A friend asked me how I would respond to someone who wrote this: “Hunters started the conservation movement in the early part of the last century, and in the United States are the largest financially contributing group to Wildlife Restoration and Conservation.”
My answer?: The only reason hunters got involved is that they’d overhunted so many species practically to extinction and they wanted to save their sport. John Muir and others were around in the 1800s, selflessly speaking for wildlife and against hunting.
And, as another commenter to this blog just pointed out: “The stark reality is this: National Wildlife “Refuges” were originally set up to serve as “duck factories” for the hunting & trapping industries, along with opportunities for livestock grazing.”
Before hunters go around tooting their own horns, they should consider the motives behind their actions. If they’re ultimately self-serving, they are not necessarily all that praiseworthy. Don’t let hunters ‘shit you, an overblown sense of entitlement is not the same as a selfless environmental ethic.
Wolf Photos Copyright Jim Robertson
Exposing the Big Game 
perfect picture for the post! 🙂
Thanks for your input!
Excellent! Years ago there was a hunter apologist article in, of all places, the Earth First! Journal. I was so mad I nearly cancelled my subscription. But I wrote this letter instead: https://word.office.live.com/wv/WordView.aspx?FBsrc=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fdownload%2Ffile_preview.php%3Fid%3D561456983908886%26time%3D1403898592%26metadata&access_token=100002388214405%3AAVLMNCZRPjCqeiZ5qXOKbF11uBEOF5uw2OgyD2ucS0eiyg&title=Hunting+Letter.doc
I couldn’t open the link; I guess I’m not up to date on Adobe yet…
Great letter, Joanne
And did hunters willingly get involved or were they told “you broke it, now you fix it”?
Reblogged this on Exposing the Big Game.
Since Gifford Pinchot was chosen as the first chief of the United States Forest Service instead of John Muir the management style has been to view the natural world as a resource. The idea of preserving wilderness areas for their own sake and for the animals whose habitat it is was a foreign concept. Everything was for and about people. So fostering animal populations as targets has been part of it. Hopefully the deep ecologists will win out in the end and all wilderness lives will be valued as individuals and left alone.