By the Masked Biologist
Special to the Star Journal
The founding fathers traveled to the colonies primarily from Europe, especially England. At that time, British wildlife was considered the property of the landowner, and land ownership was limited to gentry, nobility, and monarchs. Wildlife in the colonies was likely treated as an endless commodity, along with timber and other natural resources. When the colonies became the United States of America, wildlife was not considered in the development of the constitution or its amendments.
As the boundary of the nation expanded westward, the need to explore new country was coupled with the opportunity to learn about this continent’s plants and animals. The Lewis and Clark expedition left from St. Louis in 1803, headed west using rivers and waterways in an attempt to find a trade route to the Pacific coast. They returned in 1806, successful in their mission. They hauled journals, sketches, live animals and animal skins and mounts halfway across the continent to meet the expedition’s mandates placed by President Jefferson. This was an era of exploration and manifest destiny—man was conquering the wilderness and discovering what wildlife inhabited it for his use.
This nation’s wildlife was exploited throughout the 1800s. Buffalo were slaughtered, skinned, and left to rot. Migratory birds, such as ducks and passenger pigeons, were shot in large masses and shipped by the barrelful on rail back to the east coast to feed people and hogs. Animals we now refer to as big game, such as wild turkey and deer, were treated as the property of the landowner, and often squandered. Any animal that was thought to have even a hint of a negative impact on humans or livestock were shot for a government bounty, including wolves, bobcats, and coyotes.
At the same time, a kind of upper class had developed, and many had a desire to make hunting a sport and treat animals with care and restraint. A Supreme Court decision on a case in 1842 became a foundation for the Public Trust Doctrine, which stated that this country’s wildlife resources are owned by no one, they are to be held in trust by government for present and future generations. Canadian officials saw this wildlife conservation ethic develop, and the ensuing treaties and cooperative efforts gave birth to the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation.
The North American Model considered wildlife an international resource and eliminated markets for game, calling for the allocation of wildlife by law (such as licenses, closed seasons and legal forms of take). It further stated that wildlife is a public trust resource, and should only be killed for a legitimate purpose. For the first time, biological science is called to task when the model stated that science is the proper tool to carry out wildlife policy. Over decades, the model was further refined and put into practice. President Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency, 100 years after the Lewis and Clark expedition, was when significant wildlife policy implementation began.
Decades later, during Franklin Roosevelt’s administration, the 1937 Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Act (or Pittman-Robertson Act) was passed. In an era where the country was struggling mid-recovery from the Great Depression, the Aid in Restoration Act was a self-imposed federal tax on sportsmen who purchased hunting equipment. Wisconsin has received almost $200 million from this act for wildlife habitat development, land acquisition, wildlife health, research, hunter education, restoration of wild turkey, fisher, gray wolf and trumpeter swans. The North American Model of Wildlife Conservation has been heralded as the world’s most successful policy and law system developed to benefit wildlife and their habitats, with an emphasis on sound science—and it has withstood the test of time.
The Masked Biologist earned a Bachelor of Science degree from a university with a highly regarded wildlife biology program. His work in natural resource agencies across the country provided opportunities to gain experience with a variety of common and rare fish, plant and wildlife species. Follow The Masked Biologist on Facebook. Email questions to MaskedBiologist@charter.net
Source: Test of time: How today’s wildlife conservation efforts began and survived | Star Journal
Comments
While the NAM diminished the wholesale unregulated salughter that supported excessive immigration and mining in the 1800s, it inherently ignores the arc of history.
Now, the public prefers that wildlife remain available for nonconsumptive use. Places like Yellowstone National Park gain visitors almost entirely due to the unharassed complete natural wildlife community.
The same occurred in Denali, even though Alaska persisted in allowinng killing of wolves stepping outside its boundaries. When that occurred the reduced opportunities for wolf viewing caused visitation to drop significantly, reducing the tourism income of nearby human communities.
Bird watching, a massive pastime and industry also pours far more money into areas where migratory and diverse resident birds live and visit, than does sporty-killing.
As one trained in biology and behavior beyond the level of the Masked Biologist, also from birth intimately living with and observing and recording the behaviors of animals from fish to bison, including the four larger temperate zone predators of North America, I can state that the lethal activity of humans professing NAMMWM has utterly ruined that viewing capacity, turning every animal from Herons to Vultures, to Wolves, Coyotes, all species of ungulates to become so shockingly avoidant since at least the 1920s, that sport hunting should be completely banned for this reason alone.
Further, the Model’s tenet that Wildlife can only be killed for legitiimate purpose has allowed the extinction of wolf subspecies across the USA, leading to the present excess whitetail deer population dispersal and density causing the emergence and increase of dangerous ungulate disease, now spreading into the Rockies states. Those diseases are easily made available online these days and it’s not necessary to elaborate.
Moreover, even though the tick-borne diseases, also exploding in the USA, in spite of being significantly vectored by rodent populations (more evidence that the NAM is so highly flawed that it must be vacated as policy: foxes, suppressed by coyotes, are more efficient rodent predators. Where arid country places coyotes into the apex predator position, that species , along with vipers, the hawk and eagle population so diminished by excessive agricultural takeover of western lands, also need a noninvasive nonhunting human focus to be restored), is massivley propagated by the west-dispersing massive whitetail population.
Back east, where whitetails can reach 100 per square mile of wild terrain, an ecologically effective wolf population is necessary.
Since predators like wolves and grizzly bears require large home ranges, NO public killing of either species is ecologically proper. The NAM fails to contain remedy, and instead leaves decisionmaking on killing to political uncertainty.
That political pressure runs consistently against preservation of wildlife and the valuable landscapes that are the only source of clean water and carbon sequestration.
Further, humans sport hunting takes the largest, healthiest, prime reproducers (or, also unlike natural predators, does not focus on the seriously ill, injured, old, and naturally excess young, instead more randomly reducing the naturally selected best) cause directly destructive loss of the best phenotypes and genotypes of the targeted species.
To promote such a destructive and flawed corrupt idea as the North American Model of Wildlife Management, should cause all persons to withdraw support from the promoter.. Insofar as this seems to be so, I have just now decided to cross off any support for any site operator appearing to do so.
Here’s another comment I made in response to a “hunter and wildlife management professional” who trumpeted inaccurate vagaries about the North American Model, this lie that Geist and the various Safari Int/Boone & Crockett, and other ungulate and trophy hunting groups crow.
The issue is one of a public lie promoted for private self-interest group control, paralleling the lies engaged in in the political sphere. This comment is shorter than my enraged splutter here and elsewhere.
We humans overgeneralize. Any management professional will have experienced the massive evidence of poaching, and unlawful interstate transportation of ungulates alone, perpetrated by a great number of arrested licensed hunters.
Those on the ground, will have discovered, as I have, the discarded dead whole deer shot between the eyes by obvious use of vehicle lightbars, the stacks of bags of doe heads, the discarded skins (due to disease like Sarcoptes scabei) of bears, the unregulated shooting-on-sight of coyotes in the arid landscapes where that species performs apex predator duties.
The claim that the [nonhunting] public is apathetic to wildlife, runs counter to the parallel claim that “urban” inhabitants seek to control rural gunners and trappers pastimes through broad-scale advocacy for preservation of predators, nonconsumptive use of public lands, and prevention of importation of endangered species, wherever it is detected in stark contrast to a great proportion of those, preponderantly urban as well, who seek to obtain trophy, local or wide-scale fame, notoriety, or record from Boone & Crockett Club Safari Club International and other hunting groups.
The idea of rattlesnake, coyote, wolf, and other competitive hunting competitions, “derbies”, also gives the lie to hunters-as -conservationists.
The anthropocene argument of “now that we’ve killed off most predator and herd animal populations, we must ourselves kill them to manage the remaining” is so facilely false as to be beneath comment, but a lie unaddressed is a world extinguished.
In south and east-central BC and mid-western Alberta, the excessive development of mineral and fossil fuel extractions , the excessive logging, and consequent roadbuilding, and insufficiently regulated winter travel by snow-machine-borne hunters, caused the near-extinction of woodland mountain caribou. That species, insulated by agility over natural complex forest understory, (like moose, who were and are increasingly excluded by human intrusion and exploitation of their prime riparian/wetland habitat – but that’s another case , leading to the falsehood of Alaskan and past upper Great Lakes and Canadian attribution of wolves-as cause) from wolf predation.
Ungulates herd, and in the past, normally migrate among habitats, both avoiding wolves and preventing densely saturated wolf occupation.
The human factor, especially INCLUDING gun hunters, has fragmented and prevented such ease of escape and passage of caribou (elk have similar tales to tell of the excess mortality imposed by hunters, driving them into ever-smaller habitat, making those more visible when native wolves disperse and settle near their remnant populations.) . So, Geist, et al. and the hunt-promoting organizations (RMEF, RMBS and so many others too numerous to mention by name) have managed to foist wolf management by NAM means, along with Provincial lethal management to fragment and genetically isolate wolves in order to farm formerly wild ungulates for human consumption.
So, hunters DO put money into wildlife, but ONLY into agencies that farm formerly wild ungulates while killing off the very native predators that once gave ungulates health.
Crowd diseases are sweeping ever closer, to the west and north, because of wolf eradication policies including hounding, trapping, and other methods of reducing the ebb and flow of species populations. Wolf eradication is the single main cause of the 60 to 100 whitetail deer per square mile occurring in so many rural counties in the USA.
ALL predators are dependent upon prey, their numbers rising and falling following that of ungulates. Wildlife agencies prevent this moderated tidal norm. Human hunters exist in excess, or there would be no need for game regulation. It has been repeatedly substantiated that when ungulates are allowed to approach functional and connected numbers, that NO predator creates significant additive mortality.
Thus, the correct management policy should be to remove the human hunting pressure, repeatedly so additive of mortality on a population, that it alone requires extreme control, until the predator-prey dynamics of stable populations can be restored. Only THEN can a small additive number of human hunters be allowed to occur.
This is the necessary model to use instead of NAM, because human hunters genetically damage populations, taking the largest, best, fittest, while ALL other sources of mortality, from predators, parasites, and intraspecies competition remove instead the least fit.
Although there are more valid criticisms of the NAM, this one alone should cause the falsehood of that Model to relegate it to an anecdote of history.