Seven myths about hunters, guns and the wildlife they pay to protect

Somewhere in America tonight, a person who has never been hunting is explaining to a person who has been hunting every fall for thirty years that hunters are the reason wildlife is disappearing. This is a bit like explaining to the volunteer fire department that it is the cause of the fires. The conversation seldom goes well, mostly because the person doing the explaining has been handed a story that sounds right and is wrong on almost every point.

The truth is much more interesting than the story, and it flatters nobody's stereotypes. It involves a Republican President who was an obsessive hunter, a law about selling dead ducks, a tax gun owners asked for, and a legal doctrine older than the Constitution about who owns a deer. Let's test seven claims against the record. No population statistics and no revenue figures, because those change and you should get them from the agencies that publish them. What follows is the structure of the thing, which doesn't change.

First, a minute on the public trust

Every myth below turns on one idea, so here it is. In American law, wild animals are not owned by whoever's land they happen to be standing on. Under the public trust doctrine, the state holds wildlife in trust for the people. The Supreme Court stated a version of that idea in Geer v. Connecticut in 1896, which upheld a state's power to restrict the export of game birds because the state controlled game in trust for its citizens. The Court later narrowed Geer on commerce-clause grounds, but the notion that wildlife is a public resource, managed by the states for everyone, survived and became the foundation of modern wildlife law.

Conservationists later gave the whole system a name: the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation. Its tenets include wildlife held in public trust, an end to commerce in dead wildlife, allocation of wildlife by law rather than by wealth or land ownership, hunting opportunity for every citizen, and decisions grounded in science. Hold that list in your head. Almost every myth fails because it ignores one of those points.

Myth one: "Hunters wiped out the wildlife"

The claim: Hunting is why America nearly lost its game animals, so hunters are the problem, not the solution.

The record: The collapse of the late nineteenth century was driven by market hunting, which means killing wildlife to sell, and by the loss of habitat as land was cleared and plowed. Commercial hunters shot game by the wagonload for restaurants, shipped birds by rail and killed egrets for feathers to trim hats. The passenger pigeon was gone from the wild by the early twentieth century; the last one, Martha, died in the Cincinnati Zoo on September 1, 1914. The bison were driven to the brink in the same era.

The turnaround came from the sporting community. Theodore Roosevelt and George Bird Grinnell founded the Boone and Crockett Club in 1887, and its members pushed for protected lands and for hunting rules grounded in "fair chase." The Lacey Act of 1900, named for Representative John Lacey of Iowa, made it a federal offense to ship illegally taken wildlife across state lines. State game laws set seasons, bag limits and licenses.

The verdict: Mostly false. Unregulated commercial killing and habitat loss did the damage, and organized sportsmen led the rebuilding. To be fair, hunters in the 1800s took game without much restraint, and no one should pretend otherwise. The point is that the people who wrote the rules that saved the game were largely the people who wanted to go on hunting it.

Myth two: "Conservation runs on general tax money"

The claim: Wildlife agencies are funded out of the general tax pot, so everybody pays for the deer herd and hunters get a free ride.

The record: State wildlife agencies draw heavily on revenue from hunters and anglers: license and tag fees, plus the federal excise taxes that flow back to the states. The Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Act of September 2, 1937, known as Pittman-Robertson, dedicates an excise tax on sporting arms and ammunition to wildlife restoration, and a companion law for fishing, the Dingell-Johnson Act of 1950, does the same for anglers. The Migratory Bird Hunting Stamp Act of 1934 added the federal duck stamp. The full story of the first of these is in The 1937 tax that gun owners backed and that rebuilt America's wildlife.

The verdict: Mostly false. A large share of state wildlife work is paid for by the users. General tax money does fund parts of public land management and federal agencies, so "none" would be an overstatement. But the idea that hunters ride free while taxpayers foot the bill has the arrangement backwards. Check your own state agency's published budget and see where its revenue lines come from.

Myth three: "Hunting is a rich man's sport"

The claim: Hunting is for the wealthy, with their private lodges and expensive guns.

The record: Hunting was a rich man's sport in the country the colonists left. For centuries in England the game laws reserved hunting to the landed class and treated a commoner who took a rabbit as a poacher. The American system was built on the opposite principle. Wildlife is a public resource; every citizen may hunt it, subject to license and season; and the rules are meant to apply to the farmer and the banker alike. That's the "hunting opportunity for all" tenet of the North American Model. Public lands, including national forests and large tracts managed by federal agencies, are open to hunters who follow the rules, and state wildlife agencies buy and manage land for public hunting with the money hunters generate.

The verdict: Mostly false as a matter of law and design. In fairness, hunting costs money: a rifle or shotgun, ammunition, a license, travel, and sometimes a lease for access to private land. A high-priced guided trip is expensive. But the system isn't built for the wealthy. A person with a modest income, a license and access to public land can hunt, and that access is exactly what the American model was designed to protect.

Myth four: "Wildlife belongs to whoever owns the land"

The claim: If a deer is on my property, it's mine.

The record: A landowner controls access to his land. He can exclude hunters, charge for access or keep the land closed, and no one may trespass to take game. But he doesn't own the wild animals that move across it. Under the public trust, wildlife belongs to the people of the state in trust, which is why the state sets seasons and bag limits and requires licenses, and why an animal that wanders off the land is no longer in anyone's control. The Supreme Court extended the same logic to migratory birds in Missouri v. Holland in 1920, upholding the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 and the federal government's power to protect birds that cross state and national lines.

This is not an attack on property rights. The Takings Clause in Four Cases Every Landowner Should Know explains how seriously the Constitution takes a landowner's right to his land. The point is that land and the creatures that pass over it are different things. Your fence can stop a hunter from walking on your pasture. It can't stop a mallard from flying over it.

The verdict: False as to ownership, true as to access. The landowner holds the gate, and the state holds the deer.

Myth five: "A free market in game would conserve better"

The claim: The ban on selling game is government meddling. Let people buy and sell wild meat, and owners would protect their animals the way ranchers protect cattle.

The record: I take this one seriously, because it comes from a good instinct: property rights and markets often protect resources better than regulation does. And there's a partial truth in it. Where animals can be fenced, owned and raised, private ownership works; ranches and game farms prove it. The trouble comes with free-roaming wildlife, which nobody can fence. When a resource belongs to no one until someone kills it, each hunter has an incentive to take as many as he can before the next man does. Economists call that the tragedy of the commons. It's not a theory in this case. It is what happened in the nineteenth century, when a legal market for game kept paying people to shoot, because scarcity only pushed the price higher.

The sale of game was banned by state laws and reinforced by the Lacey Act, and the ban on commerce in dead wildlife is one of the tenets of the North American Model. Once there was no market for the meat, there was no profit in wiping out the herd, and the incentive flipped.

The verdict: Right instinct, wrong application. A private market works for owned animals. It fails for wild ones, and the record is a century old. Notice, too, that the rules are not anti-market in spirit: they preserved the resource so that the market in everything else (guns, gear, guides, licenses, land access) could grow.

Myth six: "The duck stamp is just a collectible"

The claim: The duck stamp is a pretty piece of art for collectors and doesn't do anything.

The record: The Migratory Bird Hunting Stamp Act of March 16, 1934, requires waterfowl hunters of a certain age to buy a federal stamp each year. The first stamp was designed by Jay "Ding" Darling, a newspaper cartoonist who was also chief of the Bureau of Biological Survey at the time. Under the law, the money goes to the Migratory Bird Conservation Fund, which is used to acquire and protect wetland habitat for the national wildlife refuge system. The stamp is also bought by collectors and by people who just want to support wetlands, and a current stamp gets the holder into national wildlife refuges that charge an entrance fee.

The verdict: False. It's a collectible and a conservation tool. The artwork is a bonus. The wetlands are the point.

Myth seven: "Gun owners who don't hunt pay nothing for conservation"

The claim: Target shooters and gun owners who never hunt contribute nothing to wildlife.

The record: The Pittman-Robertson excise tax applies to sporting arms and ammunition at the manufacturer or importer level, which means it is built into the price of the product, whoever buys it. A person who buys a box of ammunition for the range pays the same tax as a person who buys it for deer season. And Congress has allowed states to put some of that money into hunter education and public shooting ranges, which means the target shooter's purchase helps build the range he shoots at.

The verdict: False. Shooters pay into the program every time they buy ammunition. If you shoot, you are already a conservation donor, and nobody had to ask.

What the pattern shows

If you step back, the seven myths share a flaw. They assume that the people who use a resource are its enemies, and that only an outside authority can protect it. The American record points the other way: users who were organized, who agreed to pay and who accepted rules in exchange for the guarantee of access did more for wildlife than any bureaucrat could have. Six Myths About the Republican Record on Conservation and the Environment picks up the same thread on the broader environmental record, and Who Owns the Range? Grazing Permits, Allotments and the Rancher's Real Rights shows how the public-land half of the arrangement works for ranchers. For hunters just starting out, the four rules of gun safety and the reason behind each one is the first thing to learn before the first season.

The bottom line

• The wildlife crash was a commercial one. Market hunting and habitat loss did the damage, and sportsmen led the rebuilding with seasons, limits and the Lacey Act.
• Users pay. License fees, the Pittman-Robertson excise tax, the Dingell-Johnson tax and the duck stamp fund a large part of the work. Don't let anyone tell you hunters take and give nothing back.
• The deer belongs to the public, and the gate belongs to the landowner. Both rights are real, and the system works because they are kept apart.
• Markets are not the answer to everything. They work for animals that can be owned. For wild animals that cross every fence, the ban on selling game is what kept them from the market.
• Next time you hear a myth, ask for the source. Then send the person the numbers from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and your state agency. The record speaks well enough for itself.