As a hunter who has been shooting local elk and deer for subsistence for nearly 40 years, I find little to agree with in Wes Siler’s story for ϳԹ Online about trophy hunting. In it, he defends what I consider indefensible: a trip to Alaska where, with the help of an outfitter, he killed a large Alaskan brown bear to make a rug.
Siler’s argument hinges, primarily, on the belief that bear populations must be managed, that the decisions of wildlife management agencies are reliably science-backed and wildlife-focused, and that the money that hunters pay for the privilege of hunting earns them the right to kill predators. I argue that there is no scientific justification for hunting apex predators, that hunters’ disproportionate influence over state wildlife agencies leads to policies that favor hunters over wildlife, and that hunters’ contributions to overall wildlife conservation efforts are overblown.
I’m the former president of the Montana Wildlife Federation, the state’s largest and oldest hunting-based conservation organization. I hunt and kill elk and deer, prey species that evolved with predation. They reproduce quickly and produce surplus populations culled and eaten by predators, including us human hunters. Predators, whether they be bears, wolves, mountain lions or humans, are needed to control prey populations. This is not true with predator species like brown bears. They have different breeding and territorial behaviors than deer and elk, and are fairly self-regulating in population size. Killing them can disrupt social and territorial behaviors, negatively impact reproduction and rearing and result in overall negative consequences for bear populations.
Siler argues that some brown bear populations are isolated, cut off from other populations because of human activities such as logging and road construction. This results in a handful of mature, dominant bears doing most of the breeding, including with their offspring, limiting the genetic diversity of the populations. Killing a carefully chosen number of large males, he claims, can help improve genetic diversity by allowing younger, less dominant bears to breed. He also argues that this work should not be done by professionals, who would have to be paid, but by recreationalists, who will pay “large sums of money” providing “a net benefit to taxpayers.” He then explains that of the three hunters on his trip, only two of them successfully killed animals, and one after shooting it nine times with the help of his guide, raising the question about whether precise population culling is actually the goal here. We don’t ask people to pay to do delicate wildlife management work like tranquilizing and relocating moose. We let the professionals do it.
Whether you believe recreationalists are the people for the job or not, it’s more important to note that not all scientists agree with Siler’s thinking about population management. Brown bears have one of the lowest reproductive rates of any North American mammal, and cubs will spend nearly three years with their mothers. They can be very territorial, and large males provide safety and stability within a territory. Studies conducted in British Columbia, Alberta, Alaska and parts of northern Europe show that the killing of large males often leads to increased competition for breeding among younger males, increased harassment of and stress for females, increased killing of cubs by younger males, and earlier abandonment of cubs by females.
“Any human-caused mortality that disproportionately targets adult brown bears will likely have evolutionary consequences that manifest in the surprisingly short span of decades,” says Dr. David Mattson, a retired grizzly bear biologist and former member of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee. “Hunting and other forms of human-caused mortality targeting adult brown bears distort evolutionary regimes that selected over many millennia for the benefits of a long life. Hunting throws the male-centric world into disarray and upheaval, thus disrupting the social realm of females. In other words, we would no longer have grizzly or brown bears as we know them now.”
In a study titled “Characteristics of a Naturally Regulated Grizzly Bear Population,” conducted in Alaska’s Denali National Park and published in the , researchers compared populations of bears that are hunted with those that are protected. They kept track of births, deaths, and cub survival within the grizzly bear population in the park and compared those numbers to similar areas where bears are hunted. They found that the bears in the park naturally regulated their own population based on food availability. “Bears in the park were regulating the population in face of limited food resources,” wrote the lead research scientist, Jeff Keay. The population had a high birth rate, but also a high rate of cub and yearling deaths. “With no humans hunting the Denali population, it appears bears regulate themselves by managing the number of bears that make it into adulthood.”
So, if the science doesn’t support killing predators, why do these state governments allow it? Siler draws on the history of American conservation and argues that hunting is why “we have such abundant populations of wild animals.” It’s true that hunters have had a big, positive impact in conserving some species (mostly prey species). But they have arguably had a significant negative impact on other species (mostly predators).
Siler explains that hunters and hunting organizations have played important roles in conservation in North America: Theodore Roosevelt and Aldo Leopold were both avid hunters, and groups like the Boone and Crockett Club and the National Wildlife Federation do excellent work. But plenty of non-hunters have shaped American conservation too: John Muir, John J. Audubon, Rachel Carson, the Sierra Club. Yet hunters have disproportionate influence over state wildlife agencies and policies.
These agencies work closely with governor-appointed game or wildlife commissions primarily made up of hunters, outfitters, and ranchers, so state policies greatly favor species that hunters and anglers like to catch and kill—often to the detriment of other species, particularly large carnivores such as wolves, mountain lions, and bears. Late last spring, for example, around Wood-Tikchik State Park in Southwest Alaska, state game and fish officials killed 94 brown bears, five black bears, and five wolves, shooting them from helicopters during a 17-day period. They were directed to do this by the Alaska Board of Game—a group of six men and one woman, all hunters, big game guides, or trappers, appointed by the governor to oversee the game and fish department. Their reason? To protect caribou from predators to boost hunting opportunity.
In the late 1990s, there was concern among hunters that bears were killing too many elk calves in the clearwater region of Idaho, reducing hunting opportunities. Hunters wanted state officials to kill more bears (as they do in Alaska, and as they do with wolves). The Idaho Department of Fish and Game conducted a study and within the elk herds and low bull-to-cow ratios. But they found that this was not caused by bears—rather by humans overhunting bull elk, which negatively impacted breeding during the fall rut. That, in turn, affected the timing of spring calving. Calves were born later in the season, after the lush early spring forage had begun to die off. They were also born over a longer period of time. Under more natural conditions, calves are born all at once, overwhelming predators with what biologists call a “flooding strategy” that allows most calves to grow quickly and evade predation. Biologists recommended that hunting regulations be changed to protect and restore large, mature bull elk and boost bull-to-cow ratios in the herd. But the state ended up .
Siler cites the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation as evidence that hunting, as it stands, is ethical and sustainable. The model was developed in the late 1990s by Canadian wildlife biologists Valerius Geist and Shane Mahoney, and John Organ of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. They identified the core tenets that they believed had made conservation successful in North America up to that point and should continue guiding wildlife management in the future: that wildlife resources are a public trust and an international resource; that there will be no commercial market for wildlife; that wildlife can be killed for a legitimate purpose; that science-backed laws and regulations will direct policy and allocation of wildlife for hunting; and that hunting will be guided by a democratic process in which all citizens have a say and opportunity to participate.
In truth, wildlife management is rarely guided by the North American Model, and, in most states, the tenets are ignored or compromised to appease hunters and protect hunting opportunity. in every state except Hawaii, and trappers are allowed to sell furs and other animal parts for profit. Hunters have a disproportionate say in wildlife management policy, wildlife is commodified as a consumer good through tag and permit sales, and the laws and regulations are not reliably science-backed.
Finally, Siler leans heavily on the false but common claim that hunters and anglers disproportionately fund conservation. Specifically, he cites excise taxes generated from the sale of guns, ammunition, motor boat fuel, and fishing equipment under the Pittman-Robertson and Dingell-Johnson acts. Last year alone, he writes, taxes levied on hunters and anglers paid $1.5 billion to state wildlife programs. But there are some problems with his numbers. Guns and ammunition sales generate about , and the majority of guns and ammunition are not purchased for hunting—in 2021, just of those sales were hunting-related. And only two-thirds of those who buy motor-boat fuel participate in fishing.
These funds account for around 53 percent of state wildlife agency budgets. The rest derives from general tax funds paid by all citizens, and all citizens pay for the state and federal lands where a lot of wildlife lives.
Since hunters make up less than 20 percent of the U.S. population and contribute over 50 percent of funding for these departments, it is true that they contribute more than the general public to these agencies. But state wildlife departments are not the only entities responsible for conservation, and I reject the idea that conservation is limited to their actions. Furthermore, not everything these departments do is conservation, and some of the things they do are likely detrimental to conservation.
Conservation, as defined by the , is “the protection, preservation, management, or restoration of natural environments and the ecological communities that inhabit them. Conservation is generally held to include the management of human use of natural resources for current public benefit and sustainable social and economic utilization.” This includes managing game populations, certainly. But this definition also includes the work done by other governmental agencies responsible for protecting the public lands these animals inhabit, including the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, the U.S. Forest Service, and more—all of which are funded by the general taxpayer. Not to mention the hundreds of non-profits and organizations that work to protect wildlife and land across the country.
The best way to ensure the long-term genetic health and viability of brown bear populations is not through killing them. Instead, we must protect enough habitat for them to freely move and live as they evolved to, with room to adapt to future, changing conditions. In his 1953 book Round River Aldo Leopold wrote, “If the land mechanism as a whole is good then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”
That includes keeping large male brown bears around; not killing them for rugs.
An avid hunter, angler and former Force Recon Marine, David Stalling is the Director of Communications for LargeCarnivoreFund.org , and also serves on the Advisory Committee for Wildlife For All, working to reform wildlife management. He lives in Missoula, Montana.