I was recently asked to write an essay for this web site as a follow-up to an article I published in the Boone & Crockett Club’s magazine, Fair Chase, a few months ago. That article was about ethics and big game hunting. (See I’ve Walked The Line…Have You?, December, 2007) I came to the conclusion that many hunters were slowly making the transition from hunter to shooter, relying less on ability and practiced skills and more on laser range finders, corn feeders and other gimmicks. Likewise, I expressed my concern that we were in the process of domesticating our wild deer by feeding them, fencing them in, and in some states, breeding and even cloning them.

I tried not to take any sides, except for the most egregious tactics, since most hunters like to use some advantages over game (like camouflage clothing, duck calls and decoys for waterfowl hunters). Other tactics are cultural (like the use of hounds to drive deer to the hunter) – that is, very acceptable in some regions and totally unacceptable in others. Thus, unlike illegal behavior, it’s often hard to draw the line of where unethical behavior begins.

When I was asked to comment on ethics in waterfowl hunting, I remembered the days when I lived in south Texas, working for the Kleberg Wildlife Research Institute, and the pintail limit was 10 per day (obviously a LONG time ago). I often wondered if the many birds we took in those days contributed to the decline in waterfowl numbers later. The birds we took and the methods we used were legal – but were they ethical? Should we have been paying more attention to waterfowl numbers earlier? Were we greedy?

I also recalled the work done by Dr. Rick Kaminski and his student, now Dr. Brian Gray at Mississippi State University when I was head of the Wildlife and Fisheries Department there. They did an extensive survey of waterfowl hunters in the Mississippi Flyway, and found that 26 percent of duck-stamp purchasers admitted to violations that year, and 35 percent had violated over the past three years. Bag limits and shooting hours were the most common violations, followed by shooting over bait. The most disturbing thing to me about the study was that most violators broke the law intentionally. Most accidental violators, as you might expect, had shooting hour violations. Intentional violators exceeded bag limits and/or shot over bait. These were not necessarily violators who were caught. The survey was anonymous, but Kaminski and Gray also sent the survey to known violators, to see if they’d own up to having been caught – and they usually did.

My point is – why would people break a game law intentionally? Sure, I may average a couple of miles per hour over the speed limit, and even roll a stop sign now and then – but break a game law - on purpose? Folks, we’ve got to do better!

The 2006 National Survey of Fishing, Hunting and Wildlife - Associated Recreation, put out by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, indicates a four percent drop or 500,000 hunters nationwide from 2001 to 2006. That’s not a lot nationwide, but hunters are becoming a smaller percentage of the population. Half of the people in the U.S. are women, and their participation in hunting is small (about 1% of women hunt). The ethnic makeup of America is changing, and hunting participation by blacks, Hispanics and Asians is also small. If we wish to continue having the opportunity to hunt, and to conserve wildlife (yes, hunters still pay the way for most wildlife conservation), we need to clean up our act both legally and ethically to retain the public’s support.

In the Kaminski-Gray study 65 percent of waterfowl hunters said they had not violated the law, and that’s the good news. But the authors didn’t ask about ethical violations, like trespassing, sky busting, or using electronic decoys that “flap” their wings, dive, or swim in circles. I realize that challenging the ethics of electronic decoys may offend some, but let’s try to remember why we go hunting in the first place.

The Portuguese philosopher Jose Ortega Y Gasset became fairly famous for saying, “One does not go hunting to kill, one kills to have been hunting.” He meant the hunt is not the same as the kill. Survey after survey has shown that people hunt primarily to be with family and friends, to be outdoors with nature, to pass on a heritage to their children, and then to take some game if possible. Ortega Y Gasset said that hunting is a test of a hunter’s senses, experience, and skills against those of a wild animal. The greater the challenge, the greater the satisfaction of the hunt. Also, I think hunting reminds us of who we once were as a species, as we now sit behind our computers or TVs, gaining weight and getting soft.

As Aldo Leopold, in his book, the Sand County Almanac, said, “A peculiar virtue in wildlife ethics is that the hunter obviously has no gallery to applaud or disapprove of his conduct. Whatever his acts, they are dictated by his own conscious, rather than a mob of onlookers. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of this fact.”

Where do electronic decoys fit into challenging ourselves as hunters? Where does shooting over the limit fit into being with nature and supporting conservation? Where does purposefully baiting or trespassing fit into passing on a hunting heritage to our children? Do we feel more satisfied if we come home with a limit of ducks, knowing that we used these practices? As I’ve pointed out in many talks, if we don’t draw the lines for ourselves, the public will eventually do it for us.