When Emory announced a podcast episode on the topic of the "hunting is conservation" slogan, and if perhaps a new one is in order, I typed up the following e-mail to him. I thought it might be of interest to a broader audience. You can find the info about Emory's By Land Podcast here: https://byland.co/podcast
Emory,
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Do we need really a slogan or a hashtag?
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As far as slogans go “hunting is conservation” is pretty catchy. It is supposed to drive home the fact that hunter dollars pay for a lot of the wildlife management that is going on, both on this continent and on others. The maligned trophy hunters’ dollars pay for poaching control in Africa, and keeps habitat away from sprawling development by allowing people to make a living off the land that doesn’t involve cutting and planting. Projects in Asian countries, like the markhor projects in Pakistan, have shown that hunter dollars provide more value to local remote communities than the meat of a wild goat in the pot, and the population of markhor is rebounding. The story on our continent here is well-known (to us anyway).
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The question is, does the intended recipient, the non-hunter, know how “hunting is conservation”? Perhaps they align with the notion that conserving something cannot mean killing it. They may not buy into the thought that it is OK to kill some individuals for the long-term survival of the species. They may not instinctively agree with the science that says that population reduction is required to keep things in balance (like with snow geese that are eating themselves out of a summer home).
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It is very unfortunate that in today’s fast-paced society we need slogan. The complexity of hunting, of what drives us, and of our contributions to wildlife management, are hard to fit into 3-5 words. I have a hard time explaining it in 3-5 paragraphs, or even pages, and nobody reads that much anymore.
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Perhaps the problem is that we have two messages to convey, and “hunting is conservation” only tackles one. Many non-hunters are likely interested into personal motives for hunting. Nobody is buying it when I tell them I went out duck hunting to help conservation. I went out duck hunting because I love to be out on the water, love to challenge myself by doing things that are difficult, love to see ducks and geese fly, love it when I make a good shot, love it when I pick up the bird, love the feeling of self-sufficiency when plucking and converting a bird to a meal, love the fact that during all of it I forget about COVID, work, relations, future, and so forth. I’m just there, in the moment, making all the decisions and living by the outcomes of them. “Put that in a slogan, Mr. Marketing Guy”. The non-hunter may think I’m a pervert who just likes to kill innocent birds.
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A defining moment in my past, involved a small bird and a BB gun. My uncle hunted, my cousin too, and I wanted nothing else than to follow in their footsteps. Being way too young to legally hunt I would roam their little forest plot with a BB gun trying to kill birds. Some would call it blood lust, I would rather call it a desire to do something similar to what my role models were doing, even though wanton killing of little birds without any intent of eating them is not a cheerful matter. Good thing I couldn’t hit anything anyway. Till one day, I managed to clip a little house sparrow’s wing. It came fluttering down out of the tree and crawled away in leaves. I was distraught obviously and started to walk away. Then I realized that I needed to finish what I started, the bird would not survive on one wing. I found the bird and killed it outright with the next shot. I didn’t shoot too many song birds after that. But I think it did show me that I could carry the responsibility of life and death of an animal, in a way that many people cannot or will not. And that divides the masses. How can I explain what I just described to a person who has never felt the last breaths of a dying duck in his hands, or who has never looked into the eye of a deer that seconds ago was still alive, or who has never felt the warm heart inside the chest cavity of a moose (or less poetic – who has never struggled to get a pile of guts that would fill a wheelbarrow out of an elk).
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I don’t know. And to me, there lies the essence of our communication problem.
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I encourage you to also read Why I hunt and BC closes the grizzly hunt - what went wrong? for a broader perspective on my personal motivations and some thoughts on how we as hunters are failing in the public relations department.
F.