Commentary: Time to re-examine the concept of fair chase
Most of us are familiar with “fair chase,” the honor code North American hunters have followed for roughly a century. Coined by the Boone and Crockett Club (BCC) in 1888, the concept describes an ethical code originally applied to big game hunting.
It requires that the targeted animal be both wild and free ranging, with a fair chance of escape. As an aside, the BCC was especially concerned with the water-killing of deer (driving deer into lakes where hunters in boats would shoot, club, or spear them). Article 10 of the BCC constitution states that the killing of swimming (big) game was grounds for membership suspension or cancellation.
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Are deer suffering from ‘voluntary overcrowding?’
The North American pre-settlement population of white-tailed deer totaled somewhere between 24 million and 62 million animals, or an average of about 14.2 deer per square mile over roughly 3,011,600 square miles of estimated range. (Hanberry, B.B. and P. Hanberry. 2020: Wildlife Society Bulletin 44(3): 512-518)
Most of these animals lived on 2,007,800 square miles east of the Mississippi River. Today, there are somewhere between 11 million and 35 million whitetails, about half of the pre-settlement number. But landcover has changed dramatically, and several Midwestern states hold numbers of deer, ranging from 15 to greater than 45 deer per square mile.
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Commentary: Exploring the connection between invasives and climate change
Here are two largely accepted premises.
• First, most conservationists and environmentalists will agree that climate change is a threat to fish, wildlife, and habitat.
• Second, most conservationists and environmentalists will agree that invasive species are a problem for fish, wildlife, and habitat (albeit not as existential as extreme heat, drought, severe storms, or ocean/lake/reservoir/river and stream warming).
Perhaps under-appreciated is that invasive species are, in large measure, a biotic manifestation of the changing precipitation and warming.
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User-pay funding no longer a sustainable revenue source for conservation
In private business, milking the revenue streams of successful products to support new ones that generate no income is a recipe for disaster, even when the “giveaways” are popular.
Unless the new products begin generating revenue, decapitalization of successful products inevitably erodes their quality. Inevitably, customer complaints and defections increase and sales drop. Consider Tesla, Twitter, and “X.” Luckily for conservation and the public, government isn’t a private business. Historically, game and non-game species have flourished more or less on the consumptive community’s dime. But that doesn’t mean that the model is endlessly sustainable.
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Is a field test for CWD coming soon?
Some are “definitive” tests. Others are not; these merely “fail to detect” the presence of disease. At least one assay has the potential to detect prions in environmental samples.
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Appealing to the better angles of our nature
Genetically speaking, humans have roughly 10,000 differences from other mammals – mostly related to brain development. This might sound like a lot, but the human genome is about 3 billion base pairs, so we’re only 0.003% different from other members of Class Mammalia.
For this reason, it shouldn’t be surprising that chimps and humans are 99% alike, house cats and humans are 90% alike, mice and humans are 85% alike, and cattle and humans are 80% alike.
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Commentary: eDNA technologies are worth exploring in fish and wildlife management
Fish and wildlife conservation depends on management to maintain healthy and resilient habitats and species.
Management, in turn, depends on cost-effective surveillance. While this sounds simple enough, “cost-effective” and “surveillance” are oxymorons for most of contemporary conservation.
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Changing seasonal temperatures are affecting game and fish
Systematic changes to average seasonal temperatures and precipitation are already affecting Midwest fish and wildlife populations. Unfortunately, more dramatic change is on the way.
Because future natural resources managers will no longer be able to use past conditions to predict the future, fish and wildlife scientists and Midwest Association of Fish and Wildlife Agency (MAFWA) are exploring what can be done using a resist-accept-direct (RAD) framework.
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International symposium sheds light on CWD findings
In early June, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Geological Survey sponsored the 4th International Chronic Wasting Disease Symposium in Denver, Colo. Presentations by leading prion scientists, geneticists, human dimensions specialists, and agency managers focused on the biological, ecological, and sociological barriers to effective control.
Russ Mason attended the conference, and here are a few key learnings and takeaways that he found most intriguing.
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