Wildlife Conservationists Need to Study History
Some Thoughts on the Conservation of Wildlife
by J.Y. Jones, MD
While we should all certainly feel a degree of remorse about the way many, if not most, Native Americans were treated after European contact, the common theme of the “noble savage” concept of conservation is overblown. In many ways, their methods of hunting were far inferior to the world’s premier wildlife management system, known as the North American Model.
Who Pays for Wildlife Conservation
Under this system, the lion’s share of funds for conservation has, until very recently, been paid by the ultimate user of wildlife, the sport hunter, although the number and percentage of active hunters continues a long decline. Ecotourism, bird watching, and other non-consumptive use of wildlife account for an increasing share when compared to the amount spent by hunters, though there is a distinct resistance from such people to putting a tax on their outdoor gear (similar to what hunters and fishermen pay) to contribute more to conservation than simply enjoying the view.
This trend reflects an urban trend and technological distractions more than loss of the desire for a wilderness or outdoor experience, plus myriad boys (as well as quite a few girls) have no fathers to mentor them in the fairly complex rules of ethical hunting.
Why Controlled Hunting Works
For a balanced view of who pays for what, there is a pretty good article in Mountain Journal that captures this well and without deep-seated prejudice1. For over a century market hunting, which led to the most drastic declines in wildlife numbers, has been banned. Most wild populations, even fish, can be overharvested to the point approaching (or passing) extinction, but no species has ever been endangered by controlled sport hunting or fishing. Numerous examples of this can be cited, from passenger pigeons to plains bison.
A case in point is the tule elk of California, which market hunters fed to the gold rush miners and others from about 1849-1851. There were many thousands of these animals in the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys in 1849, but just a very few years later there were only five of this unique subspecies left, according to one authority, while another authority cites twenty-eight.
With eradication looming, a benevolent rancher named Henry Miller captured and cared for the remaining animals on his ranch. From that stock, the herd is now thriving again, numbering about 5,700 animals distributed in discrete areas across their former range. When tule elk numbers reached a level where some needed removal, sport hunting in recent decades has played a major role in this remarkable turn of events.
Permits to take one of these creatures are highly coveted, and the hunter must either draw a tag to hunt on State or Federal land, or book with a private ranch that has them ranging freely on their property. This keeps the older, mature animals from overgrazing their habitat after most of their breeding potential has been spent, because they are removed. The rancher who shares his grazing with elk on his property gets a limited number of permits to use or distribute. These sell at a five-figure price, thus repaying him for allowing the animals to roam on his ranch to some detriment to his other livestock.
How Does Hunting Lead to Abundance?
This story is by no means unique, as many species and subspecies have recovered with the backing of hunters and their organizations. The eastern elk subspecies was eradicated from the Appalachian Mountains completely by 1890, according to the Kentucky Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS). There is now a carefully controlled hunt for Rocky Mountain elk in Kentucky, with the number of elk now around 10,000.
Certainly there was such an abundance of North American wildlife before European contact that most native excesses, such as stampeding a herd of bison over a cliff, were overall insignificant. Additionally, their bow-and-arrow hunting techniques were insufficient to eradicate any species
Why Radical “Animal Rights” Laws Hurt Wildlife Conservation
Today, the biggest threat to good stewardship of wildlife and other natural resources by outdoorsmen of all stripes, as well as among native groups in North America, is a diverse cloud of self-serving and misunderstanding animal rights groups, composed mainly of people who seldom, and perhaps never, spend a night outdoors. Such groups are doubly effective at thwarting real conservation, as they enjoy so much complicity from a Federal bureaucracy, which generally sympathizes with such groups. This wicked partnership works tirelessly to make conservation plans and proposals, including those of many Native American tribes and people groups, of little account. Radical animal rights ideas, plans, and shameless interference with genuine conservation conflict severely with true animal stewardship of all kinds.
In another example, my first book was about the monumental effort to get legally harvested polar bear trophies from Canada imported into the USA. The Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 (MMPA) specifically prohibited import of any part of a marine mammal into the USA. The polar bear survives quite well on land and does so every summer in most locales, but was nevertheless classified as a marine mammal for purposes of this law. Most lucrative sport hunts for polar bears stopped, both in Canada and Alaska, a big blow to the economy of any small Arctic village.
Bad Policy Has Consequences: The Case of Polar Bears
This has led to an epidemic among Arctic natives of dependence on welfare, handouts, free government medical care, and unfortunately drug and alcohol abuse in some places. Initiative and drive come natural to these people, but such dependency is deadly and can rob them of their best traits. These natives have a lot of land for wildlife, but none of it would grow crops.
With much effort by sportsmen’s groups, this privilege regarding import of legally harvested Canadian polar bears was reinstated by the MMPA Amendments of 1994. Certain Native Americans (mainly the Inupiat) remain the only ones who can hunt Alaska’s polar bears, but the only way they can profit is by making trinkets of the hair and skin—they are prohibited from even selling a whole skin.
Corel Pro Photos
Still, after passage of the law in 1994, no action was taken by the USFWS by 1997, the delay being blamed on “issuing rules,” a euphemism for slowdown and blockade of laws not favored by mostly liberal bureaucratic department heads. Rules are too often concrete obstacles to the intent of Congress, and because of the long delay in the process, then-chairman of the House Resources Committee (the late Don Young of Alaska, a true friend of conservation) called for hearings that led to a second law change mandating that about 100 already harvested polar bear trophies awaiting import from Canada be “grandfathered” in, and immediately importable. He also insisted (as did members of both parties) that the pertinent rules be issued expeditiously to conform to the law.
I had to testify at the Resources Committee hearing on this delay situation. The flow of legal polar bear trophies, after two laws passed by Congress, began soon thereafter, but lasted only a very few years. Each hunter applying for an import permit had to include a check for $1000 for “polar bear conservation in Canada and Russia.” Some 450 hunters paid this assessment, which a Canadian polar bear biologist I had befriended confirmed was a welcome addition to their unending efforts to find funding. After I had lost most of my contacts in Congress, USFWS decreed that the polar bear import process would end.
Enter Global Warming Activism
The reason cited to halt import was that the polar bear was threatened by global warming! The threatened designation put an additional permit (not obtainable in any case) between the hunter and importation, effectively halting all import. This occurred despite the fact that no global warming can be demonstrated by worldwide temperatures, thus now the new talking point is “climate change.”
The move by USFWS was a blatant attempt to reinstate the illogical ban (for Americans, at least, who most frequently hunted there) on sport hunting for polar bears in the Arctic. If indeed global warming were a factor, it would actually be a bonanza for the polar bear, expanding its range by tens of thousands of square miles, perhaps even to the Pole. The farthest north polar bears generally range now is approximately the latitude of Grise Fiord on Ellesmere Island, Nunavut. North of the barren Arctic archipelago, the bears encounter ice too thick and temperatures too cold for seals to make and maintain the essential breathing holes where bears await a seal meal. It’s an amazing thing, but a polar bear weighing 600-1000 pounds can capture and extract a fighting 300-pound seal out of one of those holes in the ice. But this opportunity never develops if the ice is extremely thick.
A Sensible Model for World Wildlife Conservation
The polar bear management system in Canada, at least at the time I was heavily involved with the effort in Congress, was a model for the entire world. Polar bear numbers in Canada at the present time are at record levels in many zones of the Arctic, and seem to be increasing even now.2
At least two full-time polar bear biologists were employed by Canada, and as mentioned one became a good friend with whom I stayed on my fairly frequent trips to or through Yellowknife and Iqaluit. I was invited to come up at one point to help dart polar bears for collaring with my friend, working from helicopters on the Gulf of Boothia population. While doing my duty with friendly Congressmen such the late J. Roy Rowland and the late Charlie Norwood, between trips to Washington I would travel to another remote Arctic village, almost all in Canada, but to a couple in Alaska as well. I believe I visited more than a dozen villages in what is now Nunavut (back then Nunavut was in the planning stage, and the entire area was known as the Northwest Territories of Canada). From such experiences I gained a much deeper insight into the plight of these Native Americans, and a better working knowledge of conservation of Arctic wildlife.
Local People Have a Vested Interest in Conservation
The marine mammal resources of the Canadian Arctic are considered the property of the native peoples (Inuit and Inuvialuit) there. By careful count and analysis, using satellite collars, visual counts, follow-up evaluation of all harvested bears, native accounts of numbers of bears sighted, plus other factors, each village is assigned an appropriate number of polar bears they may harvest. It must be rare for a village to refuse to cooperate, since I have never heard of any village declining to abide by the quota they are given.
These natives are generally true conservationists, although not all villages elect to participate in sport hunting of polar bears, even though they have a quota. This is despite the fact that sport hunting is more lucrative and the best conservation. Indeed it is, because seeking and removing older male bears reduces significantly an ever-present danger to both females and especially cubs; sport hunting also provides a robust income stream for the village. Most of the time such a village that spurns a sport hunt has a very small quota, so pressure is strong to give the permits to locals on a draw or rotating basis.
Where enough permits are available, it is worth the considerable effort to feed and maintain a trained team of sled dogs, which are otherwise pretty useless since the advent of snowmobiles. Most sled dogs are fed well on a diet of plentiful fish, usually large freshwater trout caught by the dog owner. Dogsled transportation by sport hunters is mandated, at least in part, to keep the sled dog tradition alive in Canada’s Arctic. It also makes the hunt more challenging and enjoyable to the visiting hunter, and gives the participating guides a year-round occupation (counting fishing to feed their dogs). Arctic natives not involved in a sport hunt will occasionally take a big male bear if they spot one, but they more frequently encounter a mother with cubs, and the cubs are fair game to them, since they are superiorly tender as edible meat.
Evolution and Polar Bears
On the subject of polar bear evolution, much continues to come out in the scientific literature, including the skull of a polar bear with DNA fragments aged at 150,000 Darwin years3. This article is part of the latest rage, whereby many scientists who are blind to the real story now believe the polar bear came first, and from it came the barren ground grizzly.
Regardless of such speculation, I have seen a barren ground grizzly, dark brown in color, patiently waiting beside a seal breathing hole on the ice. How great is the advantage of a white bear in this situation? That same grizzly bear was seen a few days later on land digging for Arctic ground squirrels. Obviously he hadn’t been very successful in his seal hunt, but had he been light in color his efforts might well have paid off.
I’m no polar bear scientist, but a more likely scenario is that lighter grizzly bears were more successful on the ice than darker bears, and this distinction led to today’s polar bears. This is far from evolution, since they are basically still subspecies of the same species. The two species (or more likely subspecies) share an incredible amount of genetic information and hybridize easily. It’s been considered and may someday come to pass, if the evolution question is put to rest, to change the polar bear’s scientific species designation, Ursus maritimus, to Ursus arctos maritimus, a subspecies of the common grizzly bear.
Unintended Consequences of Bad Policy
Until sanity and good conservation measures are implemented, it is likely that many conservation scenarios will face a continuing battle to succeed. In their place will come a destructive and counterproductive “green agenda” enforced by its partners in the radical animal rights movement (not to mention those within the government).
For example, Kenya allowed the preservationists to lead them into outlawing safari hunting in 1964, convincing the government that tourist revenue would surpass safari hunting revenue. This cost all outfitters and their local guides, skinners, cooks, and many other team members their livelihood. Perhaps more tragically, the funds and the incentive to protect animals has been lost. Safari operators had always patrolled their concessions against poachers at great personal cost as well as significant peril, and with very limited government help. When there were no safari operators and no local workers, as well as no hunters, the animals were mostly left to fend for themselves. As a result of rampant poaching and the bush meat trade, there are hardly any animals left in Kenya today outside the national parks, where government patrols struggle to keep poachers at bay on limited ecotourism dollars. The country has toyed with the idea of resuming sport hunting, but the situation now is almost irreversible, since there would be nothing for prospective hunters to hunt!
There are dozens, if not hundreds, of similar examples, where U.S. law serves as a conservation disincentive, rather than protecting the subject animal or animals. What is needed is the same thing academia, science, and the government lack as regards biological and cosmic evolution: A complete revision of mindset for the test tube as well as the telescope. Follow the science, they say—but when you do, it leads AWAY from unguided evolution through mysterious “stuff happens” laws and random chance, and points directly to intelligent design.
In the case of wildlife stewardship, it’s equally clear what should prevail: Do what’s best for the local people, and in most cases that will give the animals on which they depend the best chance of staying off the endangered species list.
References
- https://mountainjournal.org/all-americans-are-paying-for-wildlife-conservation-not-just-hunters-and-anglers; Tom Sadler, Tom Wilkinson, March 8, 2021.
- https://polarbearscience.com/2020/11/17/good-news-gulf-of-boothia-and-mclintock-channel-polar-bear-survey-results/
- https://news.ucsc.edu/2022/06/polar-bear-bruno.html#:~:text=After%20diverging%20from%20brown%20bears,America%2C%20Europe%2C%20and%20Asia.
J.Y. Jones MD has been an eye physician and surgeon for five decades. He is a decorated Vietnam veteran, speaks Spanish, and has volunteered in 28 overseas eye-surgery mission trips. He has received numerous awards for writing and photography, and is a frequent speaker at sportsmen’s events, where he particularly enjoys sharing his Christian testimony. J. Y. and his wife Linda have been married since 1964.
Dr. Jones is an avid hunter who has taken all North American big game species using the same Remington .30-06 rifle, resulting in the book One Man, One Rifle, One Land (Safari Press, 2001); Dr. Jones helped Safari Press produce the Ask the Guides series, their most successful North American hunting books. He has written 14 books and some 300 short articles for various periodicals. For more articles by Dr Jones, visit his Author Profile page.