Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 7, 1991 TAG: 9104090478
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: D-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: M. RUPERT CUTLER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Meanwhile, wildlife-management professionals are under fire from academics who have formed the new disciplines of conservation biology, landscape ecology and restoration ecology. Self-described as taking a more holistic approach, they criticize wildlife managers for preoccupation with game species.
Many of us have reacted defensively to this one-two punch, rather than consider why it has happened and how we should be adapting to changing conditions.
Hunters and trappers are becoming the butt of jokes. Remember President - and fisherman - Jimmy Carter's problem with the "attack rabbit"? When people stop taking you seriously, you're in trouble.
Opponents of the so-called blood sports have no trouble attracting the attention of the mass media. After all, a good fight makes for colorful headlines and eye-catching photos. Some of our most widely read cartoonists, such as Garry Trudeau of "Doonesbury," have jumped into the fray.
Opponents of hunting and trapping are winning at the polls. In November, the California electorate voted to ban the trophy hunting of mountain lions with dogs, effectively ending legal mountain-lion hunting throughout that large and influential state. That action followed the closure of the black-bear hunting season there as a result of litigation funded by animal-rights groups.
Today's animal-rights activists believe that wearing fur from any source is unjustified, period, end of discussion. Don't talk warm. Don't talk needed income for indigenous peoples and the rural near-poor. Don't talk eat-outs of valuable marsh grasses. Don't talk humane, quick-kill methods. Just say no to fur.
We're obviously not talking rationality or science here; we're talking emotion and the diverse views of individuals regarding the relationship between humans and other animals.
I'm sure most wildlife biologists believe opponents of hunting and trapping to be wrong and misguided. But professional biologists and the sportsmen of Virginia should avoid the path taken by the National Rifle Association in the pursuit of its political goals.
When the NRA lumps those (including the Fraternal Order of Police) concerned about the easy availability of "Saturday Night Special" handguns, Uzis and other weapons designed to kill people, with those who would make it difficult for the average person to obtain traditional sporting arms, I believe it loses the support of many potentially sympathetic people.
Sportsmen would be well-advised to agree on which weapons are best for sport and which are not, and to make common cause with the majority of Americans who want to do something on a nationwide basis to reduce the outrageous number of homicides by gun here compared to other civilized countries.
This tactic might result in increased support from the non-sportsman majority for, or at least tolerance of, the sportsman's point of view when questions affecting the future of public hunting and trapping are debated.
We are dealing with two distinct "publics" when it comes to attitudes toward hunting and trapping. Their differing views must be borne in mind.
Nothing we do will change the stand of the true animals-rights activist, who believes that the taking by a human being of the life of another animal that can feel pain - particularly in the name of sport or recreation - is simply immoral. "Equal rights for all species" is his or her credo. These very sincere people look for inspiration to the "reverence for life" writings of the late Albert Schweitzer.
Trying to change their minds, by arguing that human hunters and trappers mimic the role in nature of extinct or increasingly rare keystone predators such as the wolf, cuts no ice with them. (This is particularly true when hunters are encouraged to take the biggest and best trophy animals out of the herd, thereby weakening its genetic base, instead of culling the poorest specimens, as predators do. Trophy hunting and natural predation have distinctly different impacts on prey species herd vigor, and the animal-rights people know that.)
But hard-core true believers do not represent the views or values of the majority of Americans. While most Americans today do not hunt or trap, neither do they harbor any resentment of the fact that others choose to pursue the traditional, lawful, biologically sound and sportsmanlike taking of game and furbearers. A recent survey taken in Virginia found that 70 percent of the respondents favored hunting.
The threat to future public hunting and trapping opportunities comes from a potentially lethal combination of sophisticated political and media action by the anti-blood-sport minority, fence-sitting or disinterest by non-sportsmen, and the anti-social behavior of a minority of hunters who are giving the rest of us a serious public-relations black eye.
Rural landowners, who control habitat and access to game, have had it with both boisterous, abusive "city hunters" and redneck "good ole boys" with their dogs, who treat the landowner and the law alike with disrespect. Those two groups are fouling our nest. Hunters must do a better job of policing their own ranks, turning in a game poacher as quickly as they would a drug pusher.
The salvation of professional wildlife management lies in revising its own self-image. We must become practicing ecologists who tend to the health of the entire ecosystem with all its live parts - and not just be satisfied with artificially pumping up the populations of a handful of favored species.
When we do the latter, we mess with a well-founded natural equilibrium among predator and prey, and we ignore the interests of a growing number of citizens in species other than game species. Let's manage wildlife for all species, and for all Americans.
After all, aren't our principal problems habitat maintenance and public access? Healthy habitats produce healthy populations of game as well as non-game species. And access will be more certainly assured if non-sportsmen as well as sportsmen are interested in gaining access to the property.
We're talking size of political constituency here. The more Virginians you have interested in your program for whatever reason, the more political support you'll find for your program.
The preoccupation of wildlife-management professionals with harassment of sportsmen by animal-rights activists is distracting us, as ecologists, from addressing the truly important issues of the day: human population growth; war and peace; poverty, ignorance and inequities in the distribution of health, wealth and economic opportunities; resource waste - especially the waste of energy, in the form of our inexcusably rapid consumption of the world's limited petroleum resource; climate change; the essentially irreversible loss of precious topsoil and pure water to careless land use and toxic waste-disposal practices; and the extinction of species.
If more sportsmen's groups became better-known for helpfulness to their communities as a whole (as many already are), and if they more aggressively policed their own ranks to eliminate the bad apples, our future would be bright.
M. Rupert Cutler is director of the Explore Project's Lewis and Clark Environmental Education Center in Roanoke. This is excerpted from a speech at the 1991 annual meeting in Richmond of The Wildlife Society, Virginia Chapter.
by CNB