So, Where Are They?

By:  Ward M. Clark

Wildlife in the United States is the subject of much debate.  On one side you have hunters, anglers, and outfitters who enjoy wildlife not only for the recreation and culinary opportunities they provide, but also for the beauty and serenity of their surroundings.  On the other, you have the strident proponents of the radical Animal Rights agenda, who would proscribe any taking of wildlife, for any reason.

Caught in the middle are the wild animals and birds of North America, whose well-being hangs in the balance as two diametrically opposed groups of humans fight out a war of words over the ultimate fate of America’s wildlife.  In the meantime, virtually on a daily basis, another stretch of vital wildlife habitat is plowed under, bulldozed, drained, and “developed.”

In his classic 1949 work A Sand County Almanac, conservationist Aldo Leopold wrote, "All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts... The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land."[1]

Who is it, then, that today strives to abide by Leopold’s visionary land ethic?

Habitat is the single greatest wildlife issue we face today.  America’s wild lands are increasingly coming under the developer’s bulldozer, being plotted, subdivided, developed.  In our quest to be closer to Nature, we are leaving Nature with very little room.  Without habitat, there will be no wildlife, and the arguing of opposed advocacy groups will be for naught.  The question then arises; who is really doing something about the habitat problem?

The Animal Rights advocacy groups claim to be working for wildlife; a lot of the rhetoric put forth by the Animal Rights organizations claim to have protection of wildlife as part of their agendas.  To examine this, we might look at one of the largest and best known groups, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PeTA).  PeTA has an annual budget of almost $14 million, a membership of about half a million.  With those resources, PeTA could be preserving thousands of acres of wildlife habitat; instead, not one acre of wildlife habitat has been preserved, restored, or protected by the folks at PeTA. 

PeTA proclaims its position on hunting with regard to financing and habitat preservation quite plainly on their World Wide Web page:  “The relatively small fee each hunter pays does not cover the cost of hunting programs or game warden salaries. Hunting fees pay for hunter programs that benefit only hunters, like manipulating animal populations to increase the number of animals available to kill. The public lands that many hunters use are supported by taxpayers, and funds benefiting "nongame" species are scarce.”

In fact, none of the above statements are true.  The first sentence,  “The relatively small fee each hunter pays does not cover the cost of hunting programs or game warden salaries” is completely unfounded.  The truth of the matter is that State wildlife agencies, who bear the cost of wildlife law enforcement and habitat preservation, are funded almost entirely by license fees and Federal funds gathered by the Pittman-Robertson Act.

The Colorado Division of Wildlife publishes its funding sources annually.  For the Division’s fiscal year 1996-1997, 70.77% of the Division’s $76.7 million in operating funds came directly from license sales; 12.18% from the P-R fund; 6.9% from the Colorado Lottery, and only 0.46% from a voluntary State tax form checkoff.  That adds up to 82.95% of the operating capital directly from sportsmen and women, putting the lie to PeTA’s claim. 

PeTA’s second claim, “Hunting fees pay for hunter programs that benefit only hunters, like manipulating animal populations to increase the number of animals available to kill,” is also misleading at best.  In the first place, habitat preserved with hunter’s dollars is of benefit to all wildlife, not just game species.  State agencies, however, do quite a lot of non-game work that PeTA seems to ignore; the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, for example, funds and operates the Wildlife Diversity Program, devoted to non-game wildlife.  The Wildlife Diversity Program has reintroduced the River Otter into Iowa, and is working with landowners to protect and restore nesting sites and habitat for the Eastern Bluebird.   Farther west, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife operates a similar program called  “Teaming with Wildlife.”  The TWW program is funding construction of birdwatching trails, restoring riparian habitat, and providing educational materials to teach schoolchildren about Oregon birds and animals.

Finally, PeTA claims that “The public lands that many hunters use are supported by taxpayers, and funds benefiting "nongame" species are scarce.”  In fact, most public lands across the US are State owned and controlled, with the exception of the Rocky Mountain States, which have high proportions of Federal lands.  What PeTA conveniently leaves unsaid is that the public lands administered by State and Federal governments are open to everyone to use, hunter and non-hunter alike.  Also, PeTA omits the fact that non-hunting use of public lands exceeds hunters’ use by a huge margin; and that the Federal and State lands support many species of wildlife other than game species.

What’s really interesting, however, is to look at the track record of the Animal Rights organizations with respect to wildlife habitat.  The following table lists several of the larger Animal Rights groups and their contributions to wildlife habitat:

It’s easy to see that, while the Animal Rights movement is long on talk with respect to wildlife, they are sadly short on action.

While the Animal Rights advocacy groups are promoting their agenda, all over the West, you see habitat diminish, day after day, week after week, year after year.  More and more area is developed.  Acres of wildlife habitat are converted to condos, golf courses, casinos, and ski runs.  More executive homes are sprouting up on ridgelines, more paved roads to carry the Volvos and BMWs farther back into what was once premium wildlife habitat.

Even so, there is a note of hope in the urbanization of the West.  There are groups of people working to preserve wildlife habitat.  In southern Colorado, 30,000 acres of land in the Upper Purgatoire River valley has now been removed from development and set aside as the Bosque Del Oso State Wildlife Area.  For years it seemed as though this land was destined to be broken up into a few score 35-acre “ranchettes” like so much other land in this scenic area.  The Montana Power Company previously owned this land; it is now owned by the people of Colorado, purchased at the cost of over $19 million dollars. Where did the money come from?   Not from any of the Animal Rights groups.  Not a penny.

A great deal of the money for this purchase was raised and donated for this cause by the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, a Missoula, Montana based organization dedicated to preserving habitat vital to the American Elk.  The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation (RMEF) was founded by a group of sportsmen, elk hunters to be precise, in 1984, and since that time RMEF has been involved in preserving and enhancing over 2.3 million acres of wildlife habitat in 48 States and 8 Canadian provinces.

Many other projects have been financed and aided by the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation.  These include Arizona’s 1,362 acre White Mountain Ranch, a parcel of mountain meadows, forest and wetland surrounded by the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest that provides crucial winter habitat for elk, and is home for at least two threatened species, the Little Colorado Spindace and the Apache trout.  In California, the RMEF has successfully procured the 4,487-acre Orr Lake habitat for wildlife, as well as the 302-acre Dastella Flat property that provides vital wildlife habitat for California’s unique Tule Elk.  Moving to Colorado, the RMEF was instrumental in the preservation of the 1,320 acre Catamount Ranch, which includes a vital north-south migration corridor for wildlife; the 4,200 acre King Mountain Ranch, and the 2,100 acre South Paw Ranch.  These properties, formerly primed for development, are now protected for wildlife.

The Foundation’s efforts are not confined to the Rocky Mountain states, either.  Chapters in the East have worked to set aside 1,500 acres in Pennsylvania and have worked on reintroduction of elk into New York and Kentucky, both parts of the American elk’s original range.

But the habitat issue isn’t confined to elk, or to mountainous and wooded areas.  Across North America, you see wetlands in crisis – marshes are being drained for shopping centers, parking lots, and apartment complexes.  Swampy areas are seen by many as just a nuisance, a breeding ground for mosquitoes, something to be drained, filled, and converted into something “useful.”  Much of the East Coasts’ historic wetlands has been drained and developed.

Here too there is hope.  In as unlikely a place as Long Island, over 1000 acres of wetlands has been restored, providing vital habitat for waterfowl, shorebirds, and many species of animals.  The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the New York Department of Environmental Conservation, and the Suffolk County Vector Control Division have signed the Long Island memorandum of Understanding.  The agenda is to set out to restore 10,000 acres of coastal wetland and sub-tidal habitats on Long Island and surrounding areas over the next ten years.  The Animal Rights organizations were conspicuous by their absence in this issue.  In fact, the lynchpin of the agreement, and source of much of the funding, is a group called Ducks Unlimited.

Ducks Unlimited was founded in 1937 by a group of dedicated conservationists, and has grown into one of the largest sportsmen’s organizations in the world.  Today, Ducks Unlimited has raised over $1.4 billion to protect over 8.5 million acres of vital wetland habitat.

Ducks Unlimited’s projects have resulted in the protection of such areas as the White Lake Refuge in Tennessee, the St. Catherine Creek National Wildlife Refuge in Mississippi, and the 300,000 acre Ace Basin area in South Carolina’s Low country.

Another habitat issue encompasses farmland, particularly Midwestern row-crop farm country.  In years past, row-crop practices left ample cover for wildlife – sloughs were left unplowed, fencerows grew up in grasses and weeds, and edges were left in trees and high ground cover.  More recently, “clean farming” practices and stagnant grain prices have led many farmers to plow and cultivate every available inch of land – leaving no available homes for the local wildlife.  The Animal Rights movement has, predictably, done nothing to help the dwindling habitat available in the nations’ farmlands. 

Enter Pheasants Forever, a St. Paul, MN based organization dedicated to preservation and restoration of farmland habitat suitable for game birds, and many other forms of wildlife as well.  Since their start in 1982, Pheasants Forever has raised over $24 million, which has gone to protect and restore over 850,000 acres of vital habitat.  Pheasants Forever projects have included renovation of nesting covers, planting windbreaks, establishing forage plots, wetland restorations, and direct land acquisitions.

Now let’s compare the habitat achievements of these few groups.

The good news doesn’t even stop there.  The Federal government is also in the wildlife habitat funding game.   With the passage of the Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Act of 1937, otherwise known as the Pittman-Robertson (P-R) Act, an excise tax was levied on firearms, hunting gear, and later archery tackle.  The funds thus raised are earmarked to be distributed to the States for the sole purpose of wildlife and habitat preservation and restoration programs.

The history of the P-R fund is a story in itself.  In the 1930’s, wildlife in the United States was in a pretty bad state.  Whitetailed and mule deer were scarce, elk had been pushed back into remote mountain fastnesses, waterfowl were dwindling.  The wood duck, a common bird today, was thought to be nearly extinct. 

Then, in the mid 1930’s, a coalition of sportsmen’s groups, conservationists, and sporting goods manufacturers (to include the major firearms manufacturers) joined together to lobby Congress to enact an excise tax on sporting firearms and ammunition. Their efforts bore fruit in the 75^th Congress, when Senator Key Pittman of Nevada and Representative A. Willis Robertson of Virginia introduced the identical bills SB 2670 and HB 7681.  President Franklin Roosevelt signed the final bill into law on September 2, 1937. In the 1970’s, the P/R tax was expanded to include sales of handguns and archery tackle.   The excise taxes amount to 11% on sporting rifles and shotguns, paid by the manufacturer or importer; 11% on ammunition for rifles and shotguns; 11% on archery tackle, and 10% on pistols and revolvers.

Incidentally, in a rare show of fiscal responsibility for a government agency, the US Fish and Wildlife Service uses less than 5% of the proceeds for administering the fund itself. 

Proceeds from the resulting fund were to be distributed to the States for wildlife habitat preservation and restoration projects.  In order to receive the Federal funds, States are required to kick in at least 25% of the sum they are eligible to receive from P/R.  P/R funds, augmented by hunting and fishing license sales, have been of benefit to wildlife of all sorts – from deer to eagles.  States are, by law, able to use the funds disbursed under P/R for specific purposes, which include:

-         Acquisition and improvement of wildlife habitat

-         Reintroduction of wildlife species

-         Population studies

-         Construction of facilities directly related to wildlife

-         Assistance to landowners in matters that affect wildlife

-         Research in wildlife management

-         Hunter (safety) education

-         Target range development

-         Management of wildlife areas

-         Publication of research and management activities

In 1949, Aldo Leopold spoke further to the land ethic;  “In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such."[2]

So, who really cares about wildlife?  Who is upholding Leopold’s vision of the land ethic, of wise stewardship of the environment?  Who’s putting their money where their hearts are?

The facts speak for themselves.

Copyright © 2000 by Ward M. Clark. All rights reserved.