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Agree 100% with this take:
By Andrew Exum
Raymond McCrea Jones / Redux
SEPTEMBER 1, 2023
For many Americans, this coming weekend brings the start of hunting season. Although states allow the hunting of some game species in late summer, the calendar really opens with dove season. Nearly a million Americans will hunt doves this fall, and many, if not most, of them will do so this weekend.
Hunting is a mostly solitary activity, but dove shoots are social events. Men, women, and children across America will space themselves out around sunflower fields, sitting on upturned five-gallon buckets, waiting for gray migratory birds to arrive looking for water and food in the early mornings and late evenings. I am headed to South Texas in a few weeks to open the dove season there with friends I hunt with each year.
But although hunting doves is a popular activity among hunters, it’s not that popular among Americans in general. Just 38 percent of Americans approve of hunting doves, according to a new study by the Outdoor Stewards of Conservation Foundation, which tracks the attitudes of Americans toward hunting over time. Forty-two percent oppose or strongly oppose it.
Read: Hunters are people too
Public approval for all forms of hunting have declined in just the past two years since the survey was last administered. More Americans disapprove of hunting today, in fact, than they have at any point over the past two decades. And that’s a problem, because America needs hunting more than most Americans realize.
So what’s behind the growing unpopularity of hunting?
A few things, it appears. First, Americans favor hunting some species more than others. Americans are just fine with people hunting deer, for example, which are a menace in most northeastern suburbs and the cause of 2 million car accidents each year. They are less fine with people hunting bears and wolves, and they are filled with immense disdain for people who hunt African lions and elephants. (It’s nearly impossible to get 77 percent of Americans to agree on anything except elephant hunting.)
Second, as more Americans associate firearms with mass shootings and other violence, fewer Americans approve of any firearms-related activities, including hunting and sport shooting. More Americans approve of hunting with a bow and arrow than approve of hunting with firearms, for example, even though firearms usually offer a more reliably humane way to kill an animal. And this year’s survey registers a sharp increase of Americans who disapprove of all legal recreational shooting, including the kind of shotgun games you might see at the Olympics.
Even as approval for hunting declines, though, hunting remains an important part of the conservation model that has served America so well for more than 100 years. The dark days of 19th-century market hunting nearly eradicated deer, bison, and turkey from the continent. We have carefully brought each species back from the brink and now rely on hunters to help manage wildlife populations under strict government regulation.
Indeed, one of my favorite ironies is that self-proclaimed conservative and libertarian Americans who otherwise never miss an opportunity to resent government regulation happily participate in one of the most heavily regulated activities in America. The same Americans who are normally filled with deep suspicion for government bureaucrats nonetheless hold their state game wardens and wildlife biologists—who set and enforce the limits that guide hunters each season—in high regard. The post-pandemic surge in distrust of science and government mandates has not yet affected wildlife biology and fish-and-game associations.
It’s also ironic, of course, that many left-leaning Americans can be so ambivalent about some of the longest-running, most successful, and scientifically grounded government programs. The same well-meaning people with those signs in their yard that read in this house, we believe … that science is real often seem to be among those happy enough to throw the science aside when it comes to effectively managing wildlife, as in Connecticut, where the state is resisting the recommendation of its own wildlife biologists that it should authorize a bear hunt. Animal-rights activists are fighting to have louder voices on state fish-and-game commissions, minimizing the contributions of hunters as well as the input of state wildlife biologists.
Red-state conservatives, meanwhile, enthusiastically make hay of any anti-hunting measures they can associate with Democrats, no matter how dubious the ties. But they are silent about the fact that although conservation remains one of the few truly bipartisan issues, the only votes against conservation legislation during the Trump and Biden years have come from a large anti-conservation wing of the Republican Party that would make Teddy Roosevelt spin in his grave. They are likewise silent about decisions from the conservative judiciary that endanger wildlife habitat.
But the Biden administration, and Democrats in general, can do a better job talking about the importance of hunting. Aside from a few prominent western politicians such as Senator Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, an enthusiastic elk hunter, you very rarely hear Democrats talk about how hunting plays a role in the party’s conservation goals—even though that might help bridge some of the gap that now exists between a largely urban Democratic Party and the kind of rural voters necessary for it to maintain control of the Senate.
I started hunting as an adult, after my wife questioned why we were not making better use of the marksmanship skills I acquired as a child growing up in East Tennessee and, later, in the Army. We have four children, and my wife calculates that I need to hunt, kill, and butcher several deer each year to fill our freezers with enough meat to get us through the next summer. I also enjoy hunting upland birds with my dog, a pointing breed, so on fall weekends, I am more often in the woods than home watching football.
We tell our neighbors in our extremely left-leaning D.C. neighborhood that I hunt for the same reason we grow many of our own fruits and vegetables: We like being connected to our food chain, without supermarkets as intermediaries, and we like to consume our food in as conscientious and sustainable a way as possible. Any doves I manage to shoot this fall will go into my wife’s adobo recipe.
Aldo Leopold famously wrote, “There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.”
That kind of logic makes sense to our neighbors, for the most part, and they marvel that my 4-year-old daughter likes to help me pluck grouse and woodcock in our alley.
Hunting grounds us, as individuals, in the food we consume, and enables us, as a society, to more carefully steward the land we have been given. We need to say that more often, and loudly, lest we lose something that we need more than we realize.
Andrew Exum is a contributing writer for The Atlantic. From 2015 to 2017, he was the deputy assistant secretary of defense for Middle East policy.
America Needs Hunting More Than It Knows
But public sentiment is turning against it.By Andrew Exum
Raymond McCrea Jones / Redux
SEPTEMBER 1, 2023
For many Americans, this coming weekend brings the start of hunting season. Although states allow the hunting of some game species in late summer, the calendar really opens with dove season. Nearly a million Americans will hunt doves this fall, and many, if not most, of them will do so this weekend.
Hunting is a mostly solitary activity, but dove shoots are social events. Men, women, and children across America will space themselves out around sunflower fields, sitting on upturned five-gallon buckets, waiting for gray migratory birds to arrive looking for water and food in the early mornings and late evenings. I am headed to South Texas in a few weeks to open the dove season there with friends I hunt with each year.
But although hunting doves is a popular activity among hunters, it’s not that popular among Americans in general. Just 38 percent of Americans approve of hunting doves, according to a new study by the Outdoor Stewards of Conservation Foundation, which tracks the attitudes of Americans toward hunting over time. Forty-two percent oppose or strongly oppose it.
Read: Hunters are people too
Public approval for all forms of hunting have declined in just the past two years since the survey was last administered. More Americans disapprove of hunting today, in fact, than they have at any point over the past two decades. And that’s a problem, because America needs hunting more than most Americans realize.
So what’s behind the growing unpopularity of hunting?
A few things, it appears. First, Americans favor hunting some species more than others. Americans are just fine with people hunting deer, for example, which are a menace in most northeastern suburbs and the cause of 2 million car accidents each year. They are less fine with people hunting bears and wolves, and they are filled with immense disdain for people who hunt African lions and elephants. (It’s nearly impossible to get 77 percent of Americans to agree on anything except elephant hunting.)
Second, as more Americans associate firearms with mass shootings and other violence, fewer Americans approve of any firearms-related activities, including hunting and sport shooting. More Americans approve of hunting with a bow and arrow than approve of hunting with firearms, for example, even though firearms usually offer a more reliably humane way to kill an animal. And this year’s survey registers a sharp increase of Americans who disapprove of all legal recreational shooting, including the kind of shotgun games you might see at the Olympics.
Even as approval for hunting declines, though, hunting remains an important part of the conservation model that has served America so well for more than 100 years. The dark days of 19th-century market hunting nearly eradicated deer, bison, and turkey from the continent. We have carefully brought each species back from the brink and now rely on hunters to help manage wildlife populations under strict government regulation.
Indeed, one of my favorite ironies is that self-proclaimed conservative and libertarian Americans who otherwise never miss an opportunity to resent government regulation happily participate in one of the most heavily regulated activities in America. The same Americans who are normally filled with deep suspicion for government bureaucrats nonetheless hold their state game wardens and wildlife biologists—who set and enforce the limits that guide hunters each season—in high regard. The post-pandemic surge in distrust of science and government mandates has not yet affected wildlife biology and fish-and-game associations.
It’s also ironic, of course, that many left-leaning Americans can be so ambivalent about some of the longest-running, most successful, and scientifically grounded government programs. The same well-meaning people with those signs in their yard that read in this house, we believe … that science is real often seem to be among those happy enough to throw the science aside when it comes to effectively managing wildlife, as in Connecticut, where the state is resisting the recommendation of its own wildlife biologists that it should authorize a bear hunt. Animal-rights activists are fighting to have louder voices on state fish-and-game commissions, minimizing the contributions of hunters as well as the input of state wildlife biologists.
Red-state conservatives, meanwhile, enthusiastically make hay of any anti-hunting measures they can associate with Democrats, no matter how dubious the ties. But they are silent about the fact that although conservation remains one of the few truly bipartisan issues, the only votes against conservation legislation during the Trump and Biden years have come from a large anti-conservation wing of the Republican Party that would make Teddy Roosevelt spin in his grave. They are likewise silent about decisions from the conservative judiciary that endanger wildlife habitat.
But the Biden administration, and Democrats in general, can do a better job talking about the importance of hunting. Aside from a few prominent western politicians such as Senator Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, an enthusiastic elk hunter, you very rarely hear Democrats talk about how hunting plays a role in the party’s conservation goals—even though that might help bridge some of the gap that now exists between a largely urban Democratic Party and the kind of rural voters necessary for it to maintain control of the Senate.
I started hunting as an adult, after my wife questioned why we were not making better use of the marksmanship skills I acquired as a child growing up in East Tennessee and, later, in the Army. We have four children, and my wife calculates that I need to hunt, kill, and butcher several deer each year to fill our freezers with enough meat to get us through the next summer. I also enjoy hunting upland birds with my dog, a pointing breed, so on fall weekends, I am more often in the woods than home watching football.
We tell our neighbors in our extremely left-leaning D.C. neighborhood that I hunt for the same reason we grow many of our own fruits and vegetables: We like being connected to our food chain, without supermarkets as intermediaries, and we like to consume our food in as conscientious and sustainable a way as possible. Any doves I manage to shoot this fall will go into my wife’s adobo recipe.
Aldo Leopold famously wrote, “There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.”
That kind of logic makes sense to our neighbors, for the most part, and they marvel that my 4-year-old daughter likes to help me pluck grouse and woodcock in our alley.
Hunting grounds us, as individuals, in the food we consume, and enables us, as a society, to more carefully steward the land we have been given. We need to say that more often, and loudly, lest we lose something that we need more than we realize.
Andrew Exum is a contributing writer for The Atlantic. From 2015 to 2017, he was the deputy assistant secretary of defense for Middle East policy.
