America’s wildlife agencies have spent years developing an ambitious program called R3—Recruitment, Retention and Reactivation—designed to persuade more ordinary citizens to hunt and fish.
The theory is that agencies should recruit newcomers, retain current sportsmen and reactivate those who have wandered away from the outdoors, perhaps after discovering that golf entails fewer opportunities to accidentally commit a misdemeanor.
Government agencies, conservation organizations and outdoor companies have invested substantial money, manpower and meeting-room coffee in studying why people begin hunting and fishing, why they quit and how to bring them back. After all that research, the newly recruited hunter is generally welcomed into the fraternity with a regulation booklet written with the friendliness of an aircraft-maintenance manual and the simplicity of the federal tax code.
“Welcome to hunting,” the agency effectively says. “Please identify this duck while it travels 45 miles per hour in predawn light, remember which of six management zones you currently occupy, determine whether your shotgun plug satisfies both state and federal law, consult today’s precisely calculated shooting hours, count every bird possessed by everyone sleeping in your cabin and preserve the fully feathered wing required for identification during transportation.
Also, please remember that the rules may have changed since last Tuesday. Good luck, youngster.” Several months later, the same agency convenes an expensive symposium to explore why hunter recruitment remains difficult.
No reasonable sportsman disputes the need for serious game laws. Seasons, bag limits, licensing systems, habitat protections and restrictions against commercial wildlife trafficking form the architecture of modern conservation. Wanton waste should be illegal. So should spotlighting deer, deliberately exceeding bag limits and selling wildlife on the black market.
Hunters should be required to make a reasonable effort to retrieve wounded game, and anyone intentionally pillaging a public resource deserves more than a sternly worded brochure. The problem is not that game laws exist. The problem is that, over time, the wildlife code in many states has developed the same governing philosophy as a teenager’s bedroom closet: everything that has ever gone in remains there forever, and opening the door can result in injury.
Somewhere between protecting wildlife and specifying the paperwork that must accompany somebody else’s salmon, the regulatory train jumped the tracks, crossed three wildlife-management units and struck a man carrying an improperly labeled goose breast.
Federal migratory-bird regulations alone contain separate provisions governing taking, possession, transportation, exportation, importation, processing facilities, feathers, tagging and annual hunting frameworks. States then stack their own statutes, commission rules, emergency orders, species tables, zone maps and annual proclamations on top.
Add tribal jurisdictions, national wildlife refuges, national forests, special management areas and local restrictions, and a duck hunter may need more legal counsel than a regional bank acquisition. There exist days when the most important piece of gear in the blind is not a retriever or a shotgun, but a regulatory attorney with waterproof boots.
Washington State, for example, has rules governing possession of fish caught by another person. Under certain circumstances, the fish must be accompanied by a written statement containing the taker’s name, address, license number, signature, date and area of catch. Apparently, giving a neighbor a salmon fillet now requires documentation normally associated with adopting a Romanian orphan.
The state may also require anglers to surrender tagged portions of fish—including salmon snouts—for research purposes, which undoubtedly makes biological sense but can be awkward to explain when a game officer finds three severed fish noses in the cooler. “Officer, I assure you, this is science,” is a sentence no citizen should ever have to utter beside an interstate highway.
Many of these rules began with legitimate biological or enforcement purposes. The trouble is accumulation. Regulations are born but almost never die. Every unusual incident produces another paragraph, every paragraph requires a new definition, and every definition produces a subparagraph explaining whether a fishing lure may possess emotional-support feathers.
Somewhere in a state archive, there is probably a regulation created in 1978 after Earl Jenkins transported a muskrat in an improperly ventilated Buick. Earl is dead, the Buick is rusting in a pasture and the muskrat’s descendants have moved on, but the regulation remains, quietly waiting to turn somebody’s grandson into a wildlife criminal.
Occasionally, the machinery produces an enforcement episode so peculiar that even experienced hunters begin looking for hidden cameras. In South Carolina, a hunter was arrested after stopping his truck and looking through binoculars at a deer decoy positioned near a road during a night-hunting sting. Body-camera footage reportedly showed he never shone on the decoy with an artificial light.
The charge was eventually dismissed for insufficient evidence, and the hunter later filed a lawsuit alleging false arrest and malicious prosecution. The state agency disputes his version of events, but the episode nevertheless raises an obvious question: At what point did looking at a plastic deer become the wildlife equivalent of robbing Fort Knox?
That is not an indictment of game wardens generally. Most perform difficult, dangerous and indispensable work, often alone in remote places while confronting armed people whose judgment may have been marinating in whiskey since breakfast. Genuine poaching can be organized, lucrative and destructive.
Federal investigations have uncovered commercial market-hunting operations responsible for killing and selling huge numbers of ducks, and modern wildlife traffickers continue moving illegally obtained fish, reptiles and other animals across state and international borders. Those are actual wildlife crimes. They damage populations, undermine lawful hunters and steal a public resource for private profit. Looking through binoculars at a decoy, forgetting to sign a fish-transfer slip or carrying a pheasant across the wrong invisible line does not occupy quite the same moral universe.
The distinction matters because conservation law loses credibility when a harmless paperwork error, an obscure possession rule, or a disputed technical violation is pursued with the same enthusiasm reserved for deliberate poaching.
Hunters and anglers should not need a laminated flowchart to determine whether their lunch became contraband when it crossed a county line. They should not have to download three agency applications, consult a geolocation map, review an emergency proclamation, and call a regional office before deciding whether they may keep a fish. A system that ordinary, well-intentioned citizens cannot reasonably understand is not promoting compliance. It is manufacturing violations.
Every state should conduct a top-to-bottom review of its hunting and fishing regulations with a presumptive goal of eliminating 30 percent. That would not weaken conservation; properly done, it would strengthen it. Every rule should be required to answer a simple question: Does this materially protect wildlife, habitat, public safety, fair chase, or scientifically defensible management? If the answer is yes, keep it, explain it clearly and enforce it consistently. If the answer is that nobody remembers why the rule exists but Marvin in licensing thinks it may have involved a raccoon during the Carter administration, send it to the great regulatory compost pile.
The review should also include expiration dates for rules created to address temporary conditions. Government has an uncanny ability to declare emergencies that achieve immortality. Restrictions are added after droughts, disease outbreaks, population declines or isolated incidents, yet the circumstances eventually change while the rules remain bolted permanently to the code.
The regulatory instinct is always to add another layer because repealing a rule requires an official to accept responsibility, while creating one merely requires a committee, a public comment period, and enough acronyms to conceal what is happening. Wildlife agencies routinely insist that management must be adaptive, but the regulations themselves often adapt with all the agility of petrified wood.
Agencies cannot credibly spend millions recruiting hunters and anglers, only to greet those recruits with an obstacle course of overlapping rules that can transform innocent confusion into criminal exposure. R3 should not stand for Recruit, Regulate and Revoke. Conservation depends upon public participation, license sales, excise-tax revenue and broad confidence that game laws exist to protect wildlife rather than to create an endless scavenger hunt for technical violations.
People are more likely to respect rules they understand, and wardens are more effective when they can focus on actual poachers rather than conducting forensic examinations of freezer labels.
Protect the resource. Punish deliberate poaching. Simplify everything else. And perhaps print the remaining regulations in a booklet small enough to fit somewhere other than the bed of a pickup.
– Chris Dorsey
Chris Dorsey is a 30-year media veteran and conservation thought leader who is the founding partner of Dorsey Pictures, a Global 100 Production Studio, and Mission Partners Entertainment Group, a leading IMAX/giant screen natural history producer.