Hunting and environmental regulation

Definition: Pursuit and killing of game animals by humans for sport or for needed food

Hunting persists as a sport and a tool for wildlife or environmental regulation, but the assessment of hunting from the standpoint of values is politically and philosophically controversial.

Hunting originated as a means of subsistence, but it seldom has that status today. When hunting was necessary for human survival, no real environmental issues surrounded the practice, merely expediencies. American Indians burned land to make it more attractive to buffalo and deer, but this was done because such conditions favored human subsistence. When European colonizers traveled to North America between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, American Indians were able to collaborate in the fur trade and rise above a subsistence economy, but at a price that they could not foresee. Commercially desirable species were soon trapped out of settled regions and on the frontiers, forcing American Indians who relied on such species to move to new areas.

The British colonists began to regulate hunting by enforcing laws that limited the taking of desirable species of mammals, birds, and fish and also by offering bounties on predators that threatened livestock. Laws seldom prevented, and sometimes were not intended to prevent, market hunters from using guns, nets, and traps to kill wildlife and then sell their take in public markets. Initially, settlers had little time to contemplate hunting as a sport, even if they enjoyed doing it, because it was an important supplement to farming.

In Europe, from which the settlers came, hunting was often the exclusive right of royalty and the aristocracy, who hunted exclusively for sport. Such a formal class system did not take hold in the Americas, and class restriction of hunting never developed. However, property owners often felt that they had special rights to the wildlife on their lands and in their waters. Therefore colonies, and later states, began to legislate the hunting, fishing, and trapping rights of property owners and others. Although some species were depleted in the East, they seemed abundant both in the West and in northern Canada, and therefore most people did not worry about depletions.

Beginnings of Opposition

Eventually, naturalists, such as Pehr Kalm in the 1740s and Alexander Wilson in the early nineteenth century, realized that Americans were too complacent about their wildlife heritage and began writing against the reckless killing of animals. By the mid-nineteenth century, nature writers were awakening concerns for wildlife. After the Civil War, when sports hunters rode the transcontinental railroad west to kill buffalo, the carnage was reported in newspapers and magazines. However, commercial hunters also used the railroads to take buffalo hides and tongues to eastern markets, and settlers on the plains believed that farms and ranches were incompatible with freely roaming buffalo and American Indians. Thus, although several bills protecting buffalo were introduced in the U.S. Congress during the 1870s, none became law. By the 1880s, the buffalo was nearly extinct, and in 1889 Congress reacted by establishing the National Zoological Park to help breed endangered species.

By 1900 the ethics of hunting and the preservation of game species were serious public concerns. However, the ways these matters have been understood and evaluated have changed over time. Initially, abundance was thought to depend on the passing and enforcement of hunting restrictions. This approach was later supplemented by the establishment of federal wildlife refuges and national parks, which preserved habitats.

Ethical Debates

The ethical issue that dominated the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was whether market hunting of mammals and birds should continue. In 1907 the White House Conference on Conservation emphasized the need for state wildlife or conservation departments to study and manage hunting and fishing in each state. In that new climate, market hunting was outlawed, except for species trapped for their fur.

Nonhunting nature lovers asked whether sport hunting was any more defensible on moral grounds than market hunting, but opposition to sport hunting was muted by the fact that many sport hunters were active in habitat preservation and supported the enforcement of wildlife laws. Poachers were enemies of both groups. Aldo Leopold, an avid hunter, and pioneer wildlife manager, also helped bridge the gap between these groups by developing a land ethic that became influential after his death in 1948. Wildlife managers also discovered that in environments transformed by civilization, hunting could become one of the tools for wildlife management.

After World War II, the number of nonhunting nature hobbyists greatly increased, whereas the number of hunters declined as a percentage of the total U.S. population. In 2022, hunters constituted only about 4.6 percent of the population, but nature hobbyists are several times as many. This percentage of hunters was down from 10 percent in the years immediately following World War II. Data from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service confirmed the decline in Americans who hunt and worried that this trend threatened the revenues of state wildlife agencies. Along with these changes came an increased interest in environmental ethics.

At the practical level, deer hunters argue that their hunting serves to control deer populations now that wolves and American Indians no longer do so because deer will degrade their own environment if their numbers are not limited to the environment’s carrying capacity. In contrast, at the philosophical level, some environmental ethicists respond that no one imagines that hunters go through all the trouble they do in order to do the deer a favor. Many environmentalists have suggested that deer populations could be better controlled if their natural predators, which were removed by hunters in the first place, were reintroduced into their native habitats. During the 1990s, programs to reintroduce predator species were implemented in Yellowstone National Park and the southwestern United States. In Yellowstone, the program successfully reintroduced wolves, an apex predator, into the park's ecosystem. The wolves controlled the elk population, allowed for an increase in vegetation growth, and provided for a rebound in smaller animal populations.

Bibliography

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Cartmill, Matt. A View to a Death in the Morning: Hunting and Nature Through History. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993.

“The Decline of Hunting and Fishing.” Wildlife For All, wildlifeforall.us/resources/decline-of-hunting-and-fishing/. Accessed 4 Feb. 2023.

Dizard, Jan E. Mortal Stakes: Hunters and Hunting in Contemporary America. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003.

Light, Andrew. “Methodological Pragmatism, Animal Welfare, and Hunting.” In Animal Pragmatism: Rethinking Human-Nonhuman Relationships, edited by Erin McKenna and Andrew Light. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004.

Quinton, Michael S. “Reintroduction of the Top Predator.” National Geographic Society, 2 June 2022, education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/reintroduction-top-predator. Accessed 4 Feb. 2023.

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