SCIENCE BLASTS By John F. Organ, B&C Professional Member Excerpt from Summer 2017 issue of Fair Chase Those of us in the hunting community take great pride in the fact the dollars we spend on hunting licenses, firearms, ammunition, and archery equipment are the financial backbone of state-...
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Much debate has occurred through the years over the value and purpose of maintaining records of “trophy” big game animals killed by hunters. This has become magnified in recent years with a focus on trophy hunting in general, spawned in part by the Cecil the Lion episode, and in conflicting reports on the genetic impacts of trophy hunting to big game populations in particular.
SCIENCE BLASTS By John F. Organ, B&C Professional Member Excerpt from Summer 2020 issue of Fair Chase Wildlife conservation in the United States has progressed through many phases while adhering to some core principles. Most significant is the common law doctrine that wildlife is held in trust...
SCIENCE BLASTS By John F. Organ, B&C Professional Member Drs. Dave Wattles and Steve DeStefano of the Massachusetts Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit attach a GPS collar to a bull moose in west-central Massachusetts. Excerpt from Spring 2016 issue of Fair Chase The distribution of the...
By Keith Balfourd, B&C Professional Member Excerpt from the Fall 2018 issue of Fair Chase Good question. For the sake of this column, the word “antis” refers to those who are vocally opposed to hunting. Some may also be animal rights advocates, although not all. If the concept of fair chase is...
By Craig Boddington — Under certain conditions, I enjoy hunting with iron sights, which parallels using archery tackle, handguns, and muzzleloaders: You’re consciously surrendering range and losing critical first- and last-light capability. If you can’t see, you definitely can’t shoot.
I was pronghorn hunting, walking through rolling sage, when a coyote came out of a little draw and trotted across my view. I flopped down to shoot prone...
Imagine a 300-pound male bear at the edge of a hardwood forest that borders a crop field bursting with ripe corn. Does he take a detour to avoid venturing into this exposed area, or does he walk in and enjoy the abundance of food? Would it matter if this was the only crop field in the area or adjacent to five other fields? Or if there were many bears in the area? Or if there were people nearby? What if this bear was a sow with two cubs in tow?
By John Organ — Nearly 100 years ago Aldo Leopold, the father of game management, coined the term “harvestable surplus.” The intended meaning of the term is that some wildlife species and populations may produce more young in a given year than can survive to the following year. Those individuals doomed to die over the winter, for example, represent the “surplus” in the population. Leopold observed that those surplus animals could be killed by hunters during the fall, instead of succumbing to winter mortality, and there would be little impact on the population. So, in theory, hunting would be sustainable because the population would not change.
THE ETHICS OF FAIR CHASE By Daniel A. Pedrotti Jr. B&C Regular Member Chairman, Hunter Ethics Sub-Committee Excerpt from Fair Chase, Spring 2015 We are a community of multitudes and generations. Our way of life predates recorded history. Our roots go back to a time when there was no thought of...
THE ETHICS OF FAIR CHASE By Daniel A. Pedrotti Jr. B&C Regular Member Chairman, Hunter Ethics Sub-Committee Excerpt from Fair Chase, Fall 2015 When man first hunted, “fair” was probably not on his list of priorities. Likewise, I am pretty sure “chase” was to be avoided at all costs, and was...
THE ETHICS OF FAIR CHASE By Daniel A. Pedrotti Jr. B&C Regular Member Chairman, Hunter Ethics Sub-Committee Excerpt from Fair Chase, Winter 2015 Wild (naturally occurring), free-ranging (unrestricted within its biological home range) big game has always been the central focus of the Boone and...
THE ETHICS OF FAIR CHASE By Daniel A. Pedrotti Jr. B&C Regular Member Chairman, Hunter Ethics Sub-Committee Excerpt from Fair Chase, Spring 2016 We all know that sometimes the words we use mean different things to different people. This happens be-cause we have diverse back-grounds and...
THE ETHICS OF FAIR CHASE By Daniel A. Pedrotti Jr. B&C Regular Member Chairman, Hunter Ethics Sub-Committee Excerpt from Fair Chase, Summer 2016 When you consider the phrase fair chase literally, it is nonsense. There is nothing fair about chasing animals with the advantage of our human...
THE ETHICS OF FAIR CHASE By Daniel A. Pedrotti Jr. B&C Regular Member Chairman, Hunter Ethics Sub-Committee Excerpt from Fair Chase, Fall 2016 I recently attended a meeting of the Texas Parks and Wild-life (TPW) Commission, which sets policy for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD)...
THE ETHICS OF FAIR CHASE By Daniel A. Pedrotti Jr. B&C Regular Member Chairman, Hunter Ethics Sub-Committee Excerpt from Fair Chase, Spring 2017 Here we are at the beginning of a brand new year with several good reasons to reconsider and rededicate ourselves to those things we hold most...
THE ETHICS OF FAIR CHASE By Mark Streissguth B&C Regular Member Excerpt from Fair Chase, Summer 2017 During a coffee break recently, I was thumbing through some outdoor magazines. Between the hunting stories and how-to pieces, I found myself really reading the advertisements and some product...
Recently my wife and I attended a documentary on the disturbing amount of food waste in our country and the world, titled, “Just Eat It.” I didn’t see a connection with hunting ethics until I was in a discussion at our recent annual meeting of the Boone and Crockett Club in Nashville. Many members were lamenting the bad press that hunters get, i.e., “Cecil the lion,” and the fact that study after study has shown that only about 20 percent of the non-hunting public approves of trophy hunting, whereas 70-80 percent or more approve of legal hunting if its purpose is to produce food and/or to enhance wildlife management.
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