Are We There Yet?

The issue of hunter ethics has attended the American hunting culture since recreational or sporting hunters drew a distinction between themselves and those slaughtering America's wildlife for commercial and subsistence purposes. The Boone and Crockett Club, founded by Theodore Roosevelt and associates in 1887, carries a fair chase standard in its bylaws that defines fair chase as "the ethical, sportsmanlike and lawful pursuit and taking of any free-ranging wild game animal in a manner that does not give the hunter an improper or unfair advantage over such animals."

Although not much more needs to be said, other thoughtful people have taken up the subject, perhaps none more succinctly than Paul Quinnett in his book, Pavlov's Trout: "...[E]thics is what you do in the dark, before the game warden shows up."

The dean of American conservation thought, Aldo Leopold, gave us two points to ponder. The first related to our individual behavior, the second focused on the big picture.

"A peculiar virtue in wildlife ethics is that the hunter ordinarily has no gallery to applaud or disapprove of his conduct. Whatever his acts, they are dictated by his own conscience, rather than a mob of onlookers."

Professor Leopold also wrote: "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of a biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise."

Leopold set the bar, so to speak, with these challenges: caring for the land and watching our individual behavior. Today's world is far removed from Leopold's, and it's worth taking stock of how we measure up to these and other challenges.

The Land Ethic

When America was new, a French nobleman, Alexis d' Tocqueville, visited our budding nation in the early 1800s and wrote a book, Democracy in America. He saw little evidence of a land ethic, writing:

"In Europe people talk a great deal of the wilds of America, but the Americans themselves never think about them; they are insensible to the wonders of inanimate nature. Their eyes are fired with another sight; they march across these wilds, clearing swamps, turning the courses of rivers...."

In the half-century that followed, the commercial and subsistence slaughter of wildlife unleashed the most severe decimation of animal populations in human history. Theodore Roosevelt went west to ranch and hunt in the 1880s and left us a graphic description of what had just happened to our biotic communities. Writing in Hunting Trips of a Ranchman and Wilderness Hunter, TR set down the following:

"No sight is more common on the plains than that of a bleached buffalo skull; and their countless numbers attest the abundance of the animal at a time not so very long past. On those portions where the herds made their last stand, the carcasses, dried in the clear, high air, or the mouldering skeletons, abound."

Roosevelt wrote of a rancher who'd traveled 1,000 miles across northern Montana and told him that during the entire trip "he was never out of sight of a dead buffalo, and never in sight of a live one."

Roosevelt's experience in the West and his passion for the hunt galvanized a determination that sport hunting and the biotic community necessary for hunting would not vanish, and when he became president he offered an observation not too different from that of d' Tocqueville.

"The idea that our natural resources were inexhaustible still [persisted], and there was as yet no real knowledge of their extent and condition. The relation of the conservation of natural resources to the problems of National welfare and National efficiency had not yet dawned on the public mind."

In 1903, TR declared Pelican Island a refuge, launching the National Wildlife Refuge System. He added 150 million acres to the nation's forests, created 51 bird preserves, designated 18 national monuments, four game preserves and five national parks. It added up to 9.9 percent of America--the size of Kentucky, New York and Texas. Then he called seven national conferences on conservation; help was on the way for America's ravaged wild lands.