Why hunting helps the environment
By Matthew Leclerc
The conservation of wildlife is a topic that comes up very frequently. Hunting and hunters are the biggest advocates for conservation. As a hunter, I face this question every spring and fall. Why does hunting help protect animal population? 300 years ago, humans living on American soil used hunting skills to find their food. In today’s day and age, people go to their local supermarkets to pick up some bacon or turkey or chicken. Humans are more focused on futuristic technologies rather than the other mammals who share this planet with us. Without hunters keeping animal populations sustained and balanced, certain species would overpopulate a given region. If this occurs, the animals’ food supplies would shrink dramatically and populations would decrease extremely.
Conservation is the action of conserving something. We conserve many things: money, food, and a very important topic which is very hard to keep conserved, nature. Nature is threatened every moment of every day due to many factors. One factor is the increase in human population. A study from UNICEF estimated that the world population is rising where about 350,000 people are born each day. With such a rapid increase of human population, the world is set to run out of natural resources quicker than we expect. If we ran out of resources, our planet would go into a huge famine and populations would decrease extremely. This is fairly similar to animal populations. The deer and elk population have grown to an alarming rate. According to Outdoor Life, the "Whitetail deer population grew from 29.8 million in 1994 to 32.7 million today." Just before coming back to college after winter break, I was driving on an old back road when seven deer passed right in front of me. This was one of many encounters I’ve had within the last few years. Overpopulation without hunting, would cause the game populations to grow so high that they would
end up eating their entire food supply. A lot of them would die, and some would move into cities and towns looking for food.
If animals moved into cities or towns motorists would be colliding with deer and elk more often, and they would be around people where they could possibly attack. Where do we see wildlife the most? Roadways. A recent report showed that 200 people die each year to wildlife-animal collisions. "7.4 million deer are annually harvested, 1.8 million killed by motorists" (Outdoor Life). And in a typical year, "Deer kill more people than all commercial airline, train, and bus accidents combined" (Outdoor Life). I was on the highway coming back from the Portland Maine mall with my girlfriend about two weeks ago when I saw blue lights flashing behind me. I slowed down and let the state police zoom by me. Traffic began to come to a stop and we could see the lights flashing in the distance. As we got closer we could see what had happened. A car was laying in the middle of the highway upside down with what looked like the remains of a whitetail deer. From 2000-2006, 2,307 lives were taken on human-made roadways due to these collisions.
Wildlife-vehicle collisions aren’t only a problem for the safety of motorists, but also the economy. Over a billion dollars are spent every year in property damage. So how do hunters play in a role in all this? Hunters play a huge role economically.
“When buying your hunting license, equipment, guns, travel, and other goods like the other 80+ million people, around 70 billion dollars are spent and contribute to the nation economy to better protect wildlife sanctuaries, maintaining parks, and help scientist survey populations of game and nongame species” (Gibbons).
With so much money pouring in to the national wildlife programs, scientist can focus on ways to keep animal habitats secure