Public Menace

Alas, I am thoroughly familiar with the Pennsylvania hunter, having watched him in action. More often than not he hunts from a seated position, in a place where he has always hunted, and in habitat that doesn't hold deer because it has been ruined by deer or because the deer that had been there have fled at the first rifle cracks of the new season.

Since anecdotal data seem to carry weight in Pennsylvania, I collected some of my own from a hunter who really is “a killing machine.” His name is Tim Schaeffer and, in addition to serving on the Governor's Council for Hunting, Fishing and Conservation, he is the executive director of Audubon Pennsylvania. Schaeffer doesn't sit on stumps. He looks for the steepest, nastiest, people-unfriendliest terrain, then makes a beeline for it. I asked him how his season had been. He'd had no trouble getting his deer. With him was his father-in-law, who hadn't hunted a day in his 66 years; he got his deer, too. Moreover, to do their thing for the buck-doe ratio, they'd selected antlerless deer. “The notion that there are no deer left couldn't be more incorrect,” he says. “We saw a ton of deer where people are claiming there are none.”

Data of a less anecdotal nature were collected last fall by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers at its 22,000-acre property around Raystown Lake, in south-central Pennsylvania. Hunters were complaining bitterly that the deer had been shot out, but an infrared aerial survey revealed that the deer were merely doing what they do when they're hunted—evading hunters. One area contained 80 deer per square mile, and the average was 51—roughly three times what Alt and his management team had determined to be environmentally acceptable.

Will the game commissioners fold under pressure from the Unified Sportsmen of Pennsylvania and its Greek chorus, and go back to its tradition of raising more deer than the land can support? I put the question to Jan Beyea, a former vice-president of National Audubon and a consultant and facilitator for the deer study commissioned by Audubon Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Habitat Alliance. “If history is any example, they will fold,” he said. “Whenever any progress is made in turning deer numbers around, some hunters have a fit, and the game commissioners eliminate the new measures.”

So what's the solution? Education? No, because knowing what's good for you is not the same as wanting what's good for you. “You can ‘educate' hunters till hell freezes over,” says Alt. “But it's like educating children to eat brussels sprouts. They'll get the question right on the exam, but they'll never eat one.”

The interesting, pertinent question therefore becomes: “Why do the vocal sportsmen get what they scream for?” The answer: Because they pay the bills. In Pennsylvania 71 percent of the public wants deer brought into balance with the land, but this cannot happen when the hunters provide virtually 100 percent of the Game Commission's money. The hunters and the commission reject all outside funding proposals because they want to keep the power where it is. Mohr, for example, is quoted by the York Daily Record as saying: “The problem with listening to all the special-interest groups is that, once you compromise, they've already gotten into your fort. Once nonhunters are telling you what you're going to accept, our days are over.” But hunters, who make up only 8 percent of Pennsylvania's population, qualify eminently as a “special-interest group.” The commission is legally mandated to look after all native fauna. Instead, its policy is and always has been: If you can't shoot it, it's not wildlife.

The funding setup at the Game Commission and most state game and fish agencies ensures they present curricula hurtful to everyone and everything—the sort you'd expect in a school where pupils signed their teachers' paychecks. As the deer-study scientists reported, “The Pennsylvania Game Commission needs to establish new funding sources that represent its broader constituencies and provide its full range of stakeholders an opportunity to participate in management decision processes.” Bryon Shissler, one of the study's authors and a consultant to Audubon Pennsylvania, speaks for his fellow environmentalists as well as his fellow hunters when he declares: “We [sportsmen] no longer represent the majority of our fellow conservationists, and we cannot afford to pay for what this state needs and deserves to manage its natural resources responsibly and effectively.”

In the few states where game and fish agencies get public funding, fish, wildlife, and all human user groups, especially sportsmen, benefit spectacularly. The best example is Missouri, which in 1976 passed a one-eighth-of-a-cent sales tax dedicated to fish, wildlife, and forestry, thereby annually providing the state Department of Conservation with about $95 million of its $160 million budget. According to Joel Vance—one of the nation's most respected outdoor writers, a onetime Audubon columnist, and a former Missouri Department of Conservation employee—the tax “has elevated Missouri's conservation program to number one nationally, both in funding and in scope.” A one-tenth-of-a-cent sales tax helps fund the state Department of Natural Resources. As a result Missouri has been able to purchase and protect vast tracts of wild land, all of it open to hunting and fishing. Not only does the tax generate fish and wildlife, it generates money. Fishing, hunting, forestry, and wildlife viewing now bring $7 billion to Missouri's economy each year. Arkansas, which had limped along with one of the nation's stingiest fish and wildlife budgets, went to a one-eighth-of-a-cent conservation tax in 1996 and now gets almost $50 million a year, most of which is spent on nature centers and major land purchases. The recently rediscovered ivory-billed woodpecker is just one beneficiary of such policies.

Alt sums up the efficacy of traditional, license-revenue funding when he observes: “There is no animal the states have paid more attention to and spent more money on than white-tailed deer. And there is no better example of malpractice.” I knew from working with retired biologists that, like old soldiers, they tend to “just fade away.” In a real sense the good ones are old soldiers. So I asked Alt what he intended to do with the remainder of his life. I liked his answer: “I quit the commission because I could do more to solve this deer crisis by working on the outside. I promised the game commissioners that I would spend the rest of my career trying to change the system, that I would become their worst nightmare. That's where I'm headed.”

WHAT YOU CAN DO