Holes in the Model

IN 2001, THREE LUMINARIES OF THE WILDLIFE PROFESSION, VALERIUS GEIST, SHANE MAHONEY, AND JOHN ORGAN, were called upon to consider the role hunting has played in the development of wildlife conservation in America. The paper they presented at the 66^th North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference, “Why hunting has defined the North American model of wildlife conservation,” (Geist, et al., 2001) was immediately hailed as a ground-breaking analysis of the influence hunters have had in the recovery of wildlife populations, many of which were on the brink of extinction little more than a century ago.

As hunting and hunters have come under renewed attack in the last thirty years, the message this paper delivered has become more and more important. For generations, hunters have provided irreplaceable funding and political support for conservation, and their demand for abundant, widely distributed game populations has protected millions of acres of habitat and provided the impetus for the creation of millions more. The bond between hunters and the places they hunt has proven to be a powerful force in conservation, and it will continue to exert great influence for generations to come.

Many of the most persuasive voices in the conservation movement have belonged to hunters— Frank Forester, John James Audubon, George Bird Grinnell, Theodore Roosevelt, Aldo Leopold, and scores of others convinced the American public that wildlife and wild land are essential parts of our national heritage, as precious as the American flag and our founding documents.

For all these reasons, the wildlife profession not only embraced the Geist paper but began to refer to it in the same reverential tones once reserved for A Sand County Almanac. “The North American Model” has become a catch phrase in any philosophical discussion of wildlife management and an instant rebuttal to nearly any criticism leveled against the profession. Since we in the business offer it as a comprehensive defense against any attack, it should come as no surprise that, in recent years, a small but growing number of critics have pointed out what they believe to be shortcomings in our implementation of the model and, in a few cases, blind spots in the model itself. [See, most recently, Artelle, et al., 2018.]

This ongoing interchange has led to several newer publications. Perhaps the most comprehensive is The Wildlife Society’s technical review, “The North American Model of Wildlife Conservation,” [Organ, et al., 2012] undertaken by sixteen wildlife professionals, including the three authors of the 2001 paper. In that document, the authors list challenges the seven tenets of model face and offer responses.  What they do not do is offer any revisions to the tenets as they were originally stated.

I think there’s great virtue in several of the tenets described by Geist, et al.: Our wildlife should be held in trust for the public, as they point out; it’s generally a good thing that, with some salient exceptions, markets for wildlife are no longer legal; allocation of wildlife by law is right and proper, as is the “democracy of hunting,” which grants “all citizens the opportunity to participate.”

But I think there are elements of the other three tenets in the model that are confusing and, with increasing regularity, expose the profession of wildlife management to criticism it does not deserve.  Probably most important, the model as it currently exists fails to give weight to one of the longest standing missions of wildlife managers and wildlife conservation itself.  Here are my concerns:

Wildlife can only be killed for a legitimate purpose

There continues to be vigorous debate over the idea that “wildlife can only be killed for a legitimate purpose.” The devil resides in the definition of “legitimate.” In Wyoming, hunters are allowed to leave the neck and ribs of a big game animal in the field while taking only the

upper legs, loin, and tenderloin. In Alaska, this would be considered wanton waste. Is one of these more legitimate than the other? Faced with justifying the take of furbearers for no more than their pelts, the professional manager may have little more than historical precedent to offer in defense of this as a “legitimate purpose.” All this confusion when, from a strictly ecological point of view, the whole idea of meat, hide, extremities, or internal organs left in the field as being somehow “wasted” is an oxymoron. Unused parts from a dead animal are more surely wasted if they are consigned to a sanitary landfill than if they are left in the habitat where the animal died. The wildlife profession approaches this issue with remarkably little underlying thought or consistency. At the very least, we should consider an overarching definition or definitions of the word “legitimate.”

Wildlife are considered an international resource

Another tenet of the model is that “wildlife are considered an international resource.” Well, animals that move back and forth across international boundaries are certainly considered “an international resource,” except, possibly, in the cases of some marine mammals and fishes. While we use this expansive classification quite successfully in the management of

waterfowl, it seems to me that we struggle to apply it effectively in the conservation of locally rare mammals like the wolverine and gray wolf, as well as many of the neotropical migrant birds. The concept of a “distinct population segment,” which could be considered as a challenge to this tenet since it is essentially contradicts the general idea of connectivity and broad distribution, is a matter of repeated legal confrontations. We continue to engage in periodic donnybrooks over the authority of state wildlife managers versus their federal counterparts when it comes to populations of wildlife that may cross state boundaries or move in and out of federal reservations. Some wildlife is remarkably sedentary; other wildlife often moves inconveniently across all sorts of political boundaries. This tenet as it has been understood and is currently applied seems to be the subject of extensive debate. At the very least, it could use some clarification.

Science is the proper tool for discharge of wildlife policy

And the one remaining tenet: “Science is the proper tool for discharge of wildlife policy.” These are the words in the original paper, and they are carefully chosen. Certainly, we would be remiss if we did not collect pertinent data on how a given management decision affects the wildlife population it’s designed to influence. Easily said— much harder to do. Dependable indices to population size are a starting point in nearly any management effort, but as any field professional will tell you, getting really dependable indices is remarkably difficult and expensive for most big game populations and nearly impossible for most species of small game, especially when those estimates need to be made at a landscape scale at least once a year. The profession does the best it can, but I think we have to admit that the application of science to the task of monitoring game populations is still far from perfect. Where data are incomplete or lacking, management decisions still have to be made.

Beyond the practical challenges of applying sound techniques of data collection on a landscape scale, I’m concerned that this tenet has been paraphrased into something like: “We believe in science-based management.” Geist and his colleagues stressed that science was a tool for the “discharge” of wildlife policy. The paraphrased version of the Geist tenet can easily lead off toward the idea that wildlife policy should be based on science.

I don’t know how that can be done. An unbiased approach to collection of data can answer a lot of questions about the current state of a wildlife population and its habitat. It can help us understand the effect of a management action or other changes in the environment. In a few cases, it may even help us predict the effect of an action we haven’t yet taken.

What it cannot do is answer any question that starts with: “Should we . . . ?” Science can’t tell us whether we should protect a species from extinction. It can’t tell us whether we should allow construction in a deer migration corridor, dam a creek, log a hillside, apply a pesticide, impose antler restrictions, or close a hunting season. These are questions that can only be answered by consulting our values. Wildlife policy has always been driven by collective preference, prejudice, and, quite often, moral judgment. The only help science can give us in these matters has more to do with opinion surveying than aerial transects or call counts. To suggest that science can somehow help us decide what we want is not only inaccurate but opens science to accusations of bias that damage the discipline.

The missing eighth tenet: the importance of nongame

This brings me to a glaring omission in the Geist paper. There should be an eighth tenet. Boiled down to its essentials, it should go something like: “All wildlife has value, whether we hunt it or not.” This would account for the huge gathering of wildlife that is classified as “nongame.”

I’m not surprised that Geist and his co-authors neglected this element of wildlife conservation in North America. Their primary goal in drafting the paper for the North

American was to defend hunting as a critical part of the broader conservation movement. Their use of the broad term “wildlife” faintly implies that nongame species have benefited from the application of the model— which is true— but tenets that stress “elimination of markets,” allocation of wildlife,” and “the democracy of hunting” suggest strongly that, in this paper, “wildlife” mostly means “game.” In the context of the argument the authors were making, this is understandable.

What I have more trouble understanding is why the wildlife profession has still not included nongame explicitly in its “North American model.” It certainly isn’t because we’ve ignored nongame. As early as 1705, researchers were in the field in the American wilderness, risking their health and often their lives to catalog nongame species. John Lawson, Mark Catesby, the Bartrams, Alexander Wilson, and a score of others labored to open the eyes of people on both sides of the Atlantic to the diversity and abundance of wildlife in the New World. By the time Audubon came on the scene, a community of natural historians was already well established in America, and they were already concerned about the declines of nongame species and natural systems they were witnessing.

The smoke had barely cleared from the battlefields of the Civil War when a new generation of conservationists— almost all of them hunters— began the effort to protect nongame animals from the ravages of habitat loss, overharvest, and pest control. The federal government’s Bureau of Economic Ornithology was established in 1885 with the primary mission of convincing farmers that most nongame birds weren’t threats but assets. In 1886, the avid hunter George Bird Grinnell launched the Audubon Society, mainly to galvanize protection for plume birds. The Migratory Bird Treaty Act was adopted in 1918, not only to rebuild populations of waterfowl but to protect all migratory nongame birds.

In the modern era, wildlife managers with federal and state agencies along with a host of private-sector groups are moving mountains to understand the ecology of nongame species, from plants to mammals, and protect populations that are in trouble. The Endangered Species Act gives legal protection to rare plants and animals and has been instrumental in the recovery of taxa as diverse as the bald eagle and the Colorado butterfly plant. The nascent State Wildlife Action Plan has mandated a comprehensive approach to cataloging nongame and provided some money to help the work along. More funding, more manpower would help the work go faster, but there’s no doubt that nongame management is an intrinsic part of modern conservation.

None of this is even mentioned in the “North American Model” as it is currently written.

From a strictly philosophical point of view, I find this disturbing. It neglects a rich part of

the history of the wildlife management profession and fails to stress that, over the history of conservation, hunters have been motivated by much more than a selfish interest in producing targets.

From a more practical point of view, the failure to present a model that accurately portrays wildlife conservation leaves the profession and the community of ethical hunters open to criticism from groups who are genuinely interested in maintaining abundant, diverse wildlife as well as organizations whose main interest is in disrupting the conservation traditions that have brought us so far. When we’re called on to defend our efforts, it would be useful to have an accurate description of American wildlife management in the “model” that intends to define it.

The upshot

I certainly don’t offer this critique to impugn the contribution represented by the original paper. It’s clear that the profession needed a statement of philosophy when Geist and his colleagues made their presentation, and it remains an excellent foundation on which to base our work. However, I think there are difficulties with the current description of wildlife management contained in the model, and I don’t agree with the authors of the TWS review that we should not “revise, modify, or otherwise alter what has heretofore been put forward as the Model.”   We should do precisely that.

I hasten to point out that I’ve been a hunter all my life. I feed my family on wild game. I hunt for the freezer; I hunt for connection with the wild world; I hunt for spiritual renewal. I heartily support the notion that hunting has been, is, and, in all likelihood, will continue to be a critical part of wildlife conservation in America. But game management, hunter management, are subsets of the profession of wildlife conservation. We would serve ourselves better if we gave the world a model that accurately reflects everything we do, not just a part.

I hope these comments encourage discussion to that end.

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Literature cited:

Geist, Valerius, Shane P. Mahoney, and John F. Organ, 2001. Why hunting has defined the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation. Transactions of the 66^th North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference 66: 175-185.

Artelle, Kyle, A., John D. Reynolds, Adrian Treves, Jessica C. Walsh, Paul C. Paquet, and Chris T. Darimont, 2018. Hallmarks of science missing from North American wildlife management. Science Advances 4(3): eaao0167, 7 March 2018.

Organ, J.F., V. Geist, S.P. Mahoney, S. Williams, P.R. Krausman, G.R. Batcheller, T.A. Decker, R. Carmichael, P. Nanjappa, R. Regan, R.A. Medellin, R. Cantu, R.E. McCabe, S. Craven, G.M. Vecellio, and D.J. Decker, 2012. The North American Model of Wildlife Conservation. The Wildlife Society Technical Review 12-04. The Wildlife Society, Bethesda, Maryland, USA.