Aldo Leopold wrote, The Ecological Conscience, "I have no illusions about the speed or accuracy with which an ecological conscience can become functional. It has required 19 centuries to define decent man-to-man conduct and the process is only half done; it may take as long to evolve a code of decency for man-to-land conduct. In such matters we should not worry too much about anything except the direction in which we travel. The direction is clear, and the first step is to throw your weight around on matters of right and wrong in land-use. Cease being intimidated by the argument that a right action is impossible because it does not yield maximum profits, or that a wrong action is to be accepted because it pays. That philosophy is dead in human relations, and its funeral in land-relations is overdue."


The other morning a conservation hunter friend, Rod Bullis, called and said that I needed to turn on Northern Ag Network's Voices of Montana - they were discussing elk shoulder seasons. I dont own a radio, but I found it online quickly and caught the second half. Pissed off, I found the audio links and listened to the first half.
Segment 1
Segment 2

The guest was Terry Anderson, from PERC. He said the best habitat are the larger private parcels like Turner and the Wilks places, said the public hunters are slaughtering the wildlife, the tragedy of the commons, that we need restricted access to protect wildlife. He also said the average hunter needs to pay for hunting access, talked about $1000, said the hunters were driving around in $30,000 pickups with expensive rifles and such and can afford to pay landowners for the right to hunt. Terry said our licenses need to go up, but the increase should be dedicated to landowners, then spoke about going back to late season hunts to drop elk numbers down like before. The listeners where then referred to PERC's website for more information. PERC is a Bozeman based organization that I knew advocated for federal public lands being turned over to the state.

I went to PERC's site, typed in elk hunting in the search bar to find they advocate ranching for wildlife, specifically talking about the Texas Model:
"Texas has the flexibility and incentives for which ranching for wildlife strives. It is by far the leader in terms of the number of landowners who have instituted fee hunting. A study by Butler and Workman (1993) found that 52 percent of the Texas ranches surveyed offered fee hunting. The result is a wide array of hunting opportunities and price ranges in Texas (see Figure 1)..."

"With the decline of quality hunting opportunities on public lands, however, more hunters are willing to pay for better hunting, and landowners are responding to this demand by offering hunting access for a fee. Through ranching for wildlife, state wildlife agencies can build on this foundation..."

"In other western states, ranching for wildlife provides many of the benefits found in Texas. In these states, much of the land is public and access has been traditionally free. Until recently, this free access discouraged private landowners from even maintaining habitat, let alone planting forage or building ponds to attract game animals. Landowners could not earn enough from fee hunting to justify the expense. With the decline of quality hunting opportunities on public lands, however, more hunters are willing to pay for better hunting, and landowners are responding to this demand by offering hunting access for a fee. Through ranching for wildlife, state wildlife agencies can build on this foundation."

PERC advocated longer seasons, "Because a longer season offers a better chance of harvesting trophy animals, more hunters are willing to pay landowners a premium for these hunts." There were numerous papers there like Turning Wildlife Into An Asset, Wildlife in the Marketplace, etc.

This Sept., after the Skyline Sportsmen wrote an oped against elk shoulder seasons, PERC's Terry Anderson wrote a reply, in which he stated, "Colorado's 'ranching for wildlife' program takes an even bigger step. It gives landowners more say in who can hunt and gives them some permits which they can sell at whatever price the market will bear in return for cooperating with the state's wildlife agency on habitat management plans.

Put bluntly, opposition to shoulder seasons is driven by short-sighted self-interest. It is short sighted because it fails to recognize landowners, who control the best habitat in the state, as allies of hunters. It is self-interested because it fails to recognize that landowners bear the cost of providing habitat and asks them to provide a free-access lunch for hunters. To be sure, elk are public wildlife, but as Chuck Denowh, policy director for United Property Owners of Montana, put it, 'it's time for the public to pay. The shoulder seasons are a very tiny step in the right direction.' "

So I got the partially worked Satirical Magpie editorial cartoon that I had begun working on in June, when the elk shoulder season first came up before the FWP Commission, and finished it - adding PERC to the Robber Barons.

click to enlarge

One of my favorite quotes is from Marshall Sahlins, an anthropologist, who wrote, among many other things, The Original Affluent Society, first presented at a symposium on "Man the hunter," in 1972, about hunter-gatherer cultures. Towards the end he states, "The world's most primitive people have few possessions. but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilization."

My previous decades of research, prior to Montana conservation, is in ancient archaeology, anthropology, comparative religious systems and linguistics - mostly of hunter-gatherer cultures and the following Indo-European caste/class system cultures that are very market, resource control driven. So this subject is not unfamiliar to me. In fact, it was part of what drove me to all that research, because hunter-gatherer mentalities are typically community oriented, sharing what they have, which I have participated in and have been a recipient of, especially when I have been injured and couldnt hunt.

John Gowdy wrote in, Hunter-gatherers and the mythology of the market, "Assumptions about human behavior that members of market societies believe to be universal, that humans are naturally competitive and acquisitive, and that social stratification is natural, do not apply to many hunter-gatherer peoples. The dominant school of economic theory in the industrialized world, neoclassical economics, holds these attributes to be essential for economic advancement and affluence... Neoclassical economic theory contains more than a set of beliefs about human nature. It is also an ideology justifying the existing economic organization, resource use, and distribution of wealth. This belief system sees class divisions as inevitable and sees nature as a collection of 'natural resources' to be used to fuel the engine of economic growth and technological progress. The inequality of the distribution of goods among individuals in a capitalist economy is justified according to the 'marginal productivity theory of distribution.' "

Gowdy further writes concerning the environment of hunter-gatherers, "Because immediate-return hunter-gatherers lived, for the most part, off the direct flows from nature, it was immediately apparent when the flow of nature's services was disturbed, sustainability meant sustaining the ability of nature to provide the necessities of life. Hunter-gatherers have displayed the ability to substitute certain natural resources for many others, but care was taken to maintain the flow of nature's bounty.

Substitution is also one of the basic driving forces behind market economies, but it takes a much different, and virulent, form. In economic markets, no matter what the resource, a substitute for it will always appear if the price is right. However, since the ultimate measure of market value is monetary, all things are reduced to a single common denominator, money. Substitution is based on monetary values which may ignore essential characteristics not related to immediate market functions. According to economic criteria, an economy is sustainable, then, if its ability to generate income is maintained, that is, if the monetary value of its means of production is non-decreasing (Pearce and Atkinson 1993)... This way of looking at the world masks the fact that we are sacrificing for ephemeral economic gains the viability of resources upon which our ultimate existence as a species depends...

Market decisions reflect the interests of individual humans, not necessarily the community, and certainly not the well-being of the rest of the natural world. We make very different choices as individuals than we do as members of families, communities, or nations, or even as world citizens."

"In 1887, a New Yorker-turned-cowboy rode his horse through North Dakota's Badlands on an autumn hunting trip. Instead of the vast herds of antelope, deer and elk he had encountered on previous journeys, 29-year-old Theodore Roosevelt this time confronted a landscape nearly devoid of wildlife and devastated by overuse. 'What had been a teeming paradise, loud with snorts and splashing and drumming hooves, was now a waste of naked hills and silent ravines,' Edmund Morris wrote in his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography 'The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt.' "

"Of course it's a lot tougher hunting elk on foot than driving around road-hunting. And if you're lucky and skillful enough to take one, it requires carrying it back a mile or more to camp on your back, one quarter at a time. But as those who've spent their time chasing elk know, there's not much about it that's easy. You 'earn your elk' through hard work, good preparation and attention to treating any animal you may take with the respect it deserves."

Thank you,
Kathryn QannaYahu
406-579-7748