There can be no question about how bad hunters have been at recruiting new people into the lifestyle or, for that matter, keeping people in it.
The last 30 years or so of data offer a crystal clear picture of our collective failure in this arena. We used to be more than 10 percent of the total U.S. population. Now, we’re around 4 percent.
Hunters make up a much bigger proportion of South Dakota’s population at right around 10 percent, depending on how you count. Still in the last three years alone, 9,000 hunters stopped buying small game licenses. Several thousand more people stopped applying for firearms big game hunting licenses too.
Where did these hunters go? Well, the license data is clear on that score too. Those missing hunters either died or got too old. That happens. No one can stop the march of time. The problem is, those 9,000 hunters didn’t recruit anyone to take their place in the field.
This is a huge problem for anyone who cares about wildlife in North America. It is hunters, for the most part, who pay to manage and conserve wild animals in the United States. That’s true for both game and non-game species. Hunters also foot the bill for a substantial portion of the country’s habitat programs. It is hunters alone who have pushed to tax themselves in order to conserve wildlife. And it is hunters who fight hardest for wild places and the things that live in them.
Certainly it’s gotten harder for Americans to stay connected to the land and wildlife in the last 40 years. As a society, we’ve become increasingly urban. Wild things and wild places have gotten further and further away from most of us. It’s hard work to take your kids or yourself out to the woods to chase deer or pheasants or rabbits, which makes skipping the exercise altogether that much easier.
Still, those of us who hunt cannot be absolved of our sin of neglect. We have failed and failed miserably to pass our love and reverence for the wild on to the next generation. In fact, we’ve missed our chance to get nearly two whole generations in their childhood. This is despite 30-odd years of youth hunting events and programs. They just didn’t work.
Those youth programs didn’t work for many reasons. For one, they didn’t do a good job of serving kids whose parents didn’t already hunt. Put another way, youth programs have, by and large, served as an excuse for parents who hunt, to take their kids hunting too â€" Something they should have been doing anyway.
Another reason youth programs haven’t worked is that even when kids whose parents don’t hunt do get to participate, their parents don’t and there’s rarely any follow-up beyond the event itself. Who is going to take that kid hunting again, if not their parents?
Hunting is inextricably linked to human identity. It’s never going to go away entirely. There will always be a segment of society that is drawn to active participation in the wild. We should not be worried about hunting disappearing but we should be worried about hunting becoming something restricted to only those who can afford to spend exorbitant sums of money to hunt drastically reduced stocks of game. You know, like in Europe.
If you think that can’t happen, you’re wrong. In the U.S. hunters have, for more than 100 years, maintained a critical mass of sorts. We’ve been great enough in number and politically diverse enough that politicians of all stripes were forced to listen to us. That’s how we got the Lacy and Pittman-Robertson acts passed. Now, we’re losing both our numbers and our political diversity.
All is not lost. While we missed GenXers and millennials as children, there’s a chance to bring many of them into the fold. A renewed interest in knowing where food comes from is inspiring adults to take a look at hunting as a source of protein for their families. Many of these folks are sitting on the sidelines looking for someone to help them get started. As evidence, consider that 531 adults took advantage of South Dakota’s new apprentice hunter program in 2018.
Those of us who hunt owe it to ourselves, our children and the wildlife we love to step up and mentor new hunters whether they’re kids or adults. But especially if they’re adults because they can take their kids hunting too. We all need to commit to taking somebody hunting for the first time and sticking with them as they stumble and struggle to learn.
There are some tools out there to help us help beginning hunters. South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks has recently partnered with Powderhook, a smartphone app that acts as a sort networking site to connect new hunters with folks who can show them the ropes. Many conservation groups such as Pheasants Forever have established programs specifically to recruit new hunters and they can help as well.
I, for one, am doing my best to make new hunters. My wife killed her first deer last fall and she's already thinking about the next one. She was one of the 531 apprentice deer hunters. If you’re reading this and want to learn how to hunt, shoot me an email at nick.lowrey@capjournal.com. We can hunt rabbits through March, and I know a few good spots.