User:Terry.clark0905/sandbox/The Decline in Hunter Recruitment and Retention

Over the last decade, there has been a drastic decline in the recruitment and retention of the hunting population. People have been hunting for thousands of years to obtain their own food. Now days, less and less people have the need or desire to want to hunt, which has caused a drastic decline in the numbers of people who hunt. Hunter recruitment and retention has been declining in the U.S., partly because of the loss of traditional practices in which families would introduce their children and other family members into the hunting heritage and lifestyle.

Statistics show that there has been quite a large decrease in the number of hunting license sales and hunting supply sales over the past decade in the U.S. According the U.S. Department of the Interior, hunting participation has dropped by around 2 million participants over the last 10 years (2017). Decades of decline in the total number of hunters in the U.S. have resulted in biological, economic, and social consequences. Wildlife agencies have sustained reduced conservation funding, have experienced difficulty managing impacts of some species, and generally fear erosion of the North American Model of Conservation (Larson, Decker, Stedman, Siemer, Baumer, & Enck, 2013).

With the decline in hunters, there are less mentors out there to help introduce people to hunting, which can eventually create a slow chain reaction where the hunting population numbers continue towards a downward trend. There are many solutions out there to help get more people into. One would be to increase more mentorship and education programs for people who are interested in hunting or are new to hunting. Also, an increase in public lands would increase the amount of land available to people who do not have any land of their own to hunt, thus giving them more of an incentive to get out and explore the woods. An amendment of more outdoor recreational products to the Pittman-Robertson excise tax would help with this situation.

Many people think that people hunt just to kill animals for the trophy aspect, and that hunting is very inhumane, but this is not necessarily the case for most, as hunters are the main reason that there are such a wide variety of different public lands to access. They are also the primary reason that many different species of animals have recovered from the unmanaged hunting of the early days, where settlers and Native Americans were wiping out populations of species for food and parts to sell.

References:

Interior Press. (2017). Press release: New 5-year report shows 101.6 million Americans participated in hunting, fishing, & wildlife activities retrieved from https://www.doi.gov/pressreleases/new-5-year-report-shows-1016-million-americans-participated-hunting-fishing-wildlife

Larson, L. R., Decker, D. J., Stedman, R. C., Siemer, W. F., Baumer, M. S., & Enck, J. W. (2013). Hunter recruitment and retention: A framework for research and action retrieved from https://ecommons.cornell.edu/bitstream/handle/1813/40462/HDRUReport13-4.pdf?sequence=1

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