The House Natural Resources Committee just passed H.R. 2834, which requires federal land planning documents to include sportsmen’s interests, such as hunting, fishing, and target shooting.  The bill was introduced to counter the efforts of various environmental and anti-hunting interests to leverage loopholes in federal land use policy in order to block sportsmen’s access.

Here’s the press release from the US Sportsman’s Alliance:

House Natural Resources Committee Passes Legislation Protecting Sportsmen’s Access

Columbus, Ohio – Today the House Natural Resources Committee passed H.R. 2834, the Recreational Fishing and Hunting Heritage and Opportunities Act. This bill would protect fishing, hunting and recreational shooting on federal lands.

H.R. 2834 passed the Committee with strong bipartisan support by a vote of 29-14. This vital piece of legislation would require fishing, hunting and recreational shooting to be included in all federal land planning documents and would fix numerous inconsistencies in federal law that are being exploited by litigious environmental groups to reduce hunting opportunities on federal land. This bill is strongly supported by the U.S. Sportsmen’s Alliance, Safari Club International, the National Rifle Association, and millions of sportsmen across the country.

“This legislation is vital given the Administration’s recent actions toward hunters and recreational sport shooters,” said Melissa Simpson, Director of Government Affairs for Safari Club International. “Sportsmen have repeatedly sought to collaborate with the federal agencies and have been greeted with proposed closures in areas such as the Sonoran Desert National Monument, where the BLM intends to close the entire one-half million acre national monument to shooters.  There are some 63 shooting sites within the monument, closure of which will end access for sportsmen.   Passage of H.R. 2834 is necessary to protect against these anti-hunting policies.”

“Sportsmen are increasingly facing attacks aimed at stopping them from using public land,” said Bud Pidgeon, President and CEO of the U.S. Sportsmen’s Alliance.  “This bill closes the loopholes that anti-hunters have used time and time again to try to deny access for hunting, fishing and shooting.  Now is the time to put a stop to it.  We are extremely pleased and appreciative that the House Natural Resources Committee recognized the importance of this bill.”

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I don’t often cover these issues here on the Hog Blog, even though they’re all completely relevant to all of us.  But if you want to stay informed and get involved, head over the US Sportsmen’s Alliance site and sign up for the newsletter.  Even better, join the organization.  They spend a lot of time and money working hard to ensure that our hunting, fishing, and shooting heritage is protected on state and federal levels.

On a similar note, check out Holly’s (NorCal Cazadora) post about another great organization for California sportsmen, the California Outdoor Heritage Alliance (COHA).

(Bonus points to whoever can tell me the source of that title quote without googling.)

I try pretty hard to keep my hands reasonably clean when I get involved in discussions on this blog, as well as on others.  I’m human, and I have a temper, and sometimes I do let my emotions get the better of me.  It can be a fairly ugly thing, but fortunately, I’m pretty good at not taking things too personally.  Sometimes though, there’s nothing for it but to get down in the dirt a little bit too.

Recently, I got a comment on a thread from 2009 regarding the hunting vs anti-hunting debate.  My guess is that the person who left it,  anonymously named “Krell”, figured I wouldn’t pay attention to such an old thread and that the comment would be left un-remarked.  Maybe this person doesn’t know that I try really hard to reply to comments, particularly those of any substance… right or wrong.  I keep a pretty close eye on the conversations that happen on this blog.

I probably should have just deleted it and gone on about my day.  It was, after all, just another diatribe full of the standard anti-hunting rhetoric.  Hunting is murder.  Hunters are cruel brutes.  We kill for fun.  Etc.

Sport hunting is legal murder. There are no ethics in it, let alone morality.  The prime motive is not hunger or survival. It’s pleasure. Hunters kill because  they enjoy doing it. Have to. It makes them feel good. They kill millions of  animals they do not eat. And the industry behind them makes a hefty profit.  Hunters will forever claim they love and respect nature, yet they needlessly  slaughter the best it has to offer. Such love. It’s not a “sport.” It’s more  like a war. You have the snipers and you have their unwitting targets. But in  this particular war, the other side can’t shoot back. The brutal and cowardly  couldn’t ask for more.

Not much to build on there.  Just another hate-filled evangelist attacking an opposing ideology with myth and misinformation.  Then why didn’t I delete it instead of spending the time to reply to Krell’s comments, not once, but twice?

It’s hard to say, but a part of me feels like it’s a good thing to let the readers see this foolishness, particularly in light of some of the conversations we’ve had here, and on linked blogs like NorCal Cazadora, Fair Chase Hunting, and the Mindful Carnivore.  Those conversations and the resultant comments are pretty good indicators that there’s a lot more to hunting and hunters than mindless bloodlust.  In my mind, Krell’s comments provide sort of the same thing we see when PETA goes out and does one of their idiotic publicity stunts… it hurts them worse than it hurts us.

But I think this sort of commentary is important because it can inform our conversations when we challenge anti-hunting dogma.  Sure, this person’s comments were on the extreme end of the spectrum, but this is a very real mindset out there.  As hunters, we really need to be prepared to answer to this kind of charge, even if we question the validity.  This is where hunting vs. anti-hunting becomes an ideological quagmire if we let it.  Right vs. wrong.  Good vs. evil.  And not a bit of it comes with any tangible support for either argument.  May as well be Catholicism vs. Judaism.

For my part, I gave this Krell person a chance to follow up with a more substantial discussion, and when that response offered nothing more, I closed the door.  To me, it was a lot like closing the door on a Jehovah’s Witness or an evangelist from the local, fundamentalist Baptist church.  I don’t fault anyone their personal beliefs or religion, and I appreciate those who’d like to offer me some of their Kool-Aid.  But I have little patience for anyone who wants to force it down my throat.

Should I have allowed this person’s comments?  Should I have responded?  What would you have done?

Poking around down here in the Hill Country, I’ve been trying to read up on local newspapers and magazines.  It’s a great way to learn about the issues that are important to the locals, especially if you plan to spend any amount of time (or even relocate, as in my case) in an area. If you’ve never stopped to read one of the little, hometown newspapers in any rural area, you really should. It can be a real treat.  Or,at the risk of sounding mean, it can be a real nightmare for the journalism or English major.  But I enjoy them all for the look inside rural Americana that you just aren’t going to get from USA Today or the New York Times.

One such paper that I picked up at Oasis Outback (a really cool micr0-Cabelas kind of place in Uvalde, TX) was the Lone Star Outdoor News.  In amidst the fluff stories about a grandfather who taught his grandson to flyfish, and the general, monster buck stories, there was this piece about Diamond Poole, a Dallas fitness model who went from anti-hunter to hunter over the space of a year or so (Note: The full article isn’t available online yet. This link opens a photo spread.).

According to the article, Diamond’s conversion came about after she met and fell in love with a hunter.  Through conversations about wildlife management, the realities of life for wild animals (the real world is not like Bambi), and hunter-based charities such as Hunters for the Hungry, he helped her see that hunters weren’t the “demented rednecks” she’d imagined.

After easing into hunting through sharing a blind on hunts, skeet shooting, and then dove hunts, Diamond took up the gun herself and has since killed a couple of really nice Texas whitetails, feral hogs, and some exotics… almost all in the space of a year.  I’d say the conversion is fairly complete… and all because a hunter was willing to talk to an anti-hunter and share his passion for the sport.

Why’d I share this?  Well, partly because I’m a little short on manageable ideas right now.  And yeah, those who might accuse me of bias because she’s kind of easy on the eyes… well, I’ll plead no contest.

But I also thought her story is sort of relevant to an ongoing topic amongst us outdoor bloggers.

In blog “conversations”, many of us have talked about meeting anti-hunters and helping to change their minds about hunters and our sport.  Some of us, like Tovar and Holly actually spend a lot of time doing exactly that, and both of them come from a past where their own opinions of hunters weren’t very positive.  As a result of these meetings, by chance or otherwise, we may not have converted the anti-hunters into hunters, but we’ve changed their attitudes.  While I don’t think this one-on-one approach is going to resolve the larger challenges to the image of hunting and hunters, it certainly doesn’t hurt.

Yesterday, I posted up the text of a short email I received from Steven F., apparently challenging me to justify how I can kill “innocent” beings for “fun”. 

As promised, here’s the reply I sent back to him.

Hi, Steven.

Let’s take a more objective look at this thing, if we can.

We all do a LOT of things we don’t “need” to do. 

We drive to work, or to the grocery store… an activity that kills millions of animals and humans every year, yet who wants to give up the convenience and “freedom” of driving our own vehicle?  We don’t feel like walking, or riding a bike, or taking mass transit. 

We eat food produced by mass, agricultural conglomerates that destroy entire ecosystems through monocultural practices, the use of pesticides and herbicides, genetic manipulation, and sheer waste.  We could grow our own, or buy from sustainable farms, but that’s more expensive and not always readily available.  We don’t feel like tilling up our (non-native, invasive) lawns to plant some basic food crops, or spending more for food that’s healthier for the environment and ourselves. 

We live in huge, inefficient single-family housing, displacing millions and millions of square feet of habitat because we don’t feel like living in cramped, multi-family units.  We heat and air condition these homes, and power them to watch television, browse on computers, and light up rooms we’re not even occupying at a cost to nature that is insanely out of proportion to the comfort and convenience we receive. 

We don’t need any of this for subsistence.  Most of it gives us pleasure, or at least comfort.  And it’s destroying the world in which we live… animals and plants alike. 

Now, on the other hand, you have hunters… less than 12% of the entire country’s population.    We go out with the specific intention of killing animals, but we do so under controlled conditions so that our actions are not harmful to the overall populations.  In some cases, in fact, killing certain animals benefits the population at large.  In other cases, the activity generates money which is used to protect and preserve habitat, fund research to better understand the environmental and ecological balance (for all animals, not just “game”), and, truth-be-told, generate employment for millions of people. 

In light of other common human activities, hunting is actually a very benign undertaking. 

Specific to the essay you read…

The point of the essay was to challenge the cliché of many pro-hunting arguments with the simple and honest facts.  There are many reasons that the sport of hunting is defensible, such as population management and the generation of money through licenses, fees, and taxes.  But those are not the reasons that hunters hunt.  We hunt because we want to. 

Like most other non-essential human activities, if we did not find pleasure in them, we wouldn’t do them.  Whether it’s hiking, bicycling, or hunting, we don’t do these things because we have to.

So yes, hunting gives us pleasure.  Killing, in itself, does not.  I realize that’s a slippery distinction, because without killing there is no hunt.  But you’d have to be pretty obtuse not to recognize that there is a difference between the experience of the hunt, and simply killing things.  Hunting is not indiscriminate slaughter. 

As to the moral “right” or “wrong” of killing animals for sport…  that’s one of those things that can no more be justified than religious beliefs.  Obviously, if hunters felt the same way about the sanctity of animal life that anti-hunters claim to, we wouldn’t hunt.  We see it differently, though. 

By and large, hunters recognize the animal in ourselves.  Rather than placing ourselves “above” the animals as some would argue, we put ourselves with them.  We take a role, albeit modernized and inconsistent, in the natural, predator-prey relationship.  Some animals are predators, and others are prey.  There is nothing wrong with a lion killing a deer, or with a hawk killing a rabbit.  Why should there be anything “wrong” with a human predator taking an animal? 

 An animal still died to bring me that steak on the grocer’s shelf, or even to protect the soybean fields from which that tofu was derived.  Someone is killing animals, daily, for each and every one of us to eat.  Why would it be wrong for me to occasionally take the active role in that killing? 

 Is subsistence the only justifiable reason for hunting?  Some hunters would argue (and I agree) that there’s more to sustaining ourselves than stuffing our bodies with food.  For hunters, hunting provides a connection and understanding of nature and our places in it.  That connection defies rational explanation, largely because it’s not entirely rational.  But it can’t be denied, and it doesn’t have to be justified to anyone except ourselves. 

 The arguments of people who are truly anti-hunting are not entirely rational either.  They feel a strong certainty that killing animals for sport is “wrong”.   They can’t couch an argument in any logical grounds. 

 And thus… impasse. 

 So no.  I don’t feel that hunting is “wrong”.

Selfish?  Probably.  But no more selfish than driving a private vehicle, living in a single-family home, or sitting here now on this computer typing out a message that is largely meaningless… it will not change the world.  It probably won’t change your mind. 

But you asked.

Seems like every year, about this time, I’ll start to see more activity regarding my old posts about pro-hunting vs. anti-hunting.   I’ll get comments on old threads as well as emails directly to my box.  I attribute some of it to the fact that public school kids are getting their research paper assignments for the last half of the year.  In fact, I often get requests to quote my essays or old posts in research papers (I always accede, and ask for the opportunity to read the finished product). 

But some of the flat-out attacks, moronic threats, and other stuff… well, maybe it’s from the same source.  I don’t know.  A lot of it certainly is puerile enough to have come from school kids.  The language and lack of substance remind me of a bunch of nine year-olds cussing at one another behind the cafeteria during recess.  Flexing the lexicon, so to speak, and often taking great linguistic liberties.  

Anyway, I always delete the personal attacks and extreme foul language, but sometimes I get one that, while not necessarily well-reasoned, seems to be reasonably toned.  Like this one from Steven F (I’ll keep his last name to myself):

Hmm.  In your piece titled “Fighting the Anti-Hunters” you admit that you and most hunters do not hunt for subsistence but because you/they enjoy doing it…not that there’s ever been any doubt about that.  But let me get this right.  You are saying you shoot animals because you feel like it, because it gives you pleasure.  How on any moral grounds can you justify that — killing an innocent being for pleasure, aka enjoyment, sport, fun, or whatever you call it, and not know there’s something very wrong and selfish about it?  What is ethical or moral or justifiable about killing if you don’t really need to?  I’d like to know.  

The essay he’s referencing here, Fighting the Anti-Hunters, was published on my personal website back in 2001. 

Sometimes, I really wish someone would come up with something new to debate, by the way.  I expect anyone who’s read this blog for more than a year has seen some version of this same argument repeated here and on other sites where I comment.  I’ve made the same responses so often that I can do it by rote, if I’m careful.  Sometimes I probably do.  In fact, because of the redundancy I hesitated sharing it at all… but then I realized that I was short of content this week. 

So there’s the challenge.  What do you guys think?  I wrote a response, of course, that I hope wasn’t too lengthy.  I’ll share that tomorrow because I’d like to read what some of you might have to say first.

Our self-proclaimed “friends” at the Sierra Club have reached a new low… or is it a new high? 

(Thanks to the good folks at Field and Stream’s Field Notes blog for getting my blood pressure up this morning.)

Apparently they’re concerned about the ecological disaster looming in the woods as bear hunters’ hounds do their doody on the trail.  According to this article in the Visalia Times-Delta, the fear is that the dog poo will somehow spread death and disease to “endangered” species in the forest.

Earlier this month, Richard Garcia, an executive member of the Kern-Kaweah Chapter of the Sierra Club, asked the Tulare County Board of Supervisors to support his group’s efforts to persuade the California Fish and Game Commission to change bear-hunting rules in the state. They want hunters to keep their dogs on leashes at all times and to remove their dogs’ feces from hunting areas.

Dogs and their feces, which can spread disease, threaten such animals as the Pacific fisher, American marten and California wolverine — all members of the weasel-ferret family — and the Sierra Nevada red fox, Garcia said.

“The problem is, we have some animals in our local national forest that are on the brink of extinction,” he told supervisors.

I’m sorry, Mr. Garcia, but the problem animals aren’t the ones running around on four legs.  It’s morons on two legs we, the wildlife, and the environment, have to worry about. 

Let’s be honest here.  This isn’t about saving endangered species or stopping the spread of disease (even ignoring for a moment, the fact that good hounds can be pretty expensive, and most houndsmen take pains to keep them disease free).  It’s about harassing hunters by attacking legitimate hunting practices.  It’s about using spurious claims and ignorant speculation to restrict an activity with which these Sierra Clubbers disagree. 

In the interest of full disclosure, only one chapter of the Sierra Club is currently engaged in this discussion. The national chapter doesn’t appear to be involved, which may indicate that some level of intelligence still functions in the organization. 

(A side note:  I’ll never forget the little gang of Sierra Club hikers I encountered on a horse ride in the East Bay hills.  My horse, as horses do, unloaded her bowels along the trail as the group was approaching.  One or two gingerly stepped around it, but another stopped and glared indignantly at me.  “Are you going to clean that up,” he queried?

“As soon as someone cleans up behind the cattle and coyotes,” I replied. 

He glared.  I glared.  And away he huffed.)

I’ve been involved with debates regarding the pros and cons of hunting for almost as long as I’ve been on the Internet.  I believe I got my first AOL account in 1988 or ’89, and was embroiled in the conversation almost immediately after.  I was also involved in those conversations on campus, and, in fact, wrote my senior thesis on the defensibility of hunting. 

The point is, there really doesn’t seem to be any new direction to take the conversation.  It’s all been said, so to speak. 

But I apparently can’t stop myself from saying it again… and again… and such has been the case in the discussion over at the KQED blogs site, in response to the Quest hog hunting episode.  If you’re at all interested in seeing how such a discussion can go, you ought to check it out.  Chip in if you feel the need, but please read what’s been said already, and consider what you’re about to say in light of the current conversation.  There’s a lot to learn from M. Figgis’s comments, and her(?) attitude toward hunters.  This is not unusual. 

When an anti is confronted with hunters who challenge the stereotype, they still tend to lump all OTHER hunters into the previous category.  It’s an uphill battle for those of us who want to show that WE are the norm, and the slobs, jerks, and poachers are the exceptions. 

Or are they? 

Seriously, I think M. Figgis makes some interesting points.  I’ve said before that non-hunters and antis will eventually see through the fascade of uber-ethics.  When we make ourselves out to be paragons of “ethics”, someone is bound to challenge the rhetoric with reality.  Honesty goes a lot further than window-dressing.

Thanks a lot, Holly!  It was all because of your post, and the trouble you had getting your comments approved on Michael Markarian’s Huffington Post blog. 

I had to go over there and try to get my own two cents published.  Of course, mine went right on up there, and I got challenged (politely and respectfully), and now here I am embroiled in the same old debate I’ve been having for a couple of decades now… just on a whole new podium. 

It’s a real challenge making a reasonable reply in 250 words or less, and I hope I don’t end up looking like a fool.  If I do though, I’m still blaming Holly.  If she hadn’t posted about Markarian’s blog, I’d never have even gone over there in the first place!

That was a tough title to write.  I wanted to make it snappy, but it also had to tell you what this bit was about, right?  Maybe I failed on both counts, but who cares?  Onward and upward.

A week or two ago I posted my response to an article that appeared in Newsweek.  If you don’t feel like clicking that link to go back and see what it was all about, here it is in a nutshell:

The Newsweek article made a strong implication that hunting, and specifically trophy hunting, was causing a decline in the average size of the hunted species.  The article proceeded to offer several examples which, on the surface, appeared to support the thesis.  In my response, I deconstructed the argument, pointing out that the data is skewed and based on totally unconnected situations.  The populations in question were largely isolated, and the “hunting” in question was generally uncontrolled poaching.

Anyway, my argument stated that the article was misleading and erroneous, and that it appeared that it was pushing an anti-hunting agenda.  I added the caveat that this is mostly my own, educated opinion. 

So imagine my joy when I saw that none other than Dr Valerius Geist responded in kind to the article (actually a couple of articles in different publications, including this one).  While he made a few more erudite points, he validated my own opinion that it appears that there is an agenda at work here.  Tom Remington, at the Black Bear Blog was able to get permission to reprint the total of  Dr. Geist’s rejoinder.  It’s definitely worth a read.

See the things that happen while I’m on the road?  I was so busy with the SHOT Show that this one almost slipped right by!

I’ve always kind of enjoyed the articles in Newsweek magazine.  While there’s a detectable tilt to the left, the publication always seems to manage some semblance of balance on most issues.  I’ve got to say, though, that I can’t remember ever seeing an issue with a positive word on guns or hunting.  And this latest issue is no exception.

“Gracing” the pages of this week’s issue is an article titled, It’s Survival of the Weak and Scrawny: How Hunting is Driving Evolution in Reverse.  The author, Lily Huang, goes to some lengths to argue that hunters, through our pursuit of the biggest and best specimens are causing species to evolve less “desirable” animals. 

Researchers describe what’s happening as none other than the selection process that Darwin made famous: the fittest of a species survive to reproduce and pass along their traits to succeeding generations, while the traits of the unfit gradually disappear. Selective hunting—picking out individuals with the best horns or antlers, or the largest piece of hide—works in reverse: the evolutionary loser is not the small and defenseless, but the biggest and best-equipped to win mates or fend off attackers.

Now those of us who’ve been in the anti vs. pro hunting debates for a while have heard all of this before.  It’s been pretty well discredited, so I was actually surprised to see it reappear… especially in a magazine like Newsweek.  We were told, over and over again that, “hunters only kill the best animals and that weakens the herd.” 

This flies in the face of the fact that most hunters, while they’d gladly take a real “trophy” animal, usually take whatever legal specimen they can kill.  The percentage of “trophy” animals taken in any given season is pretty low… although it appears to be increasing of late… in contrast to the argument.  Hunters seem to be entering more and bigger animals into the record books every season.  It’s also a fact that by the time most big game species have reached trophy status, they’ve spread their genetics across the herd for at least a few generations, and their offspring have begun to do the same.  It’s pretty hard logic to argue with, even for those of us like myself who are not wildlife biologists or geneticists. 

So anyway, when I was told about the article, I started to blow it off… but then decided to give it a read to see if it shed new light on an old subject.  I’m always ready to be enlightened, and maybe this would be the article that would do it.

It didn’t.

First of all, the “evidence” in the article was pretty scattered and largely based on species that are heavily poached and in other countries, as opposed to species that are hunted under wildlife management principles such as those in place in the US.  This includes the Australian red kanagaroo, killed by poachers for leather, and the elephants killed for ivory, as well as an isolated population of bighorn sheep in Quebec.  The author mentions other game animals, such as elk, but offers no research or statistics to support the argument that “trophy” animals are diminishing. 

So let’s start with the premise.  If a particular trait causes unusually high rates of death in a species, then that trait will eventually disappear as animals without the trait are more successful at breeding.  That sort of makes sense, if you buy into the idea of evolution and natural selection (which I do, generally).  The case of the tuskless elephants seems to make a compelling argument that there is something, at least, to this. 

Tusks used to make elephants fitter, as a weapon or a tool in foraging—until ivory became a precious commodity and having tusks got you killed. Then tuskless elephants, products of a genetic fluke, became the more consistent breeders and grew from around 2 percent among African elephants to more than 38 percent in one Zambian population, and 98 percent in a South African one. In Asia, where female elephants don’t have tusks to begin with, the proportion of tuskless elephants has more than doubled, to more than 90 percent in Sri Lanka.

So something is going on there, but is the change the result of hunting (poaching), or are there other causes.  The big problem is that nobody knows, for sure.  The kind of research to support this kind of theory simply doesn’t yet exist because it’s impossible to create control groups or measure any kind of relative data.  The information is largely circumstantial, and Huang does go so far as to admit that later in the article.  The jury is out.  The evidence is not anywhere near conclusive or widespread.  But even if it is proven that the change is caused by the excessive harvest of animals with large tusks, it’s critical to note that this is illegal and unmanaged hunting. 

So why then, did Newsweek and the author decide to publish this article as a damning assault on hunting?  If this were a court of law, they’d be bounced out on their ears.  In a debate class, they’d get heckled off-stage and get a big, fat “F” for their efforts.  But a national news magazine sees fit to publish it? 

There is not any evidence supporting an argument that trophy hunting practices are having any kind of negative effect on big game populations.  In fact, as most wildlife biologists have learned, the biggest problems are occurring for the opposite reason… too many hunters are shooting young, under-developed males from the breeding pool.  While I don’t completely agree with QDMA programs on public land, it is clear that encouraging hunters to take only mature males and more females is allowing more young males to grow to “trophy” status. 

Likewise with elk, it’s a pretty easy argument to make that any perceived dearth of trophy bulls on public land is the result of un-selective harvest of younger bulls.  The youngsters, four and five-point animals, tend to bear the brunt of the slaughter during the season.  The ones that escape, or those that live in the back of beyond where the average hunter never treads are doing just fine.  You’ll see them every year on the feedlots after the hunting season is over.  Trophy animals are also alive and well on private and limited entry areas, or at least as well as they can be due to various environmental factors (drought, severe winters, etc.). 

You can pretty much run the same argument across the gamut of North American big game.  Trophy hunting, for all the hype, isn’t having much of an effect on the species.  Most hunters are not trophy hunters, and most hunters don’t harvest the best specimens from their areas.  The most widely pursued game species are doing fine, in some cases too well, despite the hunting pressure.  I can’t speak so much for other countries like Africa, where unmanaged areas are being decimated by poaching, not only of trophy animals but of all animals.  The managed areas are a whole different picture, and incomparable to anything we have in the States (with the possible exception of Texas). 

To wrap this up, I think my biggest problem is in the way the article is focused on “hunting”, as opposed to poaching and/or poor game management.  It’s also an issue to me that the whole piece is based on shaky theory derived from isolated populations of animals and unrelated data points… and it simply doesn’t hold up on a large scale.   Maybe the majority of what I “know” about the issue is anecdotal and I have stated before that I’m not an expert.  But when even the real experts in the article state, clearly, that the whole thing is really just a rough theory…  it smacks of agenda pushing on the part of the magazine and the author. 

It is piss-poor journalism at best, and a poorly disguised anti-hunting propaganda piece at worst.  You choose for yourselves.