For sure. Hunting as a business definitely changed how I see it. I’m all for African hunting as it definitely puts a value on wildlife there and maintains habitat, as otherwise they don’t value it there. Just as we don’t value habitat here in the face of mineral extraction, farming, logging, commercial fishing etc. Unfortunately the model here will never allow outdoor sports to trump mines, logging and fisheries, the dollars aren’t even close to comparable.
Nobody here is interested in hearing it, but wildlife right now is collapsing worldwide at a pace not seen since the mass extinctions, on the level of the end of the dinosaurs. You get branded a fear monger or loonie when you bring it up. We just live a blink as humans and don’t see the scale, and many measure wildlife population health with what they know and hunt; deer, elk, black bear, etc that adapt well to human presence and modification of the land. Those species are what’s left after habitat is already heavily changed.
Grizzlies lived across Canada in recent history including Ontario and Quebec, just not in any of our lifetimes. And they were still in Texas and Mexico in the 20th century. California has the grizzly as its flag, and not a single one is left alive in the wild in the state. I read a great quote from a prominent bear biologist, below. It’s exceedingly accurate, we envision Grizzlies, wolverines, and Caribou as creatures of the deep wilderness. The deep wilderness used to be everywhere, and now is quite simply the places we haven’t overrun or modified.
I pick grizzlies as an example solely because they’re what I know and hunted for a living, but any keystone species can be the example with the exceptions of the species that benefit from our modifications of habitat into farmland, logging blocks, etc. So while I don’t blame hunting, and can definitely see its benefits where well managed, I just no longer feel the need to make the kill myself unless I’m directly feeding the family with it. There’s a reason all the greatest hunting trophies are from the past, and that everywhere our species have gone mass extinctions followed (mammoths, bison, wolves in the lower 48… grizzlies).
In earth timelines, a hundred thousand years is a #### all. Our species as we’d recognize it has been alive for less than 1/50,0000th of the history of life. The last 500 years doesn’t even show up on a graph. And yet in it, we’ve lost half the vertebrate life by volume this planet holds. And the pace has quickened astronomically in the last 100 years, and even more the last 50. I value hunting for the connection it gives me to the wilderness and would rather use it to be a part of that than to collect trophies at this point. I don’t vilify those who want to collect trophies, lord knows I did lots, I just lost the taste for it and would rather shoot the camera, pack the rifle.
That’s enough of a tangent for now, and enough to brand me even further a loonie in the eyes of most here.
