Sunday Hunting Won't Help
The decline in hunting license sales needs to be addressed realistically by the Pennsylvania Game Commission, the Department of Conservation and Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR), and other stakeholders like outdoor recreational groups and it needs to be addressed very soon. Time is running out for the State Game Lands (SGL).
The most important reason the decline needs to be addressed is funding. The Commission is almost entirely supported by hunters and trappers, or assets that have been procured with license dollars. There has been a steady decline in hunting license sales since 1980. Since 2008 the rate of decline has increased to about 9% per year.
A decrease in funding because of the decrease in license sales means a decrease in the ability of the Game Commission to maintain our 1.5 million acres of State Game Lands. This means a cutback in hiring and employing vital personnel, purchasing large expenditure equipment and general operational supplies that the Commission must have in order to adequately function.
Who will fund the conservation, preservation, and administration of these large tracks of PA land if the Game Commission cannot do it with sales from hunting licenses? Will these lands be auctioned off to commercial developers? Will PA residents be subjected to user fees like Delaware residents must pay for the use their State Parks? The Delaware model could be worth looking into.
The problem is that the Game Commission is commissioned by hunter advocates from the State Legislature. Legislators, especially from the rural counties outside of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, garner votes from hunters who are in denial that their sport is dying. These hunters remind me a bit of our former state Steelworkers who after decades of never having it so good saw their industry eclipsed by other countries because of their inability to work together with management and their failure to modernize. These legislators enable their hunter constituency and delude them into thinking that they will always be in their corner...at least as long as they are not asking for money. These conservative legislators would much rather privatize public lands than fund them. In a pinch that means bye-bye to the game lands.
Hunters are barking up the wrong tree. They should be barking up the tree of the Democrats but then that would entail an alliance with environmentalists and their ilk. That would cause the hunter establishment an identity crisis. I can't envisage a poster of a Tioga County deer hunter hugging a tree or AOC in blaze orange holding a beer.
That the hunters are in denial about the future of their hunting grounds is unfortunate and so is the fact that their sport is dying. PA needs hunters, especially deer hunters; we need hunting to preserve and help stabilize the environment. Over populations of animals can lead to destructive imbalances both in suburban areas with roadkill both human and animal and on farms with crop damage. Deer are the deadliest animal in the United States and they can do a lot of damage to Christmas Tree plantations when they rub their antlers on the trees to mark their territory.
Youth programs have not curtailed the decline in hunting licenses sales and neither will increasing the number of days to hunt. Also, hunter advocacy is on the decline since so many hunters have aged beyond their activist years. There just aren't enough hunters to continue the fight. Another reason for the decline in license sales is Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) in the deer population that has made deer hunting literally unpalatable.
Recently the PA legislature passed Sunday Hunting but surprisingly the PA Farm Bureau opposed the legislation. Why? Because of hunters trespassing. I think that it is poignant that the PA Farm Bureau was against Sunday hunting considering how much damage deer do to crops. This group's opposition to Sunday hunting should not be understated and that brings us to the issue of hunter etiquette as opposed to hunter brutishness.
The main concern of the Farm Bureau is with hunters who trespass and ignore posted signs. Imagine waking up one morning and finding a group of strangers walking on your property with guns. I have experience with this issue. Imagine waking up and looking out your bedroom window to see someone with a gun pissing on the azaleas you have naturalized in the hedgerow.
My family owned a tree nursery in East Fallowfield Twp. in Chester County. Our fields were posted but nonetheless hunters would cross our property without permission often damaging young plants. I believe that hunters who ignore posted signs think that their "right" to hunt is linked to their constitutional right to bear firearms.
As landowners, all my family was asking for was a little respect, that is, for the hunter to stop and ask permission to hunt the property; and preferably to ask before hunting season. We never had any concerns with hunters retrieving their harvest from our fields. I never had any experience with hunters who did not explain themselves while retrieving their harvest. We never had a problem with hunters cleaning their harvest in our fields. However, we did have problems with hunters who thought that their rights as a hunter were more important than our rights as landowners. On one occasion we had hunters surprise customers in our field while tagging plant stock for purchase.
My elderly parents were harassed by a hunter for years who thought my parents were harassing him. I recall one bow-hunter in his thirties who parked his pick up truck inches from my parents' property line simply to irritate them. He and his friends were loud and left their trash and beer cans after they left. My parents voiced their concerns to no avail. They even called the police. The police said there was very little they could do because the neighboring absentee farmer had given the hunter permission to hunt the property. The hunter actually told my parents that he didn't care if they called the police because he knew the police.
After my parents died, he became bolder. Their home was vacant for about eight months. He would park his truck in their driveway. He even had the audacity to use their water and hose to clean his deer on their driveway.
The Game Commission needs more authority to discipline these types of errant hunters. The problem the Game Commission faces is this decline in hunting license sales statewide. Since it is the fees from the licenses that fund the Game Commission and the maintenance of the SGL, if there are stricter licensing requirements and harsher penalties for hunting violations, it follows that there will be less funding. Hunters will go to neighboring states where the rules may be more lax or less enforced.
For the Farm Bureau constituency, it seems that privacy rights and property rights outweigh the Second Amendment. That should not be the argument but when it comes to hunter's rights, the argument usually falls into a debate about the Second Amendment and just about anything else from animal rights to sacrosanct Sunday. The tensions between interest and identity groups have prevented conversations about viable and equitable solutions to the ultimate future of the SGL.
When questions and concerns arise, hunters automatically take the position that those who have concerns are either anti-gun or have the Bambi Syndrome. Hunters forget that hunting is a privilege not a right. The 2nd Amendment does not guarantee the right to hunt. This will not change as long as hunters politicize the issue. Non-hunters forget about the large tracts of land that are open to them for recreation at the hunter's expense. Hunters appear defensive to ungrateful non-hunters. Then the partisan narrative gets ugly.
Money talks. As the hunters go, so go the SGL. It is projected that with the current 9% annual decline in hunting license sales that over the next 8-9 years, the number of hunters will be cut by half.
I last hunted in 1994 but I still fish and if it weren't for my grandchildren's excitement, rarely bait my hook.
It is a shame that hunters are so narrow minded that they fail to see the benefit of having allies in those groups who enjoy the outdoors for recreation and environmentalists who want to preserve open space. It is a shame that non-hunters are so narrow minded that they fail to see the benefit of having hunter allies who want to preserve as much open space as they do and cull the herds to keep them safe.
The ultimate question as always will be for hunter and non-hunter alike...at whose expense do we preserve these lands?
