Nationwide Scientific Survey Finds Continued Approval of Hunting, Fishing, and Shooting

Reading the survey done by Responsive Management was, needless-to-say, alarming. I went to the Responsive Management website and lo-and-behold,they support hunting. Of course the survey is going to represent that hunting is up when the reality is; hunting is on the decline.

My sic paragraphs of comments may post as one long paragraph due to the way they are formatted on this site. Southwick Associates publishes similar surveys for state and federal "management" agencies as well as for national asociations of interest groups. The survey by Responsive Management appears in several instances to be inconsistent with other surveys. Should we really believe "42% of respondents have eaten wild-caught game in the past year"? Hunting, overall, is in decline. In a far more extensive 2006 survey, some 5.5% of the U.S. population reported they hunt consistently. As of 2006, there were 12.51 million hunters aged 16 years and older in the U.S. According to a Southwick report sponsored by the U.S. Department of the Interior, Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Department of Commerce, and the U.S. Census Bureau, there were an estimated additional 1.6 million hunters aged 6 to 15. The U.S. population was about 300 million in that year. Another Southwick newsletter looked at the National Shooting Sports Foundation's response to the same report: The report’s findings alarmed the authors. They combined the adult and youth numbers for this statement: “The eye-opening report estimates that 21.8 million youth and adult Americans hunted at least once over the past five years. Previous estimates were that 14 million hunted each year, but not all hunters did so every year. The reverse is alarming, with 41 percent of American hunters only participating in one or two years out of the past five years.” While the number of hunters declined by 1.5 million from 1996 to 2006, wildlife watchers increased by 13 percent over the same period. In a 2010 addendum to the 2006 report, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wrote, “From the perspective of a percentage of the total population, the decline in hunting and fishing is more pronounced. Table 2 [not included here] details the drop in participation rates of fishing from 21.0 percent in 1991 to 13.1 percent in 2006. Participation rates for hunting fell from 7.4 percent to 5.5 percent.” This does not reflect that “big game” hunting (mostly deer) was somewhat steady; the decline was driven by subsets of hunters, like those who kill squirrels and other “small game. The number of people who generally support hunting is high and consistent. That should be no surprize since information the public receives about hunting is from the hunting industrial complex that includes the hunting and fishing cultures of the state and federal wildlife "management" agencies. Non-hunters have not broken through to the public. Most likely, it is our lack of resources and participation as non-hunters that enables a small minority of the U.S. populatioin to control both policies and opinions. While the 2006 report I cite may seem dated, it is more authoritative than many. Surveys in general are subject to bias.