Reprinted from column in Morgantown Dominion Post, Febr 2009
When a bowhunting friend from Massachusetts emailed me a copy of a story from Newsweek magazine three weeks ago, I ignored it. He wanted me to refute the story with a letter to the editor, but I just didn’t have time and I knew national wildlife hunting organizations would to it anyway.
Then last week a neighbor brought me the magazine, and it is filled with such drivel, that I just had to try to set the record straight, at least for our readers. The article is titled "It’s Survival of the Weak and Scrawny." It opens talking about Teddy Roosevelt, the conservationist/hunter. Here are quotes from the first few sentences. "In North America he (Roosevelt) stalked deer, pronghorn antelope, bighorn sheep, and elk, which he called ‘lordly game’ for their majestic antlers." One sentence later it goes on to say, "It’s that just 100 years after his expeditions, many of the kind of magnificent trophies he routinely captured are becoming rare. Elk still range across parts of North America, but every hunting season brings a greater challenge to find the sought-after bull with a towering spread of antlers."
Read that again, and you get the impression that big-antlered and horned deer, pronghorns, sheep and elk are becoming "rare." That’s what it says. It says that you can’t find good bull elk anymore. Why am I not surprised that the national press gets it wrong? Expecting Newsweek to give you unbiased scientific reporting on hunting and wildlife would be like expecting to find gardening tips in the WVU Football Media Guide.
The gist of the article is that hunters kill the biggest antlered trophies, and this means that the weaker males do the mating because there are no big males out there. The story then goes on to cite some examples. But then at the end of the article, it states, "at present, researchers’ alarm about these trends are based on theories that are hard to prove." Boy is that the truth. Evolution is a slow process. I mean, very slow. You still carry those wisdom teeth that cause us problems and serve no purpose. Some day, maybe in 1,000 years or so, noone will get wisdom teeth. Same is true for proving that killing big antlered deer is weakening the deer herd genetically.
But wait a minute. There is more to this story. New DNA research on white-tailed deer shows that the biggest antlered bucks do not do all the mating. Whitetails get the biggest antlers when they reach 5 years of age. But more does are mated by 3 1/2-year-old bucks than the older, bigger bucks. And, we now know that 30% of all does are mated by 1 ½-year-old bucks even where there is no hunting. Still further, we now know that most bucks mate only 1-2 does per year. This means that a lot of different bucks, different-aged bucks, are mating does. So, even if hunters shot ALL of the biggest antlered bucks, that would have little to do with deer genetics.
Beyond that, the truth is that hunters shoot very few of the biggest bucks. And beyond that, if we were shooting most of the biggest bucks, most of the biggest elk, most of the biggest pronghorns, etc., then hunters would take fewer and fewer of these big critters from one year to the next. But that isn’t happening either. We continue to get new world records all the time. In a state like Arizona, which has great elk, if hunters were shooting most of the biggest bulls, then every year there would be fewer big bulls out there. Indeed, from the earlier quote from the Newsweek article listed above, it’s harder and harder to find big bull elk. Not so. Not so for deer, elk, most species. New world records pop up year after year. Elk numbers and quality are great. Deer numbers and antler quality just keep going. True for most every hunted, antlered species.
The article ends by stating that "The most popular method of regulating hunting—restricting legal game to males with a minimum antler size—results in populations overrun with females and inferior males, which is ultimately no service to hunters." Hmmm. We’ve restricted hunters to take only certain bucks forever. The three-inch spike rule is a common example. That has not been the cause of too many does and lots of little bucks. And in Pennsylvania and many places around the country, there are antler restrictions limiting hunters to shooting bucks with 3 or 4 points on one side, and this has not resulted in being overrun with females and inferior males.
In fact, just the opposite is true. It’s called good, sound, wildlife management and the state wildlife agencies have been doing that for years.
So, since the "theory" really doesn’t hold for our antlered species in the United States, does it hold for other species? Maybe, maybe not. The group that comes to my mind are marine fish. Over fishing of many ocean fish species has been going on for years. The United States restricts our catch, but many countries do not and the size and number of some species is seeing significant declines. Why? Because there are no enforceable regulations. What regulations exist are ignored by foreign fishing vessels, many of them taking fish right off our coastline. That’s why you are seeing farm raised fish in the super markets. That’s why you will see the extinction of some species of marine fish in the near future. I’m wondering why the three-page article in Newsweek only devoted a few sentences to this problem?
The article does mention studies on elephants and wild sheep, and we’ll look at that next week. Relative to our hunted mammals in the United States, contrary to what you might read elsewhere, it is not about the survival of the weak and scrawny.
