DAILY SCIENCE
For more than a century, hunters have played an important part in conserving wildlife in the United States and Canada. Government-based conservation in particular relies on revenues from hunting — but the number of hunters is fast declining. So where will funding come from? Will people who love wildlife, but don’t hunt, foot the bill?
“As sociodemographic trends continue to reshape the conservation landscape,” write researchers in the journal Human Dimensions of Wildlife, people have “questioned whether the current financial trajectory of wildlife conservation is sustainable and, perhaps more importantly, who is going to pay for it.”
Led by Nathan Shipley, an environmental scientist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the researchers examine these questions through the lens of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service’s…
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Exposing the Big Game 
BS really. The non consumptive public really pays for wildlife and wilderness way more that hunters so this myth should come to end. Hunters help pay for the hunter focused state wildlife agencies and farming of recreational wildlife killing targets, ungulates, and suppression of predators who hunters regard as competitors for their recreational killing. It is all based on the North American Model of Wildlife conservation which dates back to Aldo Leopold and Teddy Roosevelt days which views wildlife from a consumptive model. We need a new model of wildlife as having a right to exist in its own right, mostly left alone from “management”.
Non hunters could do more to directly fund wildlife, wildlife habitats, public land, National Forests by paying more taxes for recreational equipment and buying Wildlife stamps. But hunters only pay about 6% in the form of excise taxes for guns and ammunition with the excise taxes be redistributed back to the states. Non consumptive tax payers contribute the rest but do not get credit for it or recognition feeding the hunter delusion that they pay for wildlife so should be able to “manage it” and kill it.
http://www.nrwm.org/wildlife-conservation-management-funding-in-the-u-s-2/).
(https://ourwisconsinourwildlife.wordpress.com/2014/03/08/who-are-the-real-conservationists/)
https://www.mountainlion.org/featurearticleguestwhopaysforwildlife.asp
http://www.wyofile.com/study-non-hunters-contribute-most-to-wildlife/
Animal Matters: “Approximately 95 percent of federal, 88 percent of nonprofit and 94 percent of total funding for wildlife conservation and management (in the United States) come from the non hunting public.” https://www.mountainlion.org/featurearticleguestwhopaysforwildlife.asp
Non
Total B.S.
It is a killing tradition, a tradition of killing wildlife, part of the the hunter-rancher-wildlife agency war on wildlife. Aside from the Montana purported 19% who hunt and around 15% who fish, nationally it is only around 4-6% who hunt and 15% who fish. The Pittman-Robertson Act aside, which returns excise firearms and ammunition excise taxes does distribute funds back to the states, however 94% of support for wildlife and public lands, wilderness and wildlife management is paid for by the general public which values wildlife viewing over wildlife killing and are offended when wildlife agencies kill and try to marginalize wolves and other predators and support and validate hunters, trappers and ranchers in wildlife killing; and wildlife farming for recreational sport killing (aka hunting) and profiteering. (http://www.nrwm.org/wildlife-conservation-management-funding-in-the-u-s-2/).
(https://ourwisconsinourwildlife.wordpress.com/2014/03/08/who-are-the-real-conservationists/)
https://www.mountainlion.org/featurearticleguestwhopaysforwildlife.asp
http://www.wyofile.com/study-non-hunters-contribute-most-to-wildlife/
Animal Matters: “Approximately 95 percent of federal, 88 percent of nonprofit and 94 percent of total funding for wildlife conservation and management (in the United States) come from the non hunting public.” https://www.mountainlion.org/featurearticleguestwhopaysforwildlife
We are still managing wildlife with a hundred year old model, before and since the time of Aldo Leopold (Aldo Leopold was an American author, philosopher, scientist, ecologist, forester, conservationist, and environmentalist and an avid hunter, Wikipedia). It is a model that sees wildlife as renewable recreational killing and trapping (public remunerative resource), a consumptive model, which is really a hunter bloodlust model. Aldo Leopold would probably be horrified at what hunting has become, but maybe not, for he was an avid hunter, and largely responsible for the model we have today. State wildlife agencies reflect this model and the training of wildlife biologists largely reflect this model.
A consumptive, hunter focused model, now also rancher-on-your-public-land focused, goes back to Aldo Leopold and Teddy Roosevelt days, and is the model of state and federal wildlife agencies today. We need a wildlife non consumptive model, one that includes coexistence strategies, rewilding, connecting wildlife corridors, largely leaving wildlife alone.
https://rewilding.org/its-time-for-a-revolution-in-state-wildlife-governance/
“Paying for the future of public lands | TheHill”
“If recreationists want to preserve public lands and our ability to recreate on them, we ought to take some lessons from the hunting and fishing community.
One way this could be achieved is through user fees. Nominal fees paid by users could provide public land managers with dedicated funding independent of legislative cycles. To some extent, this is already occurring: The Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act allows for some fee collection from outdoor recreationists under certain limited conditions, with 80 percent of the fees retained onsite to address local needs. But more could be done.
Small increases in fees — or allowing fees to be charged for a wider variety of uses — can have a huge impact. By increasing Denali National Park and Preserve entry fees from $10 per person up to $15, superintendent Don Striker estimates that the park will be able to “eliminate [its] non-roads maintenance backlog in five years.”
Another approach could be charging a small tax on recreational gear, similar to that on hunting and fishing equipment. We spend $86 billion each year on outdoor recreation gear. Even a fraction of a percent of that, dedicated to public lands and conservation programs, would go a long way. It might even provide political leverage to promote recreation interests and conservation.”
https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/407906-paying-for-the-future-of-public-lands
I hope people will step up – but did you hear the screech when they tried to increase National Park fees? It is still the best deal around, less expensive than Disneyworld and maybe even a night at the movies.
My head is still spinning from the decision about hunting grizzlies – if it is so wholesome and American an activity, why was it expressly stated that hunters not hunt bears near roads so that visitors could see? They would not like it, is why – to put it mildly!
I’m glad these decisions are turning over the rocks and exposing light to what is in my opinion a closed process dominated by ranchers and hunters – major news networks are covering it.
Wildlife and their habitats face a rather certain future, and it is bleak. Humanity has changed the course of evolutionary ecology, and is afflicted with the innately deleterious trait of failing to grasp even the economic value of natural capital inasmuch as it relates to the life-supporting functions of ecosystems. It is good to point out the myths of management, of habitat held in public trust, and of conservation funding by hunters & ranchers and their perverted stewardship. My problem as a non-consumptive birder contributing to monetary protection is the payment’s feeding into the whole consumptive model, reinforcing the idea of wildlands as a somewhat privatized special interest subordinated to the economist’s “public goods” category. The purpose of tax should be not so much to impose market incentives as to return wealth to the under-compensated who help create it, however inefficient that might be in the hypothetical absence of anti-tax forces. What wildlife needs is a wholesale human revolution in land-ownership systems, ones which go beyond our facile aims of blocking federal land buyouts or restructuring the funding (or even meaning) of conservation and replace the notion of private land status with the mandate of (non-human) nature’s private property, which could be classed as public land in a limited humanistic sense. Achieving anything this radical, though unlikely, is paramount to addressing the crisis we all face.