A HUNTER'S APOLOGIA

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

"A hunt was established because the deer herd has been rapidly outgrowing available range, wildlife officials said. Area residents have complained about deer invading nearby residential areas. There also have been an increasing number of collisions between motorists and deer."

—fromColorado Wildlife Is there no way other than hunting to keep big game populations in check? In today's overcrowded and increasingly competitive world, apparently there is not. An example: During the snow months each year, the National Elk Refuge at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, hosts thousands of wapiti that migrate in from the burgeoning herds of Teton and Yellowstone national parks and the Bridger-Teton National Forest. Since the refuge can support only about 7,500 animals, any excess resulting from natural increase must be trimmed in order to assure the survival and health of the greater herd.

Traditionally, this unpleasant task has been accomplished by sanctioning annual control hunts. Unfortunately, in some areas during some years, these hunts have degenerated into sportless slaughters, shooting-gallery fiascos bearing no resemblance whatsoever to real hunting.

"Ruralists live nearer to the everyday workings of the food chain and thus have a clearer view of life and death and their interdependence."

But to stop these control hunts and allow the elk to multiply unchecked would be to assure, within a very few seasons, mass starvation, disease and untold suffering. (Naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton's classic Lives of Game Animals cites examples of just such crashes among elk herds wintering in Jackson Hole during the years prior to the establishment of the refuge and, consequently, its control hunts.) On the refuge, of course, it's the unnatural nature of the control shoots that attracts hunters looking for easy kills, bringing out the competitive worst in some. (In fact, many hunters, myself included, will have nothing to do with such events simply because they offer no challenge, no backcountry adventure, no sense of accomplishment. That's not hunting.)

Most often, though, there is no such convenient excuse for the many sins of—not hunting, but individual hunters: What of commercial poachers and other flagrant violators of game laws? What of those who trespass, trash and vandalize? What of those who shoot wildly and wantonly, careless of the damage and suffering they may cause? What of good old intractable human greed? After all, you're out there alone in the woods;

nobody's watching.

"A peculiar virtue in wildlife ethics is that the hunter ordinarily has no gallery to applaud or disapprove of his conduct. Whatever his acts, they are dictated by his own conscience, rather than that of on look ers. It is difficult to exaggerate the impor tance of this fact."

— Aldo Leopold
(in A Sand County Almanac)

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print