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While the debate over hunting often revolves around animal welfare, hunters have long been at the forefront of conservation and preserving traditional Indigenous foodways.
When I was in sixth grade, my friend Robert told me one day how excited he was for the weekend. Robert lived in suburban Rhode Island with his mother, but spent time with his dad in the rural western portion of the state. That weekend, they were going on his second-ever hunting trip.
He proceeded to tell me about his first hunt — getting up early with his father and his buddies, setting up before dawn in his father’s favorite spot, achieving a kill. Then he got to the kicker: “When we started to harvest the deer meat, my father cut out the heart, and I ate it raw. It’s a tradition with your first buck.”
He was beaming. I was stunned.
Robert and I eventually fell out of contact, but his story colored my view of hunters’ relationship to the natural world. As I began getting involved in environmental causes, though, I started hearing a frequent refrain: there are no bigger advocates for wildlife than hunters.
This statement felt contradictory to what I remembered from Robert — but I heard it often enough I began taking it as fact. But is it? How do hunters contribute to conservation efforts? And how have they shaped the evolution of our hunting laws?
Early Hunting in the U.S.
Before British colonists arrived in what would be called “America,” they had been subject to a myriad of laws meant to preserve hunting for the highest classes. One 1541 statute, for example, limited the use of handguns to individuals whose worth exceeded 100 pounds. Others restricted weaponry or game options to a person’s skill level, since hunting was considered as much an art as a method of providing food.
In the New World, hunting was necessary for food consumption, trade, and resources. Plymouth Colony (located on the eastern shore of today’s Massachusetts) passed a provision stating that “hunting and fishing were free to all members of the colony.” Other settlements followed suit, and the hunting industry exploded, propelled by the seemingly limitless creatures roaming the vast North American wilderness.
The rapid expansion of population and money in cities along the east coast provided strong demand for wild game meat, and by the mid-1800s, professional market hunters (those who hunt professionally for trade and profit) were decimating animal populations in order to serve the wealthy’s desire for meat and furs.
As the country expanded westward, hunting also became a tool for subjugation. Indigenous nations across the Great Plains, including the Sioux, Cheyenne, Blackfoot, and Pawnee, had lived alongside the American bison (commonly referred to as buffalo) for thousands of years, relying on them for food and shelter, and honoring them as close relations. Encouraged by the U.S. government and fueled by beliefs in Manifest Destiny, white settlers slaughtered millions of buffalo to drive tribes off their ancestral lands and into reservations. The Transcontinental Railroad went so far as to advertise “hunting by rail” — when the train came across herds on its westward journey, men (with increasingly powerful firearms) could clamber onto the roof and shoot at will.
Before colonization, there were an estimated 30–60 million bison roaming the Great Plains. By 1884, there were 325 left in the wild.
North American Model of Conservation
Over time, though, a new group emerged, composed primarily of well-educated individuals who partook in hunting not as a money-making endeavor, but as a way to grow closer to the environment and the animals they pursued.
Biologist, conservationist, and avid hunter Shane Mahoney describes this period in the documentary Opportunity for All: “This idea of a class of hunter who not just killed for the pot, and certainly did not kill for commercial reasons, began to resonate in the American psyche. At the same time [there] was rising — particularly in post-Civil War America — a group of people … who felt that part of what was to become their citizenship was to make sure that the wildlife abundance of America was not lost.”
Their ranks included the founding fathers of the conservation movement: George Bird Grinnell (creator of the Audubon Society), Gifford Pinchot (first head of the United States Forest Service), and Theodore Roosevelt (whose experiences as a cattle rancher in the Dakota Territories led him to establish the Boone and Crockett Club, dedicated to the conservation of large game animals and their habitats).
Influenced in part by George Perkins Marsh’s 1864 book Man and Nature, which documented the effects of human society on the environment, these three avid hunters led the charge to reframe society’s vision of the natural world from a boundless landscape to a shared resource that must be protected for future generations. By the turn of the century, journals like The American Sportsman and Field and Stream had come into circulation, and sporting clubs were founded nationwide, dedicated to protecting particular game populations, as well as preserving the broader environments where those species (and many others) lived.
By the time Roosevelt was elected President in 1901, these groups had already begun lobbying Congress to pass laws promoting conservation. The Lacey Act (passed in 1900) forbade the trade of wildlife that has been illegally taken, possessed, transported, or sold, while the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 designated wildlife as an international resource. In 1934, the Duck Stamp (conservation revenue stamps issued by the federal government, available to be purchased by anyone, but mandatory for anyone wishing to hunt waterfowl) began raising money to preserve wetland habitats, while the Pittman-Robertson Act (1937) and Dingell-Johnson Act (1950) placed additional taxes on firearms and fishing equipment, with moneys going towards protecting wildlife.
Taken together, these laws and ideals form the basis of what Shane Mahoney and biologist Valerius Geist call the North American Model of Conservation — a unique set of guidelines which were first articulated in 2001, but have underlain conservation policies in the United States and Canada for the past century:
- Wildlife resources are a public trust
- Markets for game animals and nongame (not hunted) birds are eliminated
- Allocation of wildlife is by democratic law (not land ownership or market principles)
- Wildlife can only be killed for a legitimate purpose
- Wildlife is considered an international resource (not defined by state or national borders)
- Science is the proper tool for making wildlife management decisions
- Democracy of hunting is the standard
The Impact of Hunting Today
Curious to see how these philosophies have affected wildlife where I live — a rural state where hunting is commonplace — I reached out to Mick Klemesrud of the Iowa Department of Natural Resources (DNR), the department responsible for overseeing the activity statewide, and for enforcing federal laws.
“By 1900, Canada geese were gone not only from Iowa, but from the Midwest,” Klemesrud told me via email. “Iowa began a goose restoration program in 1964 and has successfully restored geese to their historical nesting range. The DNR conducts an annual survey that estimates Iowa’s resident Canada goose population at nearly 100,000.”
Hunters are nothing short of essential to this success, Klemesrud explains. “No tax dollars from the Iowa general fund go to support conservation — hunting, fishing, and trapping license sales is the primary funding source for conservation in Iowa.”
This is far from the only example of a rebounding animal population, Klemesrud says. Wild turkeys, river otters, trumpeter swans, peregrine falcons, and prairie chickens — among others — have all seen their numbers resurrected, thanks to the work of the DNR (and the funding that hunters provide). What’s more, money from hunting license sales is also used to fund efforts like expanding Iowa’s prairies, and research projects into issues like the white nose syndrome currently wreaking havoc on the state’s bat community.
Dr. Christopher DePerno, a Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Biology professor at North Carolina State University, agrees that hunters have an important impact on conservation. “Hunters do more to help wildlife than any other group in America,” he told me in a Zoom conversation. “They provide financial support for the state wildlife agencies, and they play an important role in wildlife management activities.”
For much of the hunting community, this commitment extends beyond simply purchasing licenses and paying excess taxes. “Hunters care about the resources,” DePerno says. “They join hunting organizations and go to banquets, volunteer their time and money.”
Still, a conservation model that relies on hunting has its shortcomings.
“Our license sales and participation has been on a long decline — a slow downward trajectory,” explains Klemesrud. With it, the money governments can use to protect land has also declined. One 2017 study noted that if waterfowl hunting continues to fall at its current rate, it would result in a reduction of U.S. wetland restoration of anywhere from 10.8 to 53.7 square miles (28-139 km2) per year.
It’s also difficult to account for the effects of open hunting on animal behavior, even if population sizes are monitored. Researchers have found evidence that the presence of hunting pressure can change the movement patterns of certain species, like the American black bear and white-tailed deer, as they move more often and expand their traditional ranges to avoid contact with hunters.
There may be evolutionary effects as well. For example, a much-discussed 2003 study of bighorn rams on Ram Mountain in Alberta, Canada, found that due to trophy hunting (“the paying of a high fee to hunt an animal with specific ‘trophy’ characteristics,” per the International Union for Conservation of Nature), the “body weight and horn size [of the rams] have declined significantly over time” as a consequence of the larger specimens being killed before they could achieve high reproductive success.
Hunting advocates maintain that the percentage of hunters exclusively seeking trophies is relatively small in the U.S., and there’s been much scientific discussion over how applicable the findings of the 2003 study are to large, genetically-diverse animal populations. Critics say those rebuttals promote “anthropocentrism,” or the idea that humans are central in the world, and nature exists for human use (hence the use of terms like “resources” for wildlife or “harvesting” for killing).
A Different Perspective
Nakai Clearwater Northup, a member of the Mashantucket Pequot and Narragansett tribes and Head of Education at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum in Connecticut, views the hunting debate differently — through the lens of his peoples’ long history and culture.
“Food is medicine,” he told me via Zoom. “Eating those foods that our families have eaten for generations — those traditional meals — is really important to who we are as people.”
For Northup, hunting is a vital part of achieving food sovereignty — a growing movement around the world, which strives for a future in which indigenous communities can address food security and health issues through their own means. “If you look at the Plains, for example, [the colonizers] eradicated bison,” he explains. “The United States government’s alternative was a box of food they’d give tribal communities each month, filled with flour, milk, and cheese. Because of that, indigenous people are leaders in high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease … Our bodies aren’t meant to process those foods.”
Looking to keep traditional hunting knowledge alive, Northup has started Rez Life Outdoors, which promotes indigenous perspectives on hunting, fishing, cooking, and land stewardship through information dissemination and educational programming. He’s also working on a wild game cookbook, which he hopes to publish in 2025.
“These food ways reconnect us to our ancestors, reconnect us to the land. We all have an expiration date. We’re all going to go back to the land — become the land — one day. So, it’s a true form of respect, the way we go about hunting.”
That respect includes leaving an offering of tobacco after every life they take — whether it's a deer, blueberries, or cutting down a tree to harvest bark — “to say thank you for allowing us to use its life to maintain ours.” Members of his tribe also ensure that they use the entirety of the animal, from the meat to the bones (to make broth), all the way to the toes (to make rattles).
Something clicked for me as I spoke to Northup, and I found my mind drifting back to that conversation with Robert back in elementary school. Yes, it was very different from what Northup was describing. And, sure, it was quite likely that Robert was simply trying to get a rise out of me by telling me about his first kill, and eating the heart. But maybe there was something deeper he was trying to get at — about his connection with his father, with the land, with the traditions he was taking part in … and about his respect for the buck, and the honor of being sustained by the deer’s life.
