Wild & Jag April 2020

CEO: TGA
Ron Thomson
AMERICA’S
WILDLIFE CRISIS Part 1
Dwindling hunter numbers reduce vital revenues for conservation:
A SURPRISING ANSWER TO THIS PROBLEM
The American experience
Frances Stead Sellers, senior writer and editor at The
Washington Post, published an article in early February
2020 entitled, “Hunting is ‘slowly dying off’, and that has
created a crisis for the nation’s many endangered species”.
Altogether, I assess this report to be “fairly well balanced”.
Its principal message was that statistics confirm annual
sales of hunting licences in America have been consistently
declining. And because hunting licence revenues are the
principal source of funding for state wildlife management
programmes, lack of funds (once derived from hunting
licence fees) is starting to have a devastatingly adverse
effect on the management of wildlife habitats and wildlife
populations.
“That’s what keeps me up at night,” Robert Miller, director
of the governor’s Advisory Council for Hunting, Fishing
and Conservation (Pennsylvania), said of the inadequacies
of the user-pay, user-play model that has
funded conservation for decades.
Sellers wrote: “A national panel has
called for a new funding model to keep
at-risk species from needing far costlier
emergency measures. The crisis stands to worsen with
as many as one-third of America’s wildlife species ‘at
increased risk of extinction’.”
AND: “The needs are becoming more urgent as (urban
sprawl) development eats into habitats.”
“But revamping the federal funding model has proved
tough. A proposed tax on outdoor gear, for example, was
killed by resistance from retailers and manufacturers.”
One of the main sources of wildlife revenues is the
Pittman-Robertson Act, which imposes an 11 per cent
excise tax on all sales of firearms and equipment to hunters,
anglers, boaters and recreational shooters. And the fewer
the hunters, the less becomes the revenue collected from
that source.
I recognise one basic flaw in the “Seller’s Report” and I
am compelled to correct her strongly articulated but incorrect
perceptions. She says, “The link between hunting
and conservation dates back (sic) more than a century to
when trigger-happy gunmen all but blasted the bison
into oblivion and finished off North America’s
most abundant bird, the passenger pigeon.
(The last passenger pigeon died in Cincinnati
Zoo in 1914).”
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GAME & HUNT APRIL 2020
Photo: Pixabay