Here's a good read on the subject. As hard as it is for hunters, the natural resources are for all citizens, not just hunters.
If hunting was deemed a pure "right", we'd have what we had during the market hunting years. No regulations, no laws to enforce, no licenses to raise monies, for if a right, you could hunt whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted, by whatever means and without bag limits.
We all do have the "right" to participate in some form of hunting, as long as we follow the common rules agreed upon and for a fee. Given that, hunting, in legal terms, is a privilege and not a "right", in legal terms.
If one thinks hunting is truely a right, go shoot a half dozen deer today (August) with a centerfire rifle, get arrested and plead your case in court. You'll quickly find that you didn't have the right to do what you did and that the "right" to participate in the fall deer seasons is a privilege. You'll also find that the state owns the deer and not you.
If hunting was a "pure" right, then nobody could ever keep firearms (or xbows) out of archery season. In fact, there would be no more archery only seasons if hunting were a "true right", since non-archery deer hunters would have their "rights" violated under equal protection.
Again, you have the right to participate as long as you follow the rules, just as you have the right to get a drivers license, as long as you follow the rules.
Now, if you put up a high fence and are not hunting "the peoples game", you can shoot whatever you want, with whatever you want, no bag limits and no license required. But even then, you don't necessarily have the right to put up a high fence just anywhere, anymore.
How the ‘King’s Deer’ became the ‘People’s Deer’
By Jim Posewitz
For several years residents near Loch Coille-Bharr in Scotland have debated the possible release of the largest mammal to be legally reintroduced in Britain. The project failed in 2005 as critics called it a menace and landowners vigorously opposed the project. Scottish conservationist Simon Jones describes the beast as “a relatively big animal…a large tubby squirrel with short legs and big teeth. The beast is the beaver, it has been extinct in Britain for 250 years, and conservationists are trying to bring it back, welcome to the European Model of wildlife conservation.
Most of us were born into a place and time that included an abundance of wildlife. It is difficult to imagine the landscapes we know without beaver, deer, elk, wild geese and the wily coyote. The truth is, however, the lower forty-eight states of North America were once virtually stripped of all the animals that had a market value.
In 1885 Theodore Roosevelt described the commercial carnage with a story of a northern plains cowboy who had just ridden a thousand miles, and then told TR that he “was never out of sight of a dead buffalo and never in sight of a live one.”
Our hunting heritage sat on the brink of oblivion. The buffalo, elk, bison and other animals were indeed in peril and could have passed to extinction here, just as the aurochs, boar, bear, wolf, reindeer and beaver did in Britain. Our American wildlife legacy might have ended late in the 19th Century were it not for the emergence of a new deal for wildlife—and for people. In time, that deal would be described as the North American Model of Fish and Wildlife Conservation.
Simply put, the North American Model of Fish and Wildlife Conservation (the Model) is how our society found a way to value, restore, conserve and share the wild resources of a continent. The Model is rooted in our legal system, our political system, and our cultural will.
Since none of our nation’s founding documents addressed fish and wildlife, it was left to the courts to define our relationship with the wild. In a long series of decisions dating back to 1842, fish and wildlife have been defined as public resources held in trust by the states, for all the people. In that first case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that by virtue of the Declaration of Independence the people in our democracy were the sovereign. What that meant in short was, the king’s deer became the people’s game.
Learning to live with this new reality was difficult, and America went through a very dark time when commercial interests slaughtered wildlife for the market, and by 1885 game populations were near collapse.
In 1887, Theodore Roosevelt, George Bird Grinnell, Gifford Pinchot and others formed a club for the restoration of wildlife to America. When TR became our president he used the ‘bully pulpit’ to embed a conservation ethic in our culture, setting aside roughly 84,000 acres a day for every day he held the White House.
When wildlife restoration faltered, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called the first North American Wildlife Conference in 1936. He called upon the people to unite in the fish and wildlife conservation effort. The people responded by creating a national affiliation of sportsmen’s clubs, and within a year won landmark federal legislation to fund the recovery. Back in their communities these hunters and anglers went to work on the restoration of habitat and the protection of wildlife, while enriching the conservation ethic in the people.
By the time the 20th Century came to a close, three generations of those sovereign people had successfully restored wildlife across the country: When Theodore Roosevelt entered the White House, there were about half a million deer in the nation; today there are more than 30 million whitetails alone. In 1907 the nation’s elk population stood near 40,000, there are now at least a million. When Franklin Roosevelt called the hunters together, there may have been a million Canada geese on our continent. By 2003 the annual goose harvest was climbing toward 3 million.
This massive restoration of wildlife was probably the greatest environmental achievement in human history.
In England, where ‘the king’s deer’ passed to private property, the aurochs, boar, bear, beaver, wolf and reindeer went extinct. In America, where wildlife became the ‘people’s game’ we have deer in our suburbs, bears in our orchards and goose dung on every golf shoe in America. None of this happened by accident.
Finding our way to a conservation ethic that would work wasn’t easy, we had to hunt for it. In the process, we learned that if we were to hunt at all, we all had to conserve and share. That is how—and why—it worked.
In 2001 three wildlife biologists described the Model in a professional paper titled: Why Hunting Has Defined the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation. In 2002 the International Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies endorsed the Model and its seven basic principles:
•Wildlife as Public-Trust Resources
•Elimination of Markets for Wildlife
•Allocation of Wildlife by Law
•Wildlife Can Only be Killed for a Legitimate Purpose
•Wildlife is Considered an International Resource
•Science is the Proper Tool for Discharge of Wildlife Policy
•Democracy of Hunting
It is, however, still up to the people in our democratic form of governance to embrace and protect these fundamental principles that brought wildlife to our time.
History teaches that those who would privatize and commercialize the people’s game, or dredge up an aristocracy of hunting, are not new. They were around in Theodore Roosevelt’s time and he left us some guidance. The following passages are his:
“The movement for the conservation of wildlife, and the… conservation of all our natural resources, are essentially democratic in spirit, purpose and method.”
“We do not intend that our natural resources shall be exploited by the few against the interests of the many. Our aim is to preserve our natural resource for the public as a whole, for the average man and the average woman who make up the body of the American people.”
“Above all, we should realize that the effort toward this end is essentially a democratic movement. It is… in our power… to preserve game…and to give reasonable opportunities for the exercise of the skill of the hunter, whether he is or is not a man of means.”
“There have been aristocracies which have played a great and beneficent part at stages in the growth of mankind; but we had come to the stage where for our people what was needed was a real democracy, and of all forms of tyranny the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of a plutocracy.”
For three generations, conservationists addressed habitat challenges, biological puzzles and law enforcement issues to bring the people’s game into a new century. As we entered the 21st Century, we noted with alarm that the component of our culture responsible for this wildlife renaissance, the hunter, was in decline.
How could an activity so profoundly linked to our lifestyle for a century find itself fading from our culture? Since this unique North American Model and the abundance it has restored are worth keeping, we need to examine the various social influences impacting hunter numbers.
The impact commercialized hunting is having on opportunity and recruitment has received precious little attention.
Commerce, or some form of exchange involving dead wildlife, has been a constant in our human evolution. At times our commercial companions have been fundamental to the success of fish and wildlife restoration. The best example of their positive potential remains the Pittman-Robertson and Dingell-Johnson Acts, excise taxes on hunting and fishing equipment that are returned to state wildlife agencies.
However, to see the dark side of commerce, simply check the advertisements for exclusive hunting experiences found in most sporting journals. None of these advertisements include the words: the public is welcome to share the abundance. A new plutocracy of the hunt seems to be emerging, and like the aristocracy of previous times, it is not likely to honor that democracy of the hunt principle basic to the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation.
Historian Daniel Justin Herman wrote an article titled Hunting Democracy in which he stated, “American citizens, not those who governed them, were sovereign. In the U.S., moreover, every adult … enjoyed another right that only kings and aristocrats had held in earlier centuries: the right to hunt … The right to hunt and the right to make political choices (vote) emerged simultaneously in the U.S.”
Herman went on to observe: “At one moment, hunting has operated in American culture as a rite of democracy and at the next, as a rite of aristocracy. That pendulum swing continues today.”
As that pendulum swings toward aristocracy, it knocks more hunters out of field than the anti-hunters could ever have hoped to. The problem with many forms of commercialized hunting opportunity is not that they seek some compensation for the landowner or for services provided. The problem is their own belief that they must exclude every common or aspiring hunter unable or unwilling to pay the toll.
The North American Model worked because we the people willed it, and then made it happen. Let us aspire to sustain the model and the seven principles that make it work. Perhaps it would not be unreasonable to have paying clients and free hunters hunting the same marsh, both taking time to learn and appreciate why the other is there.
Perhaps we could choose to not confront an aspiring hunter with a sign declaring hunting as private. As never before, we need to protect the two special pillars of the North American Model that made the whole process work: wildlife as a public trust and the democracy of the hunt.
In 1883, on his first trip to hunt buffalo on the vanishing American frontier, a 24-year-old Theodore Roosevelt spent several nights in Gregor Lang’s cabin on North Dakota’s Cannonball Creek. They held spirited discussions on topics important to our young nation. Gregor’s son Lincoln listened from his bunk as the men talked late into the night.
Years later Lincoln would write: “It was listening to those talks after supper in the old shack on the Cannonball that I first came to understand that the Lord made the earth for all of us and not for a chosen few.”
Now, 115 years later, that is a perspective worth hanging on to and taking to the field, forest and marsh. The future of hunting in America may depend on it.
The list of reasons for the decline may be long, with some being obvious and others simply superficial distractions. For example, much has been said about the many influences competing for the attention of our youth. This issue is among the obvious and many hunting organizations have launched excellent youth programs. These programs are necessary, and we all need to pitch in and help make them work.
Since the word superficial was used to define the other end of the spectrum, let me suggest that anti-hunting groups and their campaigns occupy more of our time and attention than they deserve. They have been around for a century, and while they raise a lot of money and live well, they have not damaged hunting. Hunting is still clearly okay with most Americans. Even those aspiring to be our nation’s president continue to create photo-ops with dog and gun.
Topic: Privilege or right? (Read 10756 times)
