Survey: Public Approval for Hunting Drops Sharply
BY Herschel Smith
1 year, 4 months ago
The “Americans’ Attitudes Toward Legal, Regulated Fishing, Target/Sport Shooting, Hunting, and Trapping” survey, conducted by Responsive Management, was released last month by the Outdoor Stewards of Conservation Foundation, a think tank devoted to communicating trends in outdoor activities.
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Public approval of legal hunting dropped 4 percentage points over the past two years, from about 81 percent of Americans in 2021 to 77 percent of Americans this year. Approval of recreational shooting dropped 3 percentage points, and approval of recreational fishing also dropped 3 points, to 90 percent favorability.
Go to Outdoor Life for the rest of the story.
This is not good news. The mantra that has been followed for so many years among the gun owning community is to treat gun club like “fight club.” The first rule of gun club is that you don’t talk about gun club.
If we want to reverse the attitude towards guns and hunting, this will have to change. Not only rural folk and suburbanites, but the urban dwellers must be made to feel more comfortable with our ownership of weapons and use of them for sport.
On July 12, 2023 at 1:44 am, nature boy said:
If the population gets too large and starts raiding pantries like the video out of CO where a bear climbs in a window to get some vittles, the attitude will change.
O/T-Sitting out back with Pineland buddy Tuesday and a doe with two baby deer went past about fifty yards away leaving the forest to enter crops field.
A first time for everything and they were the size of a small dog with great leaping ability already.
Once saw a six point buck leap the local swift named creek in two moves, beautiful!
Thank You God.
On July 12, 2023 at 6:13 am, Lord T said:
I agree with your conclusion that we should be treating hunting as a normal everyday activity and talk about it. I’m in the UK and when I mention hunting the response is usually one of interest.
I’m not surprised that hunting is going down. Most of the growth in population is in the cities and they don’t need to kill animals to eat they simply pop down to the local shop where it can be hunted for in the fridges or trapped in a freezer compartment. Plus they don’t have to kill it.
I always take surveys with a pinch of salt after I found out how they were managed end to end.
On July 12, 2023 at 8:51 am, Olguy said:
I don’t know…
Here’s what I have seen.
More Women buying Guns to hunt and Licenses to hunt.
I have also seen more youth in with parents getting a Rifle and Licenses.
I work in a shop.
Maybe in some states..not mine though
On July 12, 2023 at 10:12 am, Dirk said:
Na this is bullshit where I live, hunting here is a right of passage. Entire families spend a week or two in the woods, in fowl season walking checks or jump shooting.
What’s changing here, is the ability to access especially bird hunting property. Grew up hunting cacklers, Chinese track stars in the wild. Hunting a caged birds is shameful.
I’ve watch men literally walk up on the bird, have to kick it to fly, then shoot it quickly not even a sporting distances. Pathetic. Never done it, never will.
Hunting around here is an art, with a set of ethics, a noble mind set. Just like a healthy forest, the deer and elk moose etc etc must be harvested to keep the herds healthy.
Wolves were reintroduced 20ish years ago, a large pack can devastate an entire hunting region. My son in law my daughter the family were out at one of the ponds on the ranch last year when a small pack of wolves ran right in front of the humans, I wasn’t their but was told the wolves stopped and watched the humans, while the humans watched the wolves.
We’re talking forty yards distant. It’s interesting this pack of wolves is centered in the middle of perhaps 3000 cattle yearly, haven’t touched a cow or calf.
Back to birds, the wild bird populations are gone, as long as humans farm with chemicals, they won’t be back. Ashame really. Modern farming has removed all or most ground cover, chemicals and coyotes kill a lot of birds, the SILs family also have a ranch in eastern OREGON where rice is grown. Checks are left in, pheasants and mountain checker quail are thriving.
I’ve been invited often haven’t gone, I just don’t care to kill anymore. It’s a personal choice, agree the harvest is required.
Speaking of elk, was driving down a nasty dirt road last week, had a very large herd of elf spook in front of me. Amazing animals like they knew it wasn’t hunting season ran to the center of the hay field slowed and grazed while keeping an eye on me. Spent a solid twenty minutes glassing em from yards away.
A couple of the bulls were huge, like trophy huge. Their transitory move south to the Warner Mountains, then north back up to Crater Lake.
Dirk
On July 12, 2023 at 10:47 am, Frank Clarke said:
Wait ’til feral pigs are widely reported in cities. Wait ’til somebody’s child is gored/killed at the playground.
“Well, this is what you voted for. Why are you complaining?”
On July 12, 2023 at 1:14 pm, Georgiaboy61 said:
The general population needs to be made aware of the enormous contribution – vital, really – that hunters and outdoorsman make to the preservation of habitat, conservation and the health of our natural resources, lands and wildlife.
As another commenter stated, the problem is partly demographic. So many people live in urban areas now, and simply are not exposed to the wonders of the natural world, and hence don’t hunt, don’t hike or camp, don’t go boating or canoeing, etc. Worse, many urban people are afraid of the outdoors!
I am thankful every day that my parents, family, friends and teachers inculcated in me a love of the outdoors and taught me from an early age how to survive and thrive in it. It’s a wonderful gift to appreciate the natural world, and you are really missing out if you do not.
On July 12, 2023 at 7:35 pm, Don't mind me. said:
I don’t buy it. There’s been a resurgence of hunting in the last couple of decades. It might be specific to some areas, but I think overall the response to hunting is more positive than in the past.
I’ve seen this in rural as well as built up areas.
On July 12, 2023 at 8:17 pm, Michael said:
Most surveys are GIGO Garbage In Garbage Out as the result was baked into the cake by selecting the “Right” people to ask about that subject. I wonder how many Vegans were the selected responders of this survey.
Most folks have no clue that hunting licenses pay for the bulk of wildlife funding.
But let’s not let mere facts like the need for controlled hunting to keep things in balance bother any blue haired tackle box faced “voter”. Facts like deer without predators overbreed and starve-disease until the population is blasted back into balance. Bambi never starves.
I have a nice lady who keeps chickens. She is my egg lady. She calls me when a predator is killing her “girls”. I’m the one that comes by, looks at the evidence, tries to repair-reenforce her chicken coop-yard and sometimes eliminate a pest.
She doesn’t want me to tell her how I resolved the situation. Other than that quirk, she’s a nice neighbor.
On July 12, 2023 at 9:20 pm, PJ said:
Keep in mind that “to poll” is a euphemism for “to lie”.
On July 12, 2023 at 9:57 pm, Georgiaboy61 said:
@ PJ
Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) said, “There’s lies, damned lies and statistics…” and he wasn’t wrong. “Polling” sounds scientific and official, which is why certain types are drawn to citing polling data as authoritative, but if they are poorly-designed or biased, they’re not worth the paper upon which they are printed. And if it is some big-bucks advocacy outfit sponsoring the poll, dollars to donuts, the outcome will be the one they wanted. Just another lefty racket when it comes to anything related to the RTKBA, hunting, etc.
On July 13, 2023 at 2:00 am, Plague Monk said:
I’m rather surprised that no one has mentioned the fact that a growing number of land owners no longer support hunting on their properties.
I bought a house and a few dozen acres in the NY Fingerlakes region in 1987. Roughly half the land was farmland that I leased to a local farmer(and never had any problems with him or his family), while the balance was mostly wooded. When I bought the land, I allowed hunting, and did a little myself as time allowed, and for the first few years there were only minor issues, such as empty beer cans and such.
After I starting contracting in 1994, I wasn’t home as much and my wife became very busy with both church and work, and the original group of hunters aged out. Nature abhors a vacuum, and a new group of hunters emerged. They were of different ages, and they had a much more casual attitude toward property rights. Broken gates, bonfires, trash, bullet holes in the house(atop a knoll with no foliage within @50 yards).
A neighbor down the road about a mile told me that he lost several hawks to “sportsmen”, who told him that the hawks were stealing their turkeys. The NY DEC did nothing, but after two years of losing hawks he cut down the dead trees they were nesting in.
The final straw for me was the day that I was clearing out a stand of Japanese knotweed, when I heard gunshots nearby, and saw a few bullets strike the tree near me, even though I was wearing orange(not in deer season). I shouted down the hill to the group that I was working. They answered that they were squirrel hunting, and were “being careful not to aim at me”. I called the sheriff, but the shooters all left before he arrived. He saw the bullet holes and told me that I should post the property. Before i left on the South Carolina contract, I did.
Not all hunters are bad, but there are too many of them causing problems. I live in SW Ohio, now, and own about 50 acres roughly 80 miles east of Cincinnati. All woods and hills and streams, and like the other landowners, all of it is posted. I don’t get down there as much as I would like, what with my vertigo issues and chronic fatigue, but my understanding is that only the property owners and their immediate families are allowed to hunt on these lands. The sheriff there takes trespassing seriously, as does the security for the big company that has a test facility in the area.
I guess that I would have to say that I’ve become anti-hunting, after these and other unpleasant encounters over the last 40 plus years.