water. When
she climbed the bank toward us and shook out her tail, we realized our error:
it was a wolf. A half-dozen others, evidently grown pups, sprang from the
willows and all joined in a welcoming melee of wagging tails and playful
maulings. What was literally a pile of wolves writhed and tumbled in the center
of an open flat at the foot of our rimrock.
In those days we had never heard of
passing up a chance to kill a wolf. In a second we were pumping lead into the
pack, but with more excitement than accuracy: how to aim a steep downhill shot
is always confusing. When our rifles were empty, the old wolf was down, and a
pup was dragging a leg into impassable slide-rocks.
We reached the old wolf in time to
watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known
ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes - something known
only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I
thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean
hunters' paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither
the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.
Since then I have lived to see
state after state extirpate its wolves. I have watched the face of many a newly
wolfless mountain, and seen the south-facing slopes wrinkle with a maze of new
deer trails. I have seen every edible bush and seedling browsed, first to
anaemic desuetude, and then to death. I have seen every edible tree defoliated
to the height of a saddlehorn. Such a mountain looks as if someone had given
God a new pruning shears, and forbidden Him all other exercise. In the end the
starved bones of the hoped-for deer herd, dead of its own too-much, bleach with
the bones of the dead sage, or molder under the high-lined junipers.
I now suspect that just as a deer
herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear
of its deer. And perhaps with better cause, for while a buck pulled down by
wolves can be replaced in two or three years, a range pulled down by too many
deer may fail of replacement in as many decades.
Although wildlife management is supposed to be grounded in
fundamental ecological principles, conflicting pressures on managers have often
led to short-sighted practices. When Aldo Leopold wrote that essay in 1949, it was already obvious
that an overpopulation of deer leads to ecological disasters, yet decades later,
in the mid-1970s, one major, stated goal of the Michigan Department of Natural Resources
was to raise the state’s White-tailed Deer population to a million. At the same
time, the Wisconsin DNR was actively working to increase its Canada Goose
population. Most reasonable people can see pretty clearly that achieving those goals has not worked out well in many ways.
Although many hunting regulations are grounded in science,
wildlife managers can’t help but be swayed by pressure from the groups that
fund them through hunting licenses and Pittman-Robertson excise taxes. Lead
shot raining down onto the ground and water, and shot and bullets in carrion and gut
piles left by hunters, have long been known to give scavengers and birds that
pick up grit lead poisoning. Waterfowl hunters were first to accept the
limiting of their hunt to non-toxic shot. But to this day, upland
game can be shot with lead in most areas. Lead from bullets was established over a decade ago
to be the primary cause of mortality for the California Condor, whose
reintroduced population is hanging by a thread, but many hunters, along with
the NRA, banded together to fight tooth and nail against banning lead ammo in
California. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law a ban within a small zone of
the state, which took effect in 2008. Condors of course weren’t aware of that,
and continued to feed on lead-laced carcasses outside that area. In 2013, Jerry
Brown signed into law a statewide ban, which won’t be fully implemented until
2019. Again, despite the known damage to an endangered species (as well as to
other scavengers and grit-eating birds), a significant part of the hunting
community along with the NRA fought bitterly against that ban.
Venison shot with lead bullets is often laced with lead that can be ingested by the families of hunters. Because of the risks of lead poisoning, more and more non-profits are refusing to accept gifts of venison. Yet wildlife managers continue to defer to gun-rights groups that don't want any regulations on ammunition, even when it's in their own self-interest.
Many wildlife managers fought to prevent the rapid expansion
of game farms in the 1980s and 90s, predicting that transporting elk, deer, and
other animals from place to place would lead to disease outbreaks, such as
chronic wasting disease. This is one issue where both hunters and property
rights advocates split, depending on their personal stake. Those deer hunters
focused on hunting in traditional wild areas to obtain venison for the table,
and those property owners who hunt wild game on their own land, have been
outspoken in calling for halts to transporting captive game animals from other
countries, states, or areas. But game farm owners, hunters focused on trophy
animals, and hunters who prefer “canned hunts” to gambling time and money on an uncertain outcome in natural areas, want to minimize regulation.
Unfortunately, the Boone and Crockett Club’s registration system encourages the
worst practices, by allowing trophy hunters to register captive-bred deer with antlers too freakishly
large for survival in the wild. The big money involved in canned hunts for
trophies (a single 2-day hunt on a game farm can costs thousands or even tens
of thousands of dollars, vs. the negligible cost of a hunting license), along with the money involved in these game farms selling meat, hard and soft antlers, deer urine (a surprisingly large
business), and photo ops make this a lucrative business.
Despite growing calls for tighter regulations by
conservation organizations and human health advocates, the game farm industry has managed
to lobby for and win relaxed rules and expanded opportunities for deer and elk farming,
even as we’re seeing absolute proof that dangerous game farm diseases are
spreading to wildlife. Chronic wasting disease, which manifests as mad cow
disease in cattle and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, was first reported
in North America in a captive mule deer in Colorado in 1967, and then in captive mule and
black-tailed deer in Wyoming in 1979. Between 1981 and 1985, it was first found
in wild deer and elk in Colorado and Wyoming. It made it to a captive elk farm
in Saskatchewan in 1996, and several elk farms in South Dakota in 1997. Since
then, it has mushroomed on game farms and, in turn, in wild deer and elk. Since 2002, in
the area in southern Wisconsin where the disease is most prevalent, prevalence
in adult male deer has risen from 8-10 percent to over 25 percent, and in adult
female deer from about 3-4 percent to more than 10 percent.
Yet, despite the real danger of this disease for humans,
livestock, and wildlife, Idaho, which once
required all farmed elk that die to be tested for chronic wasting disease, recently
reduced mandatory testing to just 10 percent. Other states are also easing
disease testing requirements and restrictions to prevent it from spreading. Those
hunters who have historically been among our most vocal conservation proponents
are now being out-lobbied by trophy and canned hunters.
Tragically, due to all
kinds of factors including virulent attacks on all hunting by anti-hunting groups, many
principled hunters are reluctant to join forces with birders and non-hunting
conservation groups, and many anti-hunting conservationists refuse to distinguish
among traditional ethical hunting practices and modern canned hunts.
At the same time, the NRA and hunting community have both
changed dramatically. I used to read my brother’s magazines when I was a child.
American Rifleman and Field and Stream didn’t used to be the least bit political. The NRA was a true membership organization focused on promoting
responsible gun ownership rather than on fueling paranoia about gun rights. Hunting
organizations didn’t try to stir up anger at politicians, but simply worked
with them when necessary for conservation purposes and otherwise seemed mostly
interested in promoting safe and ethical hunting practices.
Meanwhile, non-hunters were in large part like me, people
who didn’t participate, but didn’t judge hunters, who seemed to be doing a fine
job of policing themselves and conserving wildlife.
Hunter numbers started dwindling as America
became more and more urbanized and removed from nature. At the same time,
animal rights advocates became more vocal and more generalized, moving from attacking
specific cruel practices to advocating for an end to all animal research, all
animal husbandry, and all hunting. Hunters were increasingly placed on the
defensive. Now tragically, here we are, splintered and bearing grudges, the two groups most passionate about protecting wildlife feuding
rather than working together.
Back in 1976, I was asked to take the anti-hunting side in a
debate about hunting in a wildlife management class. After it was over, I
realized my professor had expected me to take the traditional animal-rights,
“protect Bambi” stance. That is certainly what my pro-hunting opponent had
prepared for. Instead, I based my case on the many ways that pressure by hunters had led to
serious wildlife management mistakes.
In this same professor’s ecology class,
we’d learned that all species are interconnected. I argued that because wildlife
management focuses exclusively on game species, important components of natural
communities were being ignored. For example, we were taught that one important
management practice is to break up large stands of grasslands and forests to promote
the “edge effect.” I argued that this practice was directly contributing to burgeoning
numbers of Brown-headed Cowbirds flooding into the East to parasitize the nests
of more and more vulnerable songbirds, including our own state’s Kirtland’s
Warbler. Pheasants did indeed thrive with hedgerows, but I pointed out that
pheasants are not native birds, and so deserved a lower level of protection and
management than did native grassland species such as the Greater Prairie-Chickens that were disappearing right then from Michigan—they require uninterrupted, true
grasslands.
I argued that the Michigan DNR’s current goal of building up
the White-tailed Deer herd would lead to a lot of habitat damage (I think I quoted Leopold's wolf essay here),
giving hunters easier game at the expense of other species.
This was when the debate over lead shot for waterfowl
hunting was raging. I made the point that there was a lot of scientific proof that ducks, geese, swans, and other water birds, and all manner of
grassland birds as well, were ingesting lead shot and dying or suffering
effects of sub-lethal levels of lead. Predators and scavengers picking up
wounded and dead game were ingesting dangerous levels of lead, too. As long as
hunters defended or used lead shot, to me they were violating a fundamental
principle of ethics, their hunting propped up by shortsighted game
management rather than true ecosystem management.
The student I was debating
seemed at a complete loss to address any of these points, but my professor gave him the
win anyway, saying my arguments were “grossly unfair.”
Later that very spring, I was one of the last people to see
Greater Prairie-Chickens in Michigan, on their only remaining lek in the state.
By the early ‘80s, they had vanished entirely, in part because of
misguided management for Ring-necked Pheasants.
I’ve engaged in a few debates with hunters since then, in public hearings when controversial
issues were decided. When the Minnesota DNR proposed a dove-hunting season
after almost a hundred years of protection, I couldn’t help but dislike the
very idea—these are backyard feeder birds for me. But I realized that the
Mourning Dove is the most heavily hunted game bird in the country, and its
numbers remain strong even in the areas where hunting is heaviest. I voiced no
objections to hunting them in Minnesota, but did ask in my testimony at
the public hearing that the hunt be limited to non-toxic shot and that the
season be closed along the hawk migration corridor along the north shore of
Lake Superior during American Kestrel migration. Neither of these concerns were
taken the least bit seriously by the DNR.
Although Minnesota’s Mourning Dove season is a new one in
the state, the hunters engaging in Mourning Dove hunting are the old-fashioned
variety who go afield for sport and meat, not trophies. Common as doves are in
much of the state, hunters have no guarantee whatsoever that they’ll get one,
much less the limit, when they set out on a days’ hunt. Canned and guided hunts
require neither the skill nor the sportsmanship of old-fashioned hunting. Instead
of the thrills and uncertainties of taking your chances and dealing with the
vagaries of nature, the new style of hunting is a “you get what you pay for”
enterprise.
Frustration with unprincipled and unsportsmanlike canned hunting and the increase in trophy hunting is growing, and growing more
acrimonious, right when the ugly tenor of online interactions has bled over
into nasty face-to-face encounters. After my dove season testimony, a couple of
hunters cornered me and were extremely threatening, one even seeming to cradle
something on his hip as if to warn me that he was armed. They also recited my
address and my children’s names in a menacing way. Hunters certainly have just
cause to feel unfairly beleaguered by anti-hunters, but it goes both ways.
In Minnesota and throughout the upper Midwest, debates about
wolf hunting for decades have been far more passionate and acrimonious than the
dove debate was. People living in areas
populated by wolves can’t help but be fearful of them, with some cause, though
not quite as much as some people think. The last known killing of a person by a wolf in Minnesota was in 1989, when a 3-year-old was killed by her family’s captive wolf in
Forest Lake, and the last previous case of a wolf killing a human in the state was
over a century earlier, in 1871 in a logging camp near Pine City. Meanwhile, a
few to several people die in the state every year in auto-collisions with
white-tailed deer.
Despite everything
Aldo Leopold and other ecologists have preached, deer hunters can’t help but
blame frustrations about deer numbers on wolves. But it seems ironic that they
don’t grant the same legitimacy to wolves hunting for their livelihood that they
grant themselves hunting for sport and supplemental food.
Before they were afforded protection by the Endangered Species Act, wolves were considered fair game in Minnesota at any time.
Minnesotans have always been legally allowed to protect themselves and other
people from wolf attacks by killing menacing wolves, and before wolf protection
laws kicked in, livestock owners in the state could protect their animals by
killing wolves anywhere near their property. Aldo Leopold was representative of
the ethics of a long era when he acknowledged that he shot any wolf he could in
his trigger-happy youth.
Despite so many decades of shooting them without constraint
before federal protection kicked in, few people have traditionally eaten wolves
or lions—meat from predators isn’t normally considered palatable compared to
that from herbivores. In Alaska, wolves are frequently hunted by air. There’s little
interest in picking up the carcass for food, though trophy hunters do retrieve the
head and skin for taxidermy.
As with lion trophy hunting in Africa, wolf hunting in
Minnesota is extremely controversial, in part because of the danger, real and
perceived, that these top predators pose to human beings. In Africa, lions are
far from the most dangerous animals. Elephants, crocodiles, hippos, snakes,
tsetse flies, mosquitoes, and other humans kill many more people every year than lions do,
but lions still kill an average of 70 people each year. In comparison, North American wolves kill fewer than one person per decade.
As a top predator, healthy population numbers of wolves are
orders of magnitude smaller than their prey species. In Minnesota, the deer
population is estimated at about a million, while the population of wolves, in winter 2013-14, was estimated at just over 2,400.
Historically, Minnesota has always had a wolf population, and
some people have argued that even though their numbers nationwide justify
getting endangered species protection, they shouldn’t get that same level of
protection here, where their numbers are healthy according to credible wolf
biologists. Various pro-hunting elements pressured the US Fish and Wildlife
Service to delist the species in the Upper Midwest, and reasonable wolf
biologists helped F&W develop a management plan, so the Minnesota DNR
prepared the state management plan to add the wolf as a game species. That is
how it came to pass in January 2012 that wolves went, on the same day, from
being a federally listed endangered species to a legal game animal in Minnesota.
I don’t like the idea of anyone extinguishing what Leopold
called “that fierce green fire” for pleasure, but I’m not a wolf biologist, and
cannot formulate a reasoned opinion about the wolf hunt based on anything but
gut feelings, so I’ve never debated either side of the issue. Although few traditional hunters are interested hunting wolves, they usually maintain solidarity with other hunters, at least staying out of the discussion. Before the
wolf-hunting season opened in 2012, 2013, and 2014, anti-wolf-hunting groups
worked passionately to prevent that year’s hunt. A lawsuit filed by the Humane
Society of the United States led to a December 2014 US Federal Court ruling
ordering a stop to wolf hunting throughout the Lower 48.
Without understanding the urge to kill wolves, I could still
understand the frustrations of wolf-hunting proponents at that sudden judicial
intervention, especially after so many prominent wolf biologists, like David Mech of the
US Geological Survey, testified supporting a well-managed wolf hunt in Minnesota,
Wisconsin, and Michigan. On the other hand, one angry hunter wrote on the
Minnesota Deer Hunters Association Facebook page, “All this partisan judge did
was declare open season on wolves. Shoot, shovel, shut-up,” apparently a widespread sentiment about taking the law into their own hands and turning their backs on wildlife laws. So much virulent anger on every side makes it impossible to work out
reasonable compromises.
All this acrimony and frustration that have been building
for decades about all kinds of hunting issues exploded when Minnesota dentist Walter
Palmer killed Cecil the Lion. The ugly, over-the-top fury toward Palmer played
out mostly on social media, where photoshopped images of Palmer’s head sticking
out of a trophy plaque on a wall, demands for the death penalty, and threats
against his dental practice cropped up everywhere. Even though this was
hyperbole, as the threats to my own face by Mourning Dove hunt proponents were,
Palmer definitely felt in jeopardy and went into hiding.
Lion hunting is controversial for many reasons. Palmer paid
$55,000 to his guide to conduct his hunt—whenever that much money is involved,
ethical shortcuts and undue pressure on regulators can taint any process
involving endangered wildlife. Many people defend trophy hunting specifically
because the huge amounts of money involved help ensure that people will work
for sustainable lion numbers, though little of it goes to conservation. But
just has it has long been in the United States, hunting is a critical component
in sustainable wildlife management in Africa. Richard Leakey discussed Kenya's hunting ban in a 2006 address at Strathmore
Business School in Nairobi:
If you fly over parts of Tsavo today—and I challenge anyone to do so,
if you have the eyes for it – you can see lines of snares set out in funnel
traps that extend four or five miles. Tens of thousands of animals are being
killed annually for the meat business. Carnivores are being decimated in the
same snares and discarded. I am not a propagandist on this issue, but when my
friends say we are very concerned that hunting will be reintroduced in
Kenya, let me put it to you: hunting has never been stopped in Kenya, and there
is more hunting in Kenya today than at any time since independence.
(Thousands) of animals are being killed annually with no control. Snaring,
poisoning, and shooting are common things. So when you have a fear of debate
about hunting, please don’t think there is no hunting. Think of a policy to
regulate it, so that we can make it sustainable. That is surely the issue,
because an illegal crop, an illegal market is unsustainable in the long term,
whatever it is. And the market in wildlife meat is unsustainable as currently
practiced, and something needs to be done.
Of course, sustainable management of wildlife requires
hunters to follow the rules. Unless poaching is prosecuted consistently, that
is impossible. Walter Palmer claims he believed that everything he did on the
hunt was legal and ethical, but that raises serious questions about whether
hunting laws can be enforced at all when big money is part of the equation.
Palmer
has an international reputation as a top big game hunter, with all kinds of entries
in Safari International’s record books and a glowing 2009 profile in the New
York Times. If someone with his experience truly believes that baiting and
luring a lion off a protected national park to private land is ethical, and if
he’s representative of other members of Safari International, that seems a
legitimate argument against all trophy hunting.
Also, regardless of whether he thought he was acting legally, the
standard is supposed to be that ignorance of the law is no excuse. Conservationists
have been growing increasingly frustrated by the way so many people shooting
Whooping Cranes and other non-game animals get off with hand slaps by making
that same argument. The only way Zimbabwe authorities can prevent similar cases in the future is
if they prosecute the players in this case in court and, if they’re
found guilty, give them a legitimately harsh penalty.
Palmer has a history of lying about his hunting practices
that makes his claims of innocence now sound disingenuous. In 2006, he had a
permit to hunt bears within a certain bear-hunting zone near Phillips, Wisconsin.
But his hunting party killed a black bear 40
miles outside this zone. According to court documents, the group
agreed to claim that the bear was hunted within the legal area. They
transported the carcass to a registration station where they certified the
animal had been killed legally, and then the carcass was transported to
Palmer’s residence. Palmer was fined $3,000 and given a year's probation for
the felony conviction.
Regardless of whether Palmer is found innocent or guilty if tried in the U.S. or Zimbabwe,
the court of public opinion needs to calm down and start looking carefully at bigger issues. People who claim to be logical and dispassionate proponents of wise game
management need to start taking into account human nature, which involves
passionate feelings about animals. People who are passionate animal defenders
need to take a step back and consider the value of wildlife management,
including hunting, in protecting wildlife in long-term, sustainable ways.
And
all of us need to open our hearts and minds to our fellow Americans, accepting
that feeling empathy and love for individual animals and legally hunting
animals for food and sport are both ways that decent human beings have engaged
with the natural world for generations. Compassion for animals, is not inconsistent with compassion for our fellow humans, including hunters.
And any development of legitimate wildlife management policies must take into
account the voices of everyone with a stake in the future of wildlife,
hunters and non-hunters both.
