Killing the myth of hunting as conservation

by Fran Silverman, FOA Friends of Animals
March 2018



elephant and calf
Image from Memories of Elephants


Shooting endangered and threatened species will help save them.

Here’s another one.

Hunters are helping keep you safe by killing black bears.

In honor of National Wildlife Week, let’s parse these statements.















Human hunting related deaths and injuries – not so rare.



The math is the math and the science is the science.


Return to Animal Rights Articles

Camera-trap research paves the way for global monitoring networks

Hunter-Funded Wildlife Agency Quietly Announced Before BC Election


By Judith Lavoie.  This article is from DeSmog Canada.


The proposal for the new agency, first announced in March, was scant on details, but Steve Thomson, then minister of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations, set a fall start-up date and set aside $200,000 for consultations with conservation and hunting groups.

“Government is afraid to manage wolves, for example, or afraid to manage grizzly bears in some cases because of the politics of that,” then energy and mines minister Bill Bennett, an avid hunter and supporter of the controversial grizzly bear trophy hunt, told an East Kootenay radio station.

“Hopefully an agency that is separate from government can make decisions that are in the best long-term interest of wildlife and just forget about the politics and do what is best for the animals,” Bennett said.

According to Thomson, the agency would receive an initial government investment of $5 million and be further funded by hunting licence revenues to the tune of $9 to $10 million annually — money which currently goes into general revenue.

The plan was welcomed by hunters as a way to increase funding for cash-strapped conservation and management programs

The NDP previously tabled a bill calling for dedicated conservation funding, so, in the flurry of pre-election announcements, the plan didn’t get much attention, even though Thomson was flanked by representatives of pro-hunting groups as he made the announcement.

Then, days before the election, five of B.C.’s pro-hunting and trapping organizations — B.C. Wildlife Federation, Guide Outfitters Association of B.C, Wild Sheep Society of B.C, Wildlife Stewardship Council and the B.C. Trappers Association — announced they had signed a memorandum of understanding to work together.

“The collaborative efforts of our five organizations will help ensure the province follows through on its commitment to enhance wildlife management,” Jim Glaicair, president of the 50,000-member B.C. Wildlife Federation, said in a news release.

The organizations emphasized that the MOU was sparked by concern about the ongoing decline of wildlife.

“This is a great opportunity for our organizations to work together for the betterment of wildlife in the province,” said Michael Schneider, Guide Outfitters Association of B.C president.

Hunter-Funded Wildlife Management ‘Huge Step Backwards’

But to other groups and especially those waiting to see whether the new government will stop the grizzly hunt, the MOU appeared to indicate a pro-hunting team lining up to take over the new agency.

Alan Burger, president of B.C. Nature, which represents 53 clubs, with a total of more than 6,000 members, said in an interview that it is a major concern that the only people rooting for the new agency appear to be hunters and trappers.

“If they can dominate an agency like this it is going to be a huge step backwards,” Burger told DeSmog Canada.

“The last thing we need is greater emphasis on big game. We need to focus our attention on the ecosystem,” he said, questioning how the proposal could get so far without consultation.

“Hunting and fishing licences are an important source of revenue and B.C. Nature agrees that there should be a greater share contributed to wildlife management,” Burger said.

“But there is much greater input to the B.C. economy from the non-consumptive users of wildlife — the tourism and wildlife watching industry, people selling binoculars, camera gear, field guides, outdoor gear and, most importantly, the vast majority of British Columbians that spend money travelling and camping to simply enjoy seeing animals alive in the wild,” he said.

Valhalla Wilderness Society has come out swinging against the proposed agency, calling it a thinly disguised attempt by the B.C. government to privatize wildlife management and hand over responsibility to hunters, trappers and guide outfitters.

Funding for wildlife management should not be contingent on hunting licence revenue or special interest groups, a news release from Valhalla says.

“Notwithstanding the poor job the B.C. government has been doing in growing wildlife, wildlife should be managed by government,” it says. “The above-mentioned special interest groups lack the technical expertise to make wildlife decisions based on scientific evidence and are even unwilling to apply the precautionary principle, which, in the face of climate change, is needed more than ever.”

B.C.Wildlife Conservation Funds Desperately Needed

One lesson from the growing controversy is that conservation groups need to work together and find out whether a new model could provide desperately needed funds for conservation, said Val Murray of Justice for B.C. Grizzlies.

“We need to see animals as individuals within communities rather than numbers within a natural resource group,” she said.

“We need a cross-discipline panel of conservation biologists and scientists to bridge the values of consumptive and non-consumptive residents. There is no shortage of good science — what we lack is proper funding to implement what we know, plus good listening skills to apply the ideas.”

Letters asking for more information and setting out objections to the proposal have been sent to all three party leaders, but, until the outcome of the election is clarified, none are willing to jump into the fray.

A spokeswoman for the Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations Ministry said the previous government was looking at similar model to the agreement between the province and Freshwater Fisheries Society of B.C where revenue from fishing licences goes into research, conservation and education programs.

The intention is to hold public consultations before decisions are made, she said.

From DeSmog Canada, by way of the Rossland Telegraph.

How do Trump and Clinton differ on conservation?

Presidential campaigns offer a sneak peek into natural resource policies.



Joshua Zaffos











Humans: Never Satisfied

Quoting John A. Livingston from his book, The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation, in a chapter called “The Arguments: 243

“Before we go further, it will be useful to sum up those arguments for conservation that are based in individual and collective human self-interest, as put forward here. The most fundamental message is: if we can’t be good, at least we can be prudent. The message has been delivered historically and is delivered today in a number of ways: the ‘wise use’ arguments involve husbandry, stewardship, harvest, future resources…

“The guts of the self-interest family of arguments is that they are entirely and exclusively man-orientated, anthropocentric. Whether it is directed to individual, group, nation, or species, the appeal is to the human being and the human interest.

“Throughout we assume nature as ‘resource,’ whether for physical use or as a source of aesthetic enjoyment. In this sense, living sensate wildlife beings are no different from water, soils, and land forms, all of which were set in place by a beneficent nature expressly for human purposes. Whether man is good steward or renegade, whether answerable to God or to the bio-system or to the future human generations or not, there is no question about the locus of vested power and authority on Earth. This is illustrated best, I think, in the monumentally dull-witted arrogance of the concept of ‘harvest’ as applied to wildlife species.

“I no longer believe that there is, in practice, such a thing as a ‘renewable’ resource. Once a thing is perceived as having some utility–any utility–and is thus perceived as a ‘resource,’ its depletion is only a matter of time. I know of no wildlife that is being ‘renewed’ anywhere–not yellow birch or hemlock or anchovies or marlins or leopards or salmon or bowhead whales or anything else. ‘Renewable resource’ is self-contradictory in coherence, at least as applied to wildlife.

“If ‘resource’ continues to mean something that is put to human use, then no resource is renewable. Our demands have quite outstripped the capacity of those resources to satisfy them, and much less to satisfy them on a ‘sustainable’ basis. And we are, of course, never satisfied.”

Featured Image -- 9608


“The Sorrow and the Fury”


Back in 1980, the late Canadian naturalist, John A. Livingston, wrote the following on the loss of wildlife habitat………


There was behind my parents’ house a city ravine, with a little stream running through it. On one end, before the stream disappeared into a large pipe, there was a little marshy area where the water spilled shallowly to one side. There were toads and frogs and newts. If you lay very quiet in the grass at the water’s edge, you could observe them. The longer you looked, the more deeply you were mesmerized…possessed. There was no world whatever, outside that world…nothing beyond shimmering light on water, smooth clean muck, green plants, trickling sounds, flickering tadpoles, living, being. That was when the pain started.

The knife of separation is cruel. I not only remember in factual sense but I can feel to this day the anguished frustration, the knowledge that I could never—not ever—be more than a boy on the grass, excluded from that world wholly and eternally. But why? Why pick on me? I wished it no harm; I only wanted to be part, to join, to “plug in.” The denial was impersonal and cold and final. It had gnawed at me ever since—not all the time, mercifully—but much of it.

I wept over it, in a dogwood thicket. In the certainty that through no apparent fault of my own I was being unjustly denied something that was as fundamentally important as air, I felt much anguish at times. Unpredictably, of course, as it is with pre-adolescents, there would be unexpected moments of pure inexpressible joy and happiness when the “free flow” between nature and myself was unobstructed and open. Such moments always seemed to happen accidentally: why couldn’t I will them? Always there was a mix of sadness and pleasure. My early experience with nature was bittersweet; it still is. I rejoice in wildlife and I despair, in equal measure.

That is one side of it. Plans were revealed for the construction of a storm sewer through “my” ravine. Shock, dismay, and all the rest of it were mine early. The ten-year-old mind is not subtle: how can I warn the frogs and toads and newts? Can I get them out of there, take them away somewhere? They are defenseless; it is wrong to hurt them. What right do we have to hurt them when we cannot warn them? They don’t know what is happening, or why. There was much puzzlement here. All logic seemed to be backwards or upside down; nothing made sense. I could do nothing but watch, with sorrow and fury. But why the sorrow and the fury? What is compassion, after all, and where does it come from? And why do so many other people feel nothing at all? Those questions are as germane today as they were when I was ten. It seems clear now that, although there was no gainsaying the intensity of my emotion, my feeling for the wildlife beings involved, the sorrow and fury, were perhaps entirely on my own behalf, I was responding intensely because I was being impinged upon.

I think that through these moments of “free flow,” in the grass by the pond243beneath the dogwoods, the toads and the frogs and the newts and their hypnotic sunlight had been irreversibly incorporated into my world, literally into me. My world was being tampered with…Next spring I would have a piece missing, chewed out of me by the ditch diggers. The hurt was much more than resentment and sympathy. It was real, and I would feel it always.

…Despite repeated attempts, and despite even having heard and smelled him, and having photographed his fresh footprint, I have never seen a wild tiger. At this late date—meaning both my own chronology and the status of the tiger population—I probably never will. That is not as important now to me as it used to be, because the fortunes of the tiger are no less close to me for that. The tiger is already an integral part of me and his fate is mine. He entered me with the toads and frogs and newts.


An Elmer’s Code of Ethics


If an animal lives,

kill it.

If it gets away,

hunt it down and kill it.

If it learns to adapt to humans,

hate it and kill it year ‘round.

If it becomes endangered,

kill its mother and put it in a zoo.


If an animal proves intelligent,

respect it then kill it.

If you think it dumb,

kill it and eat it.

If it simply is,

kill it because it’s there.

If anyone’s watching,

Just call it “conservation.”

Captain Paul Watson on Welfare Ranching

Paul WATSON, Brigitte BARDOT
Welfare Ranching Show Down in Nevada







Anyhow, this is Otto’s letter with my comments.




































Joe Otto
Conservative Daily

Sheep in Wolves’ Clothing

wildlife management

by Marc

The December 18, 2013, Santa Fe Reporter, featured a profile of

Photo Copyright Jim Robertson

Photo Copyright Jim Robertson

James Lane recently fired as director of the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish. While no public reason was given for Lane’s firing, it seems likely that it was due, at least in part, to his public derision of the nonhunters as “tree-huggin’ hippies.” The department, sometimes known as “Maim and Squish,” manages wildlife on behalf of hunters and ranchers. Even after Lane’s ignominious departure, Scott Bidegain, a board member of NM Cattlegrowers Association, continues as chairman of the Game Commission, which supervises the department’s so-called professional wildlife managers.

What has been the reaction of New Mexico’s environmental and animal protection lobbyists? The supposed protectors of wildlife sheepishly sent a letter to the hunter-rancher-in-chief, begging Bidegain to replace Lane with a professional wildlife manager dedicated to the principles of the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation.

This model is aptly summed up by the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation:




The federal tax on firearms and ammunition is collected by the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB). As its name suggests, TTB also administers federal taxes on alcohol and tobacco. No one expects these tax revenues to be used to promote smoking and drinking, yet hunters expect firearms taxes to be used to promote hunting.

RMEF is, however, correct to point out that hominids have been killing wildlife since they first learned to walk upright. In North America, hunting dates back to mass extinctions of the Pleistocene, which corresponded with the arrival of humans on this continent. Well before the establishment of “Native” American cultures species such as saber-toothed cats disappeared from the North American landscape. Species which were able to survive centuries of hunting with spears, bows and arrows, proved little match for European firearms technology.

Only when hunters began to fear an end to their gruesome blood sport did wildlife managers like Aldo Leopold begin to rethink the idea of hunting without limit. Along with the establishment of the US Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management, the Pittman-Robertson Act attempted to protect ranchers and hunters from destroying both their own livelihoods and their ability to indulge in sadistic blood sports. Thus was born the myth that ranchers and hunters, who had come close to totally destroying the land and the wildlife who live on it, were the “true conservationists,” codified by the North American Model of Conservation.

In spite of the best efforts of the “hunter-conservationists,” hunting continues to decline in the United States. According to the latest [2011] National Hunting Survey, only 6% of the U.S. population hunts. When broken down by region, there has been a 45% drop over the last decade in the Mountain States from 11% to 6%. Correspondingly, the New Mexico report shows a 47% drop in expenditures by hunters.

The drop in hunting is a threat not only to hunters and ranchers, but also to conservation and animal protection lobbyists who have been collaborating with them. In their letter to the Game Deparment, Animal Protection of New Mexico, the Rio Grande chapter of the Sierra Club, the New Mexico chapter of the League of Conservation Voters and Wild Earth Guardians expressed their support for the hunters’ North American Model of Conservation.

Many of the organizations which signed this letter have had a long history of collaboration with hunters. Hunter Jon Schwedler headed APNM’s wildlife program before leaving to form the short-lived Sierra Sportsmen, the Sierra Club’s failed attempt to organize hunters in support of conservation.

Now it is the turn of Wild Earth Guardians to join the ranks of hunters masquerading as environmentalists, with the hiring of Erik Molvar. According to his WildEarth Guardians profile, Molvar has a degree in “wildlife management” and “enjoys antelope hunting.”

This profile reveals not only the sadistic pleasure Molvar takes in killing animals and watching them die, but also the difference between a wildlife manager and a biologist. State game departments and other wildlife managers use the cowboy term “antelope” to describe pronghorns. The last of their family to survive the Pleistocene extinctions in North America, pronghorns are not related to antelope, which are native to Africa. “Wildlife management” might be considered a “science” similar to economics and political science, but it is not a natural science like biology and geology.

In any case, contrary to the propaganda of the conservation lobbyists, there is no “pure science” which can guide the protection of wolves, prairie dogs, pronghorn, and other wild species, whether or not they are legally endangered. As the career of Jon Tester, Rancher-Democrat of Montana, demonstrates, the U.S. Congress retains the right to determine what animals can be legally killed without limit. Tester, after using funds from the League of Conservation Voters to defend his seat against the notorious “evil Koch brothers,” authored the law which removed endangered species protection for the grey wolf. A belated attempt by conservation lobbies to petition the Department of the Interior to restore wolf protection in violation of Tester’s law may succeed in raising funds, but it will not succeed in protecting wolves.

Rancher-Democrat Tester has now been joined in the Senate by New Mexico Hunter-Democrat Martin Heinrich. Heinrich & Tester’s Sportsmen’s and Public Outdoor Recreation Traditions Act (SPORT) Act (S. 1660) would open all federal lands, including National Park Service land, to hunters.