Free: Contests & Raffles.
Wow, so much wrong in that opinion piece, it is difficult to know where to begin. * Minorities and women are rapidly ascendant demographics within the hunting community, and a new generation of hunters, often oriented around food source values, are getting in the game. I've witnessed this firsthand, having mentored four women (one African-American) to their first deer. * Managing landscapes for ungulate prey is not just a good idea for generating game animals, it is critical if we are going to allow predators to return to historic habitat. The writer's argument is convoluted on this point. * Land management in no way resembles that of the 1920s, which was the first decade that fire suppression could really be recognized as generalized throughout the lower 48. We have strongly rounded the corner not just on that, but on the value of complex older forests and complex post-disturbance (early successional) patches that are good for deer, elk, and host of others. * Managing for hunters first may occur on some private lands throughout the nation, but I'd really like to see examples of where public lands are primarily managed for game animals or hunting. I think it is a lot less common than the author seems to think. Most public lands have strong orientation to other values, like conservation of rare habitats, generation of some commodities (timber, grazing, etc.), and non-hunting recreation. If anything, I'd like to see more of our public lands managed with ungulate habitat in mind, especially here in the West. * The problems that the author cites (Lyme disease, vehicle strike, starvation) are more typical of eastern US landscapes, which are largely in private hands- and thus making the arguments a good bit less relevant to our issues in the public land-rich West. * Lastly, is managing for an elevated hunting experience so bad? At a time when we need more Americans to connect to the land, rather than disengage from it, we should seek to enhance all forms of outdoor recreation. And, like it or not, that includes hunting, with its 12 million + adherents. I only wish Aldo were still alive to offer a strongly worded response.
