Conservation is not free. Someone must pay the bills.
Game Trails
Author(s):
Shane Mahoney
"Unless we practice conservation, those who come after us will have to pay the price of misery, degradation, and failure for the progress and prosperity of our day." - Gifford Pinchot, Cheif of US Forest Service, and 28th Fovernor of Pennsylvania
Hunters know it, but now the rest of society is starting to understand that eating meat from wild animals in a healthy, safe, and environmentally friendly choice.
White-tailed deer have been a mainstay in North American's freezer for many generations, and very few U.S. or Canadian citizens can say they have never tasted venison.
Shane Mahoney ponders how hunters can maintain their conservation leadership role in the twenty-first century
Game Trails
Author(s):
Shane P. Mahoney
The late nineteenth century witnessed a transformation in how we in North America viewed and cared for wildlife, and since that time, the hunter-conservationist movement has provided critical leadership for what is now a global phenomenon. It must be hunters who point out that this complex of viewpoints created a revolution in how we cared for wildlife and set forth a movement sufficiently relevant that it could be embraced by all of North American society, not just hunters, who then, as now, were in the minority.
Our North American system of conservation rests fundamentally upon the principle that wildlife belongs to the public collectively and is managed by the state, providence or nation for the collective good. The critical issue within the Public Trust arrangmement is that the use of wildlife by one citizen should not be unfairly advantageous to the individual or disadvantageous to the public at large. However, the issue is anything but simple when private properties are involved.
