The Death of Hunting

By Christina Larson, Washington Monthly. Posted January 9, 2006.

Colo, Iowa (population 900), a town about an hour northeast of Des Moines, is little more than a rail crossing, a grain elevator, and a dwindling main street. But at 7 a.m. on the opening morning of Iowa's celebrated pheasant season, the lights were on in a one-story building on Main Street where the Colo Lions Club was sponsoring a pancake breakfast for hunters. I arrived with two pheasant hunters, the three of us clad in the ubiquitous orange vests and caps of the sport, with dogs waiting in kennels in the back of a pickup. We were looking for a place to hunt.

Inside, the scene resembled the cantina from "Star Wars" in one way: It was a strategic place to gather information and try to seal a deal. Men sat around folding tables swapping stories about the birds they bagged last year, but also grousing about the difficulty of finding land where they could hunt. Iowa is 97 percent private land, so to have much shot at a pheasant, you pretty much need a landowner's permission to roam his fields. That's getting harder to come by these days, with old farms being sold and fence posts hung with new signs that warn, "No Trespassing."

As my companions and I filled up on pancakes, a friend of theirs walked over and pulled up a chair next to us. After helping himself to a plate, he glanced around slyly, leaned forward, and passed us an enticing tip: He had a friend who had a friend who was a local landowner and might give us permission to hunt on his land. We should drive down past Colo Bogs and look out for Joe Quaker in a grey van. Soon we were on the road, rumbling over gravel roads to the appointed meeting place. When no grey van appeared, we drove on, forced to look elsewhere for hunting ground. Occasionally, we passed hunters tromping through roadside drainage ditches, among the only public turf still available to those pheasant seekers without access to someone else's land.

This hunt for a spot to hunt is increasingly a part of the sportsmen's pursuit today. In the terminology of those who follow the problem, "access" is the buzzword phrase. "When you ask hunters directly what their biggest concern is, out of 20-odd possible choices, land access is most often number one," says Mark Duda of Responsive Management, a firm that conducts surveys for state wildlife departments. The scramble to find land can cause friction between hunters and landowners--in at least one instance, with tragic results. In November, a Hmong immigrant was sentenced to life in prison for killing six hunters in Wisconsin after a trespassing dispute erupted when he wandered onto their land.

The increasing difficulty of finding land to hunt on is, not surprisingly, nudging ever more hunters to hang up their shotguns. In Iowa, the number of hunters in state has dropped 26 percent in a decade, according to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, and other states have experienced similar declines. One in three former hunters told the agency that not having a place to hunt motivated their decision to abandon their hobby. Around the country, more sportsmen each year are parking their deer stands and duck decoys in the garage.

Even so, hunting is unlikely to disappear entirely. The ranks of hunters may dwindle, but hunting itself retains a cultural resonance, calling to mind a time when pioneers depended on ingenuity and perseverance to settle the frontier and evoking a pastoral nostalgia for farm life. Americans like to think of hunting as a national tradition, even as they tool around suburban parkways in their Subaru Outbacks. Hunting and fishing are touchstones for a world that many suburban and exurban dwellers value, even if their daily lives no longer reflect it.

In American politics, few causes are more potent than those defending threatened heritage symbols. Real or perceived attacks on school prayer, the pledge of allegiance, and the etiquette of saying "Merry Christmas" have all been whipped into political maelstroms. That's largely because conservatives recognized, and then exploited, a latent but largely unorganized anger.

A comparable frustration exists among hunters over land access. But conservatives haven't tapped into it because the source of this anxiety isn't a liberal bogeyman, like elitism or big government. Instead, it's the closing-off of private property and sale of public land, something many on the right defend. That means progressives could find themselves in the unexpected position of being the champions of hunters. Those states that have effectively slowed or reversed the hunting decline have done so with programs that use government to open up private lands voluntarily to public recreation. This time, it may be progressive government that holds out the best hope for preserving an American tradition.

A wink from Uncle Fred

If Americans don't hunt in the numbers that they used to, hunting goods stores aren't in danger of going out of business just yet. Hunting and fishing remain major national pastimes: In 2001, 13 million Americans headed out to hunt and 34 million to fish. The total number of "sportsmen" -- men and women who hunt or fish -- is 38 million today, nearly one in eight Americans. But while that's a crowd, it's a shrinking one. Over the past two decades, the percentage of Americans who hunt or fish has tumbled from 26 to 18 percent; the absolute number of sportsmen has fallen from 50 million to 38 million.

Christina Larson is managing editor of The Washington Monthly.

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