The healthy and abundant
populations of wildlife that thrive in North America today didn’t just happen.
If
Mother Nature had her way, much of it would have gone the way of the dinosaur
early in this century.
But
in the middle of the 19th century, when vast buffalo herds still
roamed the western prairies and flocks of passenger pigeons blackened the skies,
a group of farsighted eastern sportsmen took some historic steps for which we
should all be grateful. Their actions helped lay the groundwork for today’s
state and federally administered game management programs.
The
first major conservation move by sport hunters was probably in 1844 when a group
of prominent New Yorkers formed the New York Sportsmen’s Club, which was later
renamed the New York Association for the Protection of Game. The
organization’s primary goal was to stop the sale of game killed out of season.
The
strategy was to file suit against New York City restaurants and markets that
sold illegal game. The organization’s success in that arena, as well as its
efforts to strengthen weak game laws, proved sufficiently effective to encourage
other organizations in New England. By 1900, according to Lonnie Williamson of
the Wildlife Management Institute, 374 protective game societies modeled after
the New York Sportsmen were active in most New England states.
These
groups, and the ones that followed, were born from overwhelming concern among
sportsmen about the unthinking and uncontrolled killing of wildlife during the
19th and early 20th centuries.
It
was around the turn of the century that many states began to set up official
game commissions – usually a direct outgrowth of organized sportsmen’s
organizations. In fact, when the state wildlife agencies were formed, officers
of the sportsmen’s clubs often became the agencies commissioners.
In
1852 Maine became the first state to employ (at $25 to $75 annually) salaried
game wardens. Though most state agencies limited game laws to establishing
closed spring seasons, Maine, imposed a bag limit of three deer per season as
early as 1873.
In
those developmental years, hunting licenses were not required in many states and
the fledgling state agencies were financed entirely by general state funds.
However, in 1895 North Dakota made it mandatory for all hunters to purchase a
license from the state, with funds appropriated to the game commission.
From
those modest beginnings developed a network that raises and spends billions
annually in support of fish and wildlife. The Federal Aid in Wildlife
Restoration Program, known more as the Pittman-Robertson Act, is perhaps the
most renown wildlife conservation effort of all time – and was the idea and
result of sport hunters.
According
to Williamson, the original suggestion for what was to become the PR program
came in 1925 from a committee appointed by International Association of
Game, Fish and Conservation Commissioners (now the International
Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies). The committee included John Burham
of the Wildlife Management Institiute, T. Gilbert Pearson of the National
Audubon Society, George Selover of the Izaak Walton League and David Madsen and
William Adams, representing the Utah and Massachusetts fish and wildlife
departments.
It
was nearly a dozen years later, however, before Carl Shoemaker pushed the
Pittman-Robertson idea through Congress and into the statute books. Shoemaker,
also a sportsman with a penchant for double-barreled shotguns, was head of the
Oregon Fish and Game Commission before coming to Washington, D.C., as a staffer
on the newly formed Senate Wildlife Committee. Shoemaker wrote the PR bill,
gained industry support, and got the measure introduced and approved by Congress
in less than five months.
The
program collects special excise taxes from manufacturers on all hunting and
shooting equipment and redistributes the money to state wildlife agencies at a
rate based on the number of hunting licenses sold by each state. In 1950 a
similar program involving fishing tackle was instituted to benefit fisheries
management. It was called the Dingell-Johnson Act and was expanded in the 1980s
by the Wallop-Breaux Amendment.
Since
its inception in 1937, the PR program has apportioned more than 3 billion
dollars to state wildlife agencies for habitat restoration work.
Each
year more than 126 million hunters pay in excess of $345 million in license fees
and 30 million fisherman chip in another $315 million. Through special excise
taxes on their equipment, hunters contribute $90 million annually and fisherman
$140 million to funds used exclusively for fish and wildlife restoration
programs.
In
addition to the government-funded programs, sportsmen also founded independent
conservation groups to fund wildlife management.
The
Boone & Crockett Club was among the first national groups to form, according
to Williamson. That was in 1887 and was in response to market hunting and
subsistence hunting by entrepreneurs and settlers that decimated big game in the
Dakotas. Returning east from a two-year ranching stint in North Dakota, Theodore
Roosevelt eased the pain of carnage that he witnessed by forming the B&C
Club from sportsmen who doubled as the nation’s leading explorers, writers,
military leaders, scientists and politicians.
Among
the club’s first accomplishments was getting a full troop of the Sixth U.S.
Cavalry assigned to help Superintendent George Anderson control poaching and
vandalism in Yellowstone National Park.
The
League of American Sportsmen was organized in 1898 by George Oliver Shields,
editor of Recreation Magazine. This organization, along with the Audubon
Societies, the B & C Club and state game protective associations, helped
enact the Lacy Act of 1900, which was the first major law affecting fish and
wildlife. In essence, the act prohibits interstate shipment of illegally taken
wildlife. That law eventually helped eliminate much of the market hunting for
plume birds and big game.
The
American sportmen’s drive to fund conservation has not been without its snags,
however, according to Williamson. Take, for example, the 1911 offer by
Winchester Repeating Arms to give the New York Zoological Society $25,000
annually if the society would launch a program to protect game populations.
Society head William Hornaday, a vocal opponent of sport hunting and sporting
arms, refused.
Winchester
then approached the National Audubon Society (which was formed by noted
sportsman George Bird Grinnell in 1886) with the same offer made to Hornaday.
The Audubon Society originally accepted, agreeing to expand its program to check
the relentless slaughter of game birds and animals. The $25,000 would have about
doubled Audubon’s annual income. But charges surfaced in the news media that
Audubon had “sold out to the gun people who wanted to kill all the birds in
the country.” Consequently the Audubon board reversed itself and refused the
industry’s grant.