Hunting and stuff

Wildlife biology is a field of many facets. If you're a wildlife biologist, you might work for one of many federal agencies, each of which has a different goal, or perhaps a state wildlife agency, or maybe a consulting firm, or maybe a non-profit organization. Maybe you are an academic and teach wildlife biology and/or develop your own research projects with your own graduate students.

You might be trying to save a particular species or habitat. You might be managing habitats to support natural resources alongside sustainable exploitative use (e.g. logging, mining, recreation). You might be educating people on the importance of conservation. You might be studying ecosystems to see how they tick, how complex evolutionary processes work or are changing with time. In short, you might be doing any number of things.

To me, all of these things are vital. And somewhere in there, sifting through the species and the funding and the goals and the philosophy of things, is hunting.

I still do not know how I feel about it.

I'm mostly writing here to get my feelings out somewhere, feelings that have been conflicted for quite some time.

I admit I got into wildlife biology as a youngster not really knowing where I wanted to go with it. Try as I might, I can't pinpoint why I love animals; even before I saw the Lion King, even before Steve Irwin came on TV or I started watching the Discovery Channel and Animal Planet (back when they weren't crappy), I loved animals--especially carnivores. When I was a toddler, I chose stuffed animals and cheap little porcelain animal figurines from the dollar store over dolls and Barbies. I became pretty good at drawing the animals I saw in books and on TV. I had a glittery purple wolf T-shirt and a CD of an orchestra playing alongside howling wolves. By high school, I knew that what I really wanted to do was host my own animal show, be the next Brady Barr or Crocodile Hunter...but I also knew that was probably never going to happen.

So, what? Veterinarian? A week-long internship at a vet clinic, consisting solely of spaying, neutering, and lots of poop cleanup, quickly vanquished that ambition. So...animator? That would be awesome...if art school wasn't ridiculously expensive and the term "starving artist" didn't exist. Eventually--and very late--I learned of the existence of this nebulous "wildlife biology" thing. I had no idea what it meant, but I went off to the University of Idaho to find out.

I won't get into the details of what UI's wildlife biology program taught me, but I think I went through it with the vague ambition of "working with wolves". Although I learned about the existence and purpose of things like the Forest Service and the Idaho Department of Fish and Game, I don't know that my four years prepared me any better for my career. I still didn't know what I wanted to do.

To this day, I think that if I had been older, maybe taken some time in the military or in the working world before college, I don't think I would have decided to become a biologist. Maybe I'll get around to discussing that later. Maybe I won't.

But anyway, I floated around for a while and did different things--mostly being a field tech on research projects. I worked for state wildlife agencies, but never doing anything having to do with hunting--at least, so I thought. Maybe when I worked in Colorado on the mountain lion project, I thought I was researching mountain lions. What I really was doing was researching mountain lions because they eat deer and elk. And deer and elk are big game. And big game hunting is big money.

Now, my job for Montana's state wildlife management agency is, in a nutshell, to manage big game so people can keep hunting them. On the days I get to capture and radio-collar mule deer, or rescue a moose from a swampy riverbank, or help the nongame biologist band songbirds, I love my job. I get paid to teach kids (and sometimes adults!) about how cool wildlife is. I get paid to go outside and look at stuff. I get paid to ride in a little plane and see the mountains from a perspective almost no one else gets to see, and count elk and deer and mountain goats and bighorn sheep.

But in the end, the goal is always to keep these animals around so we can keep hunting them. I struggle with it sometimes.

Let's get one thing straight: generally, I am not opposed to hunting (though I currently don't hunt). Fact is, hunting is one of the primary funding sources for wildlife research and management, through donations to popular taxa- or species-specific organizations like Ducks Unlimited or the Mule Deer Foundation, and, of course, through hunting license sales and the excise tax on firearms and ammunition via the Pittman-Robertson Act. Hunting pays my salary, and I like to think I do good things with my time. And when big game hunting brings in the big bucks, things that eat big game take center stage as well. Many of those things--bears, mountain lions, wolves--are classified as big game themselves, e.g., something you can go hunt. It's not all about big game, though; conservation of elk and deer as umbrella species often leads to protection of habitats for other animals; let's face it, funding is still hard to come by to conserve things like songbirds and salamanders, things that no one wants to kill.

And yet many hunters passionately love the things they hunt.

It might seem strange to some that people who love wildlife still go out there and take it, use it. But it's true. People want to hunt, and so they want to make sure there is always big game around to keep on hunting.

And there are very real benefits. Wild game is, ultimately, a far more sustainable and humane way to get meat for the freezer than shopping at your typical grocery store. The best hunters know how to kill an animal without causing undue suffering; in fact, most hunters I talk to admit they feel awful when they take a bad shot that causes the animal to suffer. And with hunting, we are able to control populations that might become too numerous and cause damage to habitats and/or other species. (Granted, these populations typically control themselves in a human-free system, but let's face it--humans are here, taking up space, growing crops and livestock, and so we must manage the wildlife. I won't really get into this...yet.)

And then there are the things I struggle with.

Like trophy hunting. Two huge bulls came through the check station today. I oohed and aahed with everyone else, and said, "Good job," and "Congratulations", but on the inside, I was torn.

Wanting to go shoot a cow elk so you can have a year's worth of meat is something I can't complain too much about, mostly for the population management/sustainable meat thing. But why shoot a "trophy" bull elk?

Some people do it for the challenge, because finding and shooting those old, smart bulls is a lot more difficult than shooting a cow out of a herd standing in the open. They have to think like that bull, understand that bull, predict what that bull is going to do. So maybe that's a reason. And from a population standpoint, sorry boys, males don't really matter all that much (at least for most wild ungulates).

But from an ethical standpoint...how can you go through all that without developing the most profound respect for that animal? How can you go through all the work of finding him, and being rewarded by a look at his grizzled face, his broad nose, enormous antlers that have fended off predators and competitors for 7-10 years so he could pass on that noble bloodline through every cow in the harem, through breeding rights that were dearly and difficultly won, and dark eyes like windows into a mind that has outsmarted human hunters season after season...how can you see that and still take that shot?

Same goes with predators, I guess. There's the pure and (in my opinion) irrational hatred and fear of predators because they kill other animals--irrational when you're a big game killer yourself, and only want to kill the wolf because it means more elk for you. But then there's the challenge of it. Hunting predators is difficult (when you go about it ethically, anyway), and I've heard from more than one person who started off hunting them because they hated them, and now respect them for their intelligence. Predators are our competitors, and for some, there's victory in vanquishing the competition. Biologically, there is merit in "managing" predators alongside managing big game, to even out both sides of the playing field now that humans are in the trophic game. After all, wolves kill coyotes, lions and wolves kill each other, bears kill wolf cubs, wolves kill bear cubs. And I still think that opening hunting seasons on wolves was one of the best things we could do for them, because it placed a value, however small, on that animal that wasn't there when they were off-limits. It gave people a stake in wildlife management, it took away the feeling of helplessness.

But what else does hunting do to a person?

I took hunter education this year and learned that there are four "stages" of hunting; 1) the shooting stage, where you just want to shoot an animal to prove that you can, 2) the limit-out stage, where you want to fill your tag or quota to prove that you've got mad skillz, 3) the selective stage, where you get a bit pickier about what you shoot and are there more for greater challenge and greater reward (like bigger antlers), 4) the method stage, where you maybe try bowhunting because it's a greater challenge, and finally, 5) the philosopher stage, where killing an animal is no longer important. To me, this one is the key. This is where a hunter thinks about all his experiences out there, in the wild, experiencing nature and wanting to pass on that experience to others.

You can't deny that hunters, no matter what they're hunting, respect and love the natural world. They are glad the elk and deer are there, glad when they can take one home, and, often, glad to do whatever it takes to make sure it stays that way. And they are experiencing Nature--the cold, the snow, the sweat and victory of conquering the highest mountain in the quest for game, the voice of the wind in the forest, the haunting sounds of the bugling elk or the owl or a lion calling to its cubs, the stars shining in the night sky, the moon that, when full, reveals a world and a spirit most humans snug in their beds will never see.

As long as there is hunting, we will keep instilling that love, that respect, that value, in the next generation. I firmly believe that, and that is the main reason I am not opposed to hunting, in general. It would be fantastic if all of us appreciated Nature just because it's there, but let's face it, that's a poor argument for the general public. Humans are flawed. Most of us need a reason to love the owl. We need a reason to love the stars, the trees, the snow, the creeks. And we need a reason to want to keep them around. I feel blessed that I don't need hunting to find that reason in myself, and maybe you feel the same way. I want everyone else to find it, too--and if hunting gets them there, then...great.

In the meantime, I'll keep doing my job, and serving hunters, and trying to make sure we keep enough deer and elk and sheep and goats around for generations. Maybe it's not as sexy or important as tracking snow leopards with Panthera, or getting Congress to set aside another national park, or...whatever. The Wildlife Society conference in Raleigh this past week made me think about all the routes I could have taken. There are days I think that nothing I do matters, it's true. Many days. Will I stay at this job? I don't know. Probably, for a while. I don't like to think that I sacrificed my passion for conservation for the appeal of permanency, of a stable paycheck; but maybe that's what I did. Then again, maybe I can do some good here.

Maybe it's not the end.