A British Columbia Supreme Court ruling in June 2021 (Yahey v British Columbia) found the B.C. government had breached its Treaty responsibilities to Blueberry River First Nations by allowing resource extraction and other development on their territory that caused ongoing cumulative impacts affecting their Treaty rights.
It was a landmark ruling. It was the first time a court ruled that treaty rights had been breached due to the cumulative impacts of developments. Recently, the B.C. government proposed substantial reductions to hunting in the province, saying that the changes will work towards addressing its Treaty violations.
But was hunting ever an issue?
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Scientific consensus continues to overwhelmingly conclude that lead contamination negatively impacts wildlife, the environment, and human health. In many cases, the primary source of lead contamination is from ammunition.
Rachel Carson drew the world’s attention to the environmental and human health impacts of the widespread use of the pesticide DDT throughout the first half of the 20th century in her ground-breaking book Silent Spring, published in 1962.
One of the wildlife species impacted by DDT was the bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus). By 1963, there were only 417 known nesting pairs of bald eagles in the lower 48 States. Bald eagles were part of what author Michelle Nijhuis calls the “class of 1967” in her book Beloved Beasts, when they were part of the first group of species protected by the precursor to the Endangered Species Act in 1967. They were later protected by the Endangered Species Act when it came into force in 1973. But not everyone wanted eagles protected. As with many misguided and narrow-minded views on predators, many hunting and sporting groups not only opposed eagle conservation in the mid-1900s, but actively shot eagles and encouraged people to hunt them for no other reason than as part of wider efforts at the time to eliminate predators.
But conservation prevailed.
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Bison constitutes two subspecies: wood bison (Bison bison athabascae) and plains bison (Bison bison bison). For simplicity, I’ve treated North American bison conservation efforts as one thread; however, the biology and politics of protecting the two subspecies was much more complex than I summarize here.
In fact, governments, biologists, and conservationists struggled with maintaining the genetic purity of different subspecies and herds. According to a 2016 paper titled “Genetic analyses of wild bison in Alberta, Canada: implications for recovery and disease management” published in the Journal of Mammalogy, there is “acceptance that for bison living within Wood Buffalo National Park and Elk Island National Park, there are no ‘genetically pure’ wood bison and that all individuals tested from these areas fall into a spectrum of genetic admixture between wood and plains bison.” To put the numbers in context, Alberta’s Elk Island National Park has the most genetically pure herd of wood bison, numbering about 300 animals.
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This post is essentially an unedited transcript of my discussion from Episode 13 – Enhancing the Social License to Hunt of the Hunt To Eat Show covering recent initiatives to suspend black bear hunting in California.
California has had a busy year with bear hunting. In February 2021, State Senator Scott Wiener proposed Senate Bill 252 (SB-252), which was sponsored by the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), to end black bear hunting in California. One of the things that the HSUS and Senator Wiener used in 2021 was to cite a declining interest in bear hunting in California. They said that many hunters and Californians aren’t interested in, and don’t support, bear hunting anymore. Senator Wiener eventually withdrew SB-252, in part due to substantial vocal opposition from hunters. There was a petition that collected over 27,000 signatures and we made our collective position known that bear hunting is still an active and important activity in California.
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We have been here before. We have debated predator issues in North America for more than a century. North American wildlife managers, policy-makers, and hunters spent decades engaged in coordinated efforts to demonize and exterminate predators from the landscape. Wild canids received the bulk of anti-predator sentiment and efforts throughout the 20th century. Fueled by flawed science and self-serving economic interests, governments hired hunters, used bounties, killing contests, and a wide range of chemical agents in attempts to eliminate all wolves and coyotes from the landscape. The suite of anti-predator ideologies, policies, and behaviours were unethical and ineffective in the past and they are detrimental to hunting now.
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How well do you understand hunters? Consider your best hunting partner. You might spend days on end with this person every year in meandering conversations about life’s important questions. You have likely spent hours listening to them describe what is important to them and what motivates them to hunt. Maybe you don’t hunt but you have seen photos, social media captions, heard and read stories from hunters, including friends who hunt. You might have formed your opinions about both hunters and hunting based on these interactions. In either case, you might feel like you understand why a person hunts – their motivations, perspectives, and values.
Now, consider another question: how well do you feel the other person understands your motivations, perspectives, and values – as a hunter or non-hunter? Likely, you have also shared your ideas with them on a range of topics related – even tangentially – to hunting. So they should also have just as strong a grasp of your inner moral workings as you have of theirs.
If your answers to the two questions are different, it might be worth reconsidering our assumptions about how well we truly understand other people and their motivations.
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Each year, we dedicate March 8th to celebrate, honour, and appreciate women for International Women’s Day. We devote a day to recognizing the contributions of women to politics, literature, the arts, science, technology, medicine, and perhaps above all, we take the opportunity to tell the women in our lives how important they are to us.
As we look around our personal and professional communities, we find women who advanced our thinking and paved the way for so many important achievements throughout history. We also need to ensure that we celebrate the ideas and efforts of women who are doing the work right now and every day throughout the year. Let’s be sure we reach out to them and recognize their efforts as they are happening.
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I wrote this piece as a Conservation Contributor with Hunt To Eat. It was originally published on the Hunt To Eat blog.
The hunting story I was told has been somewhat incomplete. More accurately, if hunting stories are the ones that we tell friends and family about our own experiences, the hunting narrative is the collective history we tell as a broader hunting community. We can tell our hunting stories however we want, inflating the size of the fish or the antlers on the one that got away with each retelling. But what are our obligations to a hunting narrative? How can a collective hunting story give us a sense of pride and advance our long-term goals for hunting and conservation?
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Last month, I posted about the new Agreement for the conservation and recovery of the Woodland Caribou in Alberta signed between the Canada and Alberta governments. One of the themes in the history of caribou conservation across Canada is the federal and provincial governments failing to follow the timelines and requirements of Canada’s Species At Risk Act (SARA). As I’ll explain, while SARA establishes shared federal and provincial responsibility for species at risk conservation in Canada, provinces have the bulk of responsibility for managing threatened and endangered species. However, in cases where the provincial governments do not fulfill their responsibilities, SARA provides a mechanism that allows the federal government to intervene with what is called an emergency order to protect species and their habitat. But what is an emergency order, why didn’t it work to protect caribou, and what is the potential of this component of our species at risk legislation to prevent species extinctions?
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I started this blog five years ago as a space for personal reflection, intellectual exploration, and, hopefully, to connect more meaningfully with a community of other hunter-conservationists. I wanted a space where I could communicate some of the things I was learning about hunting and conservation and what I was learning about my place in that world. I began in 2015 with a post titled Setting the Stage: My Position as a Hunter-Conservationist. In that post, I tried to frame my thinking about what it meant to be a hunter and a conservationist and how I understood that role at the time.
Now, as the year comes to a close five years later, I want to re-visit that original post and reflect on my initial frame of mind and what I have learned about hunting, conservation, and my position as a hunter-conservationist in that time.
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Paul McCarney