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The mystery of The Vanishing Hunter has more pieces than a jigsaw puzzle.
The key to putting it together, experts say, lies deep in hunting’s culture.
Delta Waterfowl’s year-long examination of declining hunter numbers took us to nooks and crannies of the outdoor world we didn’t know existed when our voyage of discovery set sail.
Along the way we interviewed economists, social scientists, journalists, wildlife professionals and conservationists who have compiled, analyzed and published volumes of research into virtually every aspect of outdoor participation.
By journey’s end, the input from this diverse group of experts led us to one, inescapable conclusion: “it’s the culture, stupid”.
Hunting isn’t a video game, a business or the final destination of an ego trip; it’s a culture, the roots of which, as Aldo Leopold wrote, are, “…bred into the very fiber of the race.”
The first step in securing the future of hunting, the research suggests, is reconnecting with those ancient roots.
Efforts to restore North American hunter numbers have been praiseworthy. Numerous hunter groups and wildlife agencies, each focusing a different piece of the puzzle, have tackled hunting’s most perplexing challenge: how to recruit and retain enough participants to sustain a tradition as old as mankind.
Many of these restoration programs, however, have overlooked the basic premise that for those efforts to be successful, a universal recognition and acceptance of hunting’s culture is essential.
The notion of hunting as a culture is nothing new. In his classic 1942 essay, Meditations on Hunting, Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset wrote of hunting, “It alone permits us the greatest luxury of all, the ability to enjoy a vacation from the human condition through an authentic immersion in nature.”
Sociologists say this “authentic immersion in nature” isn’t a byproduct of hunting, but its very essence. The need to embrace that culture was identified in virtually every study we examined, every book we read and every interview we conducted. If economists speak of hunting’s culture in subliminal terms, sociologists scream it from the rooftops.
The waterfowling culture is richer and more diverse than most. What others might consider hardships—crawling out of bed in the middle of the night, wading through boot-sucking mud and breaking ice to set decoys, all with no guarantee of success—define waterfowling’s culture. For those steeped in the tradition, duck camp is its own reward.But the waterfowling culture could be in jeopardy. Participation slumped 27 percent from 2001 to 2006, and while those numbers are likely to waffle from good years to bad, recent data suggest the long-term prognosis is anything but good.
In the first installment of our Vanishing Hunter series, we reported that the demographic trends responsible for the decline in hunter numbers are the same reasons they’re not likely to rebound any time soon—the aging of the baby boom generation, urbanization and the declining proportion of the population of rural males.
A few months later, Responsive Management and the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) released a comprehensive three-year study called The Future of Hunting and the Shooting Sports. The report identified three major trends it says run counter to hunting participation: urbanization, the aging population and the declining proportion of the U.S. population that is white.
Of those influences, urbanization and the aging of the baby-boom generation will be most difficult to overcome. Urbanization, says the RM/NSSF report, dilutes the hunting culture because there are fewer people growing up in hunter-friendly rural areas.
The baby-boom generation stirred up the perfect storm, a never-to-be-repeated demographic anomaly: 80 million boomers grew up at a time when urbanization was less of a problem, access was relatively easy and most game species were abundant.
Hunter numbers soared, and by 1980, the first year the entire generation showed up on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s national survey, 10 million of the country’s record 17 million adult hunters—58 percent—were boomers.
That storm has passed. Aging baby boomers, who still comprise 44 percent of all hunters, are hanging up their guns, the trend towards urbanization has accelerated, access is becoming a major issue and habitat losses threaten the future of duck production.
The goal of today’s recruitment and retention efforts is to maintain sufficient hunter numbers to keep the culture alive, but given these realities, efforts to recruit waterfowl hunters must be tempered by an understanding that the participation levels of the late 1970s and early ‘80s are gone, and not likely to return.
Wanted: Super-Hunters
Waterfowler numbers are contracting at a time when we desperately need more, not less, support for conservation measures, and a louder, more active voice in Washington. There will be fewer of us in the future, and that will put additional demands on those who remain.
Given these demographic realities, the resource needs hunters so engaged they can pick up the slack for those they’ll be asked to replace. Call them “super-hunters”. The waterfowler of tomorrow must be capable of raising the money to fund conservation, defending hunting against its critics, influencing Congress on vital issues and nurturing the next generation of hunters.
Social scientists believe the job of recruiting hunters begins not by teaching them to shoot, but by immersing them in the outdoor culture before they’re old enough to carry a gun.
Building the Foundation
Social-science researchers, wildlife professionals and others who have seriously studied the loss of hunters over the years agree: We can’t resurrect our hunting culture without first laying the proper foundation.
Lay it wrong, they argue, and it will eventually crumble.
“The foundation starts with young kids and introducing them to nature before we introduce them to the gun,” says Dr. Bob Norton, author, former grade-school teacher and retired psychology instructor from the University of Wisconsin-LaCrosse. “Grade school kids are like blank slates with a strong sense of curiosity. If our goal is to develop lifelong hunters who have a strong conservation ethic, their first interaction with the outdoors should come well before they squeeze the trigger. They first have to learn how they fit into the natural world. They have to figure out they’re apart of, not separated from, nature.”
Put another way, if we hope to develop a new generation of super-hunters, they have to be immersed in nature beyond what they learn in school textbooks or see on television. They have it feel it, smell it, play in it and be surrounded by it—early and often.
“Nature opens up a whole new world to kids,” says Norton, whose 2007 book, “The Hunter: Developmental Stages and Ethics,” deconstructs the personal motivations, behavior and ethics of hunters. “If kids learn about nature early on and their role in it, they will better understand how hunting fits into that world.”
In the end, hunting, he says, will have meaning beyond pulling the trigger. “But we have to lay that foundation first,” he says.
Many researchers and wildlife professionals interviewed for this story agree with Norton’s analysis, but they say it won’t be easy to change contemporary culture. They say too many of today’s kids live in a wired universe of video games, television, the internet, ipods and cell phones—a 24/7 virtual society that pays little homage to playing in the woods or exploring a wetland.
Richard Louv, author of the award-winning “Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, says fear plays a central roles in why kids have become increasingly disconnected from the outdoors. He says many of today’s parents are obsessed with “stranger danger” and rarely let their kids roam freely outside without supervision.
He says sensational media coverage often compounds the problem. He also says most contemporary children have only a theoretical attachment to nature, and that they learn more about it on the National Geographic channel than actually experiencing for themselves.“We are raising a generation of kids who have little or no attachment to the natural world, and that’s tragic, because they probably never know the joys of playing in a stream and getting their hands and feet dirty,” Louv says, adding that research strongly suggests that there are human costs to nature alienation, including emotional and physical sickness. “There is also evidence that exposure to nature benefits kids. Kids who spend more time outdoors tend to do better on testing; they do better on science; they have increased self-confidence and tend to play more cooperatively.”
But how do we get children hooked on nature?
Since publishing his book, Louv has helped jump-start a national get-outdoors movement. He’s founder and chairman of the Children & Nature Network (www.childrenandnature.org), whose mission is to “is to give every child in every community a wide range of opportunities to experience nature directly, reconnecting our children with nature’s joys and lessons, its profound physical and mental bounty.”
The Network is also sponsoring Nature Clubs for Families, many of which are forming across the U.S in various forms, Louv says. He said the clubs are ways for families to connect to nature by participating in low-cost activities like hiking, biking, birding, canoeing and fishing.
“What if more and more parents, grandparents and kids around the country band together to create outdoor adventure clubs, family nature networks, family outdoors clubs, or green gyms? What if this approach becomes the norm in every community?”
Louv’s book in part has spurred federal legislation to add funding for nature education and associated outdoor activities. Called the “No Child Left Inside Act of 2008”, the bill would send money to nonprofits and state education departments for outdoor education. The bill is aimed at kids who are hooked on the wired culture.
Norton has his own ideas about introducing kids to nature. He said he’d start by bringing nature education to public schools. “I taught 4th and 6th grade, and I can tell you from personal experience that children are anxious to learn and become part of the outdoor world,” he says. “This is something we need to tap.”
He says nature education and field trips could become a regular part of traditional science coursework. “We could create conservation-minded kids,” he says. “We could bring in game wardens and conservation officials to talk about hunting and the importance of preserving wildlife habitat. The two go hand-in-hand. We do some of that now, but we need to more of it. It should be a regular part of school.”
Instead of trying to reduce barriers to hunting by allowing kids as young as 10 years to hunt with a mentor—a nationwide trend of late—Norton believes hunting-recruitment efforts should focus on nature-based activities first, after which he believes children will “naturally” gravitate to hunting.
“We first have to open their eyes to what nature has to offer,” he says. “We need to pique their interest. Mentored hunts are great, but nowadays they’re being done without the kid having to take hunter safety training. I know I’m going to get heck for saying this, but I’m opposed to that. I think we’re looking for a quick fix, but what we’re really doing is selling out our kids.”
In Norton’s book, he discusses how hunters pass through five “developmental” stages (shooter, limiting out, trophy hunting, method hunting and sportsman). He said if we’re serious about developing lifelong hunters and conservationists, the goal should be for every hunter to advance to the final stage, the sportsman’s stage. “That’s the stage where hunters are simply content to being in the field, where the thrill of the kill becomes less important,” he says. “I think we get there by bringing kids to nature early on, by whetting their imaginations for it. That’s the foundation.”
Norton and other researchers believe that we can’t develop a durable, lasting hunting culture if a hunter’s sole motivation is the kill. Early and repeated introductions to nature, as a precursor to hunter safety training, can ultimately produce more well-rounded children, they say.
“I think if a kid only learns about the kill, I think that kid is eventually going to lose interest in hunting,” says Norton. “We have to do better than that, and I think we will.”
Sixty is the New Forty
No one has to tell 60-year-old duckaholic Al Geisen about hunting’s culture—he’s been immersed in it since he was 5 years old. Now retired, Al remembers like it was yesterday.
“It happened in 1953 when my dad was stationed in Alaska and our family was living with Uncle Dutch in the little town of Bisbee, North Dakota. One afternoon, Uncle Dutch loaded me in his 1948 Oldsmobile and took me duck hunting. When we got there, he told me to stay in the car while he and a friend walked around this big slough.
“They flushed enough ducks to blacken the sky, but they only shot two. When Dutch got back to the car, I ran out to greet him and asked if I could hold one of the greenheads they’d killed. Later, when he was cleaning the birds, he pulled the curly tail from that mallard and gave it to me. That was it for me. I felt something happen inside, and I knew I was hooked.
“I still have that curly tail,” he says, the emotion of the memory showing on his
face. “Fifty-five years, and I still have that curl in my desk drawer. I often wonder how different my life might have been if someone hadn’t cared enough to introduce me to the hunting culture.”
Following a 33-year career with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Al followed his passion for hunting back to North Dakota, where he and his wife Debbie built a home. An active volunteer for Ducks Unlimited and a member of Delta Waterfowl and Pheasants Forever, Al believes seniors could fill the role of super-hunters. “Duck hunting needs people to support conservation organizations and to lobby Congress. Seniors have the time and the passion to do both,” he says.
Another role Geisen thinks seniors could fill is that of mentors for aspiring young hunters. “We spend a lot of time recruiting people to spend money at our events. Instead of just chasing the money, maybe we should be chasing the future.”
Today’s seniors have more time and money and enjoy better health than previous generations of retirees and many are long-time waterfowl hunters. Calling on retirees to serve as mentors not only would benefit the youngsters they’d tutor, but also might bring many of them back to hunting.
With this in mind, agencies and organizations should do everything they can to recruit seniors who’ve given up hunting, and to retain those who are about to quit. “Retention programs for seniors are vital,” said the RM/NSSF report, “(and) should be in the form of volunteer mentors for both hunting and shooting recruitment and retention programs.”
It’s a Man’s World–Not
How can we hope to increase hunter numbers when the pool of most-likely participants—rural white males—has not kept pace with the growth of the overall population? One obvious place to start is by recruiting women, who comprise 52 percent of the population but just nine percent of all hunters.
The number of women who hunt has actually increased slightly since 1991 even as the number of men tumbled quite dramatically. Leonard’s research pointed up another compelling reason to usher females into the hunting fraternity: Hunting participation among children soars in families where both the mother and father hunt. The more active the parents, the more likely the children are to take up hunting.
So how do we convince women to go hunting?
“Just ask,” says Kris Gentzkow, a mother of four who’s been blowing a goose call almost since she was old enough to walk. “I think a lot of women would enjoy hunting if they were invited,” says Kris, who seems to have an innate understanding of the importance of the hunting culture. “Women are stereotyped, but if they were given the opportunity, shown how much fun it is, I think a lot of them would try.”
Kris’ husband hunts big game, but she’s the one who introduced the couple’s children (22-year-old triplets and a 26-year-old) to waterfowl. She started them slowly. “They started coming along when they were about 8 and didn’t carry a gun the first year,” she says. “They carried an unloaded gun the second season, and weren’t allowed to shoot until the last day.
“I wanted them to understand that the greatness of the sport is being outside, seeing birds, watching the sunrise.”
The idea, she says, was to introduce them to the culture first, then to guns and shooting. Kris says the best way to attract women to hunting is for “the husband or another family member to take them out, because that’s who they trust.”
Cautions Kris, who shoots sporting clays on an all-female team: “A lot of women fear guns. It’s a big hurdle for them. Once they start, that fear vanishes quickly. You just have to respect it.”
Research suggests that women who grew up in a hunting culture or whose husbands hunt would be prime candidates for recruitment programs. Delta Waterfowl’s women’s hunts (see Almanac section) and Becoming an Outdoor Woman (BOW) are good exmples.
The Responsive Management/NSSF report, noting the importance of family involvement, recommended, among other things, family hunting licenses.
The Twentysomethings
Numerous studies have demonstrated that an early introduction to hunting produces more avid participants, but Jerry Leonard, an economist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, found a loophole to the start-’em-young rule.
Leonard’s, author of Fishing and Hunting Recruitment and Retention in he U.S. from 1990 to 2005, reports that a surprisingly high 30 percent of first-time hunters were over the age of 21. The reason, he suspects, is that more young people are too busy with college and starting their careers to take up hunting. “We see them coming into hunting late in their 20s,” he says.
Delta Waterfowl sees these findings as an opportunity, and has been conducting “university hunts” that target college-aged hunters. Programs that target women and young adults not only introduce twentysomethings to hunting’s culture, but ultimately their children as well. That’s important, because 92 percent of all youth who hunted the previous year came from a family where someone hunts.
Ethnic Factors
In 2005, the hunting initiation rate for children in non-Hispanic homes was three times higher than in Hispanic homes, and five times higher in white households than non-white. Those demographics prompted RM/NSSF to caution: “Developers of programs targeted at non-whites need to keep in mind than non-whites have lower participations rates to begin with and also have higher rates of desertion once recruitment occurs.”
None of that discourages Ed Reed, a 35-year-old Afro-American who’s an alternative school principal from Natchez, Mississippi, who believes non-whites are good candidates to become waterfowl hunters.
A lifelong deer hunter, Ed didn’t take up duck hunting until he was invited by colleague Patrick Wells. “From the very first exposure, I was captivated,” Ed says. “I was immersed in all things waterfowl.”
Ed worries that young Afro-Americans don’t have enough role models to encourage them to take up waterfowling. “I rarely see and representation in magazines, catalogs or the DVDs I watch,” he says, adding he was pleased to see black actor Morgan Freeman as a spokesman for Ducks Unlimited.
Reed says hunting is an important part of the Southern culture, and that includes the black culture. “This isn’t an affirmative action thing for me, but we (waterfowl hunters) are as diverse as the waterfowl we pursue, and I think it’s important that we create opportunities and access for all minorities to hunt.”
The Small-Game Connection
Is it possible the best way to recruit a young hunter is to take him squirrel, dove or grouse hunting?
Jerry Leonard thinks so. His research showed that male parents who hunt squirrel, grouse, turkeys and doves were more likely to have children who hunt. Rabbits, ducks and pheasants had a positive, but less significant, impact.
While the cause-and-effect isn’t fully understood, Leonard’s finding suggests—and the Responsive Management/SSF report agrees—that recruitment efforts targeting readily available species like squirrel, rabbit and dove could prove beneficial.
Access
Focus-group interviews conducted by RM/NSFF produced some intriguing results on the importance of access to hunting land. When active hunters were asked an open-ended question (one which had no set answer) about constraints to their hunting participation, 35 percent said there were none, 29 percent listed lack of time and 19 percent cited poor health or age. Only 9 percent mentioned access as a roadblock.
But when active hunters were asked to choose from a list of items that strongly took away from their enjoyment of hunting or strongly influence their decline in participation, 49 percent cited lack of access—26 percent said not enough places to hunt and 23 percent said not enough access—and only 38 percent checked answers relating to work and lack of free time.
This Freudian slip confirms what hunters standing in “sweat lines” hoping to draw a blind have been telling Delta Waterfowl about access problems. In most places across the country, access is getting worse rather than better, suggesting the need for innovative new ways to open more land to hunting.
Wildlife professionals say one innovative way to increase public hunting access is the new “Open Fields” program, passed earlier this year in the federal Farm Bill.
Funded at $50 million over four years, the program is designed to pay private landowners in exchange for public hunting rights, similar to the so-called walk-in area programs that currently exist in 21 states.
“Access is a limiting factor for hunters, certainly one of their top concerns, and this funding has the potential to make millions of additional private lands available for hunting and fishing, by augmenting existing state access programs and encouraging the establishment of new ones,” says Geoff Mullin, initiatives manager for the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership (TRCP).
The specific rules and guidelines of Open Fields have yet to be established, but it is likely that states will have to submit a proposal, including an access plan, before receiving federal funding.
“The best thing about Open Fields is that it isn’t a one-size-fits-all program,” says Mullin. “The idea behind the program is to allow states to tailor their programs to their unique circumstances and challenges. States need the flexibility to design a program that makes sense to them.”
Mullin says that walk-in programs nationwide have succeeded not only because they expand opportunities for hunters, but also because they deal effectively with landowner liability, provide local economic benefits, particularly in cash-strapped rural areas, and promote better wildlife management.
“It’s always good when hunters and landowners can interact in a positive way, and Open Fields is a classic win-win,” Mullin says. “Access is a huge issue to future of hunting. We need to improve it so we can pass on our heritage and traditions to the next generation.”
Based on the popularity of other state walk-in area programs, Delta Waterfowl agrees with wildlife managers that Open Fields is a sound model to help increase hunting access but needs far more funding for it to be a successful national program. As one wildlife official put it, “Access costs serious money.”
Availability of Game
Lack of game did not show up as a major deterrent to hunting activity in any of the focus-group research conducted by RM/NSSF, implying that for hard-core waterfowlers, the quality of the duck-camp experience trumps birds in the bag.
Still the 27 percent drop in waterfowl-hunter numbers from 2001 to 2006, which mirrored the decline in the mallard breeding population, suggests that availability of game is very important at least for a certain subset of the hunting population.
Dramatic increases in deer and turkey hunting since 1955 have pretty much paralleled the availability of whitetails and wild turkeys; the almost 50 percent drops in migratory bird and small-game hunting during that period suggest that with occasional hunters, at least, availability of game is important.
“I think we’re down to our core participants in waterfowl hunting,” says Mark Damian Duda of Responsive Management. Unfortunately, many of those core participants are baby boomers who will soon be phasing out and will have to be replaced.
Replacing those aging boomers will likely be easier if duck populations are strong, but that will require a constituency that’s engaged on every level.
North American Conservation Model
Educating hunters, non-hunters, politicians and wildlife managers about the North American Conservation Model is another important step. The North American Model is based on the principals that wildlife is a public resource funded by hunters and anglers.
According to the RM/NSSF report, 72 percent of Arizona adults were not at all familiar with and 24 percent were only somewhat familiar with the North American Model. Only 3 percent said they were very familiar.
Jim Posewitz, a leading proponent of the North American Model and author of a story for our Vanishing Hunter series, said even many of the men and women taking over as wildlife managers are not aware of the model. In fact, according to the Wildlife Management Institute, roughly 50 percent of students who graduate with wildlife degrees have never hunted and “know little about the reasons why people hunt or the impact and benefits that hunting and hunters provide to wildlife management and other conservation programs.”
Without the model, which Posewitz says is rooted in our legal and political system and our cultural will, hunting would be privatized as it is in Europe and hunting as we know it would cease to exist.
Rules and Regulations
Some believe complex rules and regulations are a deterrent to hunting participation, but the RM/NSSF research suggests otherwise. When hunters whose amount of hunting has decreased the last five years were asked to list the reasons why (open-ended question) only 3 percent indicated complex regulations were a factor.
When active hunters were asked specific questions about fact ors that took away from their enjoyment, only 5 percent listed regulations.
While wildlife agencies must do everything possible to manage the resource, there’s no question that rules and regulations concerning hunting zones, legal hours, bag limits and other rules should be kept as simple as possible.
Hunter Education
Like rules and regulations, mandatory hunter education didn’t show up as a significant disincentive to hunting participation in the RM/NSSF report. When asked to pick from a laundry list of items, only six percent of active hunters indicated that mandatory hunter education strongly influenced their decision to hunt.
The study did conclude, and numerous interviews conducted by Delta seemed to confirm, that flexibility in setting dates and times for classes is critical. Given that most adults have less free time, providing “services and facilities that take into consideration hunters’ and shooters’ time constraints will be more effective that programs…that do not,” the report said.
One potential adult hunter told us he nearest available class was such a long drive from her home that she’d pretty much given up the idea of getting her certification.
The Antis
Most of the research indicated that anti-hunters and animal-rightists we love to hate are over-rated as a factor in declining hunter numbers.
According to Responsive Management, hunters are winning the battle for the hearts and minds of the non-hunting public. RM says that in 2006, 78 percent of Americans approved of hunting and only 16 percent were opposed, up from 73 percent and 22 percent in 1995.
Despite increasing urbanization, 77 percent of women, 83 percent of white Americans and 61 percent of non-whites approve of hunting.
The first installment in our series suggested that hunting’s approval rating could go even higher if the media would do a better job of reporting on hunting’s contributions to conservation, and the research conducted by RM/NSSF confirms it.
The report shows that 25 percent of adults surveyed strongly agreed and 21 moderately agreed that hunting in the U.S. causes some species to become endangered. An all-out media blitz telling hunting’s side of the story could corral even more allies.
The Media/Hunting Industry
If the hunting culture is unraveling as some suggest, the outdoor media certainly must shoulder much of the blame. The media’s focus on how-to/where-to/what-to at the expense of conservation and why-to runs contrary to the underlying reasons most people take up hunting.
As the Responsive Management/NSSF study noted, “No amount of resource-related satisfaction will succeed in recruiting new participants in the absence of social satisfaction.”
The social aspects of hunting—plucking birds, telling stories that have survived generations, a youngster’s first duck or an old-timer’s last—are likely to be remembered long after the weight of the strap has been forgotten, yet most television shows and magazine articles typically depict only the killing, with little or no mention of the culture or aesthetic pleasures necessary to cement us to hunting.
What’s the solution? Some media-watchers say the hunting/shooting industry could effect change by urging the programmers and editors they support with their advertising dollars do a better job of portraying the cultural aspects of hunting and covering conservation issues likely to determine future availability of game.
The industry could take a leading role, as some companies already have, by devoting a portion of their advertisements to conservation, ethics and family participation.
Hunters could do their part of writing letters to the editor of newspapers and magazines demanding more conservation coverage.
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