Government hunting

[sackett]

This was part of an increasingly OT safari in a US Politics thread, so I decided to do it right.

I suggest that US game herds be cropped by professional federal hunters. The kill would be processed in government (or government-licensed) plants for maximum efficiency, harvesting meat, organs, hides, bones, antlers -- and by god elk teeth, which can be pricey items.

This was a new idea to some here, but in fact the genesis of my proposal goes way WAY back, to my boyhood in the 1950s. Back then, the Absoraka (Crow) tribe up in Montana had a system of tribal hunters, men appointed to crop the deer and other hooved animals on the Agency. Each hunter provided a number of families with meat. Hides, I think, were sold to tanneries.

That's right, a Plains tribe had pros to shoot their meat. The hunters also had responsibility for keeping coyotes in check, although by no means trying to eradicate them.

In those days, my father was partnering a gun shop in Sheridan, Wyoming, about 60 miles south of the Agency. When a tribal hunter's rifle needed work, my father was their man to go to. An interesting clientele. They didn't all speak much English (I said this was way back when), but there was nothing they needed telling about responsible game management.

Dunno if the Crows still have tribal hunters, but they provided a good model of how to keep valuable game species healthy.

I'd like to see this method applied to all public land in the USA. The edible kill could be inspected at least as rigorously as commercial slaughter, and sold the same way.

Or donated. I mention that because the lunch program at our school gladly took in elk meat that families didn't want to freeze. (Deer too, I imagine, although a deer a week was not too much for my family of 4 to put away.)

Exclusive government hunting would put an end to private hunting, certainly out West, where public land is plentiful. Good. I've been all for it since way WAY back.

Hunting on private land would of course continue to be subject to licensing and all the controls that come with it. If a landowner would prefer not to have louts with guns charging around on his property, he can let the federal hunters know. They could solve his white tail problem tax free.

 

[The Great Zaganza]

The role of large animals in the preservation of an ecosystem has generally been underestimated.

 

[dudalb]

I work an agency that manages a lot of federal lands; if it is necessay to think the herd, professional hunters are hired to do it.
Yes, there are professional hunters in the US; they generally kil game to sell to restaurants; Venison is quite popular.

 

[arthwollipot]

The annual kangaroo cull here in Canberra always draws a lot of ire from the sort of people for whom this kind of thing draws ire. Government-run livestock management programmes usually do.

 

[Orphia Nay]

What would be the benefits of government hunting over private hunting, or vice versa?

 

[rdwight]

What problem is this solving exactly? Are current recreational hunters normally wasting absorbent amounts? Would be hesitant to create and fund a new government program without some sufficient reasoning. Why add cost to something that currently generates profit.

 

[crescent]

Government hunting already exists in the U.S.

The Wildlife Services branch of APHIS in the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture does it, mostly focused on predator control.

Bison are sometimes not killed by hunters but are instead rounded up and sent to slaughter houses. Yellowstone does it that way.


Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge does something similar, as do some of the state parks in Wyoming. I think some native American tribes do it that way as well, although they also allow more typical hunting. Less spoilage and waste if they're trucked right to the meat packing plant before being dispatched humanely.

I know of one national park in the U.S. that was culling elk herds, using professional hunters. Done at night with night vision optics because that was the only way to get it done without public interference. They did it for three years and then stopped.. That article mentions that the state government wildlife agency also culls elk in some other national parks - something that the state government cannot do without the permission of the feds (at least in a National Park, they can do it freely in other federal lands like the Forest Service and BLM).

 

[ponderingturtle]

If populations can be controlled by volunteers why should we instead make it a paid professional job? This seems like a waste of government money.

 

[Donal]

Once again, I was pulled in by a very misleading thread title

 

[theprestige]

This was part of an increasingly OT safari in a US Politics thread, so I decided to do it right.

I suggest that US game herds be cropped by professional federal hunters. The kill would be processed in government (or government-licensed) plants for maximum efficiency, harvesting meat, organs, hides, bones, antlers -- and by god elk teeth, which can be pricey items.

This makes no sense. First, government operations are not known for maximum efficiency. That right there exceeds maximum nonsense for your proposal.

Second, there's no pressing shortage of game animal parts, that needs to be addressed by a more aggressive harvesting strategy. What people want, people use. What they don't is biodegradable and thus not wasted when it's disposed of.

Third, game herds are there to be cropped by definition. People want to crop them. People actually do crop them. That's why the government issues hunting licenses, establishes hunting seasons, and sets kill limits: To prevent over-hunting and conserve the herds. There's no shortage of private hunters ready and willing to crop some game.

Fourth, therefore, you're causing a problem where none existed. Under-hunting of game herds is not a thing. And if it were, the simplest solution would be to issue more hunting licenses or increase the kill limits for private hunters. Not set up a whole-ass government bureaucracy just to... what? Spend dollars making pennies?

 

[crescent]

If populations can be controlled by volunteers why should we instead make it a paid professional job? This seems like a waste of government money.

In cases where I have heard of it being done, they pay govvie hunters to do it because it isn't suitable for regular hunters to do.

Like at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, where they cull the bison population. It is a toxic waste site that probably has unexploded ordnance in some places. Flat land surrounded by suburbs, no backdrops to stop rounds that miss. They can't just issue hunting permits in a place like that. I think the preference there is to sell/transfer the live bison to other parks and reserves that are trying to establish populations - nobody wants to eat Bison meat from the old chemical weapons site that was once referred to as the most polluted square mile on earth.

The same issues also apply with National Parks - too crowded, it needs to be done with tight control to keep protestors away and to avoid harming people in an environment that is often much more heavily visited than most places that have big-game hunting.

With Bison at least, they are herd animals. If you want to salvage the meat then it is much, much more efficient to just herd them into pens and truck them to the slaughter house.


ETA: In The U.S., the state wildlife agencies get a huge portion of their funding through the sale of hunting and fishing permits. Until relatively recently the great majority of their funding came that way. That has changed somewhat over the past few decades, but I am guessing that most state wildlife agencies still get close to half of their funding via hunting and fishing revenue.

 

[theprestige]

Yeah, I'm still trying to figure out what problem sackett imagines needs to be solved, here.

Game animal populations don't need more culling than the market already provides.

Non-game animal population are already being managed by the government.

 

[sackett]

My objections to amateur hunting have always been

1. Cruel killing and maiming. Don't reckon I'll elaborate on that.

2. Waste of carcasses. A great many kills don't make it back due to unskillfull or delayed processing, and are dumped in the woods -- I've seen and smelled these at freeway rest stops.

3. Inefficient use of resources. Hell, we threw hides away because the dealer in Sheridan (aptly run by a man named B. Gross) didn't pay more than 5 cents for most of them. Spleens, gall bladders? We left 'em in the gut piles.

An unnumbered consideration: A few hunter-boys manage to kill somebody every year; not always each other.

 

[dudalb]

Government hunting already exists in the U.S.

The Wildlife Services branch of APHIS in the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture does it, mostly focused on predator control.

Bison are sometimes not killed by hunters but are instead rounded up and sent to slaughter houses. Yellowstone does it that way.


Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge does something similar, as do some of the state parks in Wyoming. I think some native American tribes do it that way as well, although they also allow more typical hunting. Less spoilage and waste if they're trucked right to the meat packing plant before being dispatched humanely.

I know of one national park in the U.S. that was culling elk herds, using professional hunters. Done at night with night vision optics because that was the only way to get it done without public interference. They did it for three years and then stopped.. That article mentions that the state government wildlife agency also culls elk in some other national parks - something that the state government cannot do without the permission of the feds (at least in a National Park, they can do it freely in other federal lands like the Forest Service and BLM).

Most Agencies contract it out to Professional Hunters ; it is more ecnomical then having full time hunters on staff/

 

[dudalb]

My objections to amateur hunting have always been

1. Cruel killing and maiming. Don't reckon I'll elaborate on that.

2. Waste of carcasses. A great many kills don't make it back due to unskillfull or delayed processing, and are dumped in the woods -- I've seen and smelled these at freeway rest stops.

3. Inefficient use of resources. Hell, we threw hides away because the dealer in Sheridan (aptly run by a man named B. Gross) didn't pay more than 5 cents for most of them. Spleens, gall bladders? We left 'em in the gut piles.

An unnumbered consideration: A few hunter-boys manage to kill somebody every year; not always each other.

Tom Lehrer had someting to say about that;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6IOPjIgvOI

 

[Roboramma]

Yeah, I'm still trying to figure out what problem sackett imagines needs to be solved, here.

Game animal populations don't need more culling than the market already provides.

Non-game animal population are already being managed by the government.

I think the steelman version is that wild game is a natural resources, and sackett thinks we are making inefficient use of that resource. He wants government funds to be spent harvesting that resource, but presumably he thinks that the value of that harvest would more than pay for the work of that agency. Presumably he also thinks that the efficiency of that harvest would be greater than is current system.

Personally I doubt it, for several reasons. One is that there is economic value to the act of hunting itself. There's a reason that people are willing to pay for the right to hunt a deer, and it's not just the value of the meat itself. Any look at the efficiency of the current system needs to take the value of that experience into account.

Another is as you say "government operations are not known for maximum efficiency". I'm reminded of this:

The Soviets killed some 180,000 whales illegally, driving several species to the brink of extinction. But why? The obvious answer is wrong:

…the Soviet Union had little real demand for whale products. Once the blubber was cut away for conversion into oil, the rest of the animal, as often as not, was left in the sea to rot or was thrown into a furnace and reduced to bone meal—a low-value material used for agricultural fertilizer, made from the few animal byproducts that slaughterhouses and fish canneries can’t put to more profitable use….Why did a country with so little use for whales kill so many of them?

The actual answer has a lot to say about the impossibility of rational economic calculation under socialism (and also the lesser but still important problem under capitalism of mispricing in the presence of externalities and the difficulty of aligning private and social incentives.) The answer did not appear until 2008 when, long after his death, the memoir of Alfred Berzin, a Soviet-era fisheries scientist, was translated and published. Homans summarizes:

The Soviet whalers, Berzin wrote, had been sent forth to kill whales for little reason other than to say they had killed them. They were motivated by an obligation to satisfy obscure line items in the five-year plans that drove the Soviet economy, which had been set with little regard for the Soviet Union’s actual demand for whale products. “Whalers knew that no matter what, the plan must be met!” Berzin wrote.

My point is not that a US agency whose remit is to efficiently harvest wild animal products would be exactly like the soviet whaling program, but rather that it would suffer from some of the same problems of misaligned incentives and the inaccessibility of local scale information.

 

[mumblethrax]

My point is not that a US agency whose remit is to efficiently harvest wild animal products would be exactly like the soviet whaling program, but rather that it would suffer from some of the same problems of misaligned incentives and the inaccessibility of local scale information.

Who cares? No such agency exists, nor would it. The primary role of hunting in wildlife management isn't to produce ideal markets or respond to consumer demand but to...manage wildlife. Keep deer populations in check to avoid the exigencies of exceeding carrying capacity, avoid the spread of disease, prevent vehicular collisions, that kind of thing. Demand for game or trophies, which is significantly driven by exogenous cultural factors that have nothing to do with license fees, is not directly relevant to that task. The existence of recreational hunters is just something that can be exploited in service of wildlife management. The principle reason for state agencies to sell (which recreational hunters generally can't do) or donate this stuff would be to avoid wanton waste. That, and that it's cheaper than other means of disposal.

There might be money to be made in licensing hunting of endangered animals at exorbitant rates, but that's not a good reason to do it (except maybe to market fundamentalists). If we, as a culture, turned away from hunting as a pastime (which is in fact happening, and will become a lot more pronounced in the next decade or two), that might have implications for wildlife management (we could no longer rely on volunteers to cull populations, nor on funding from licensing fees for conservation efforts), but would tell us nothing about what needs to be done.

 

[theprestige]

My objections to amateur hunting have always been

1. Cruel killing and maiming. Don't reckon I'll elaborate on that.

2. Waste of carcasses. A great many kills don't make it back due to unskillfull or delayed processing, and are dumped in the woods -- I've seen and smelled these at freeway rest stops.

3. Inefficient use of resources. Hell, we threw hides away because the dealer in Sheridan (aptly run by a man named B. Gross) didn't pay more than 5 cents for most of them. Spleens, gall bladders? We left 'em in the gut piles.

An unnumbered consideration: A few hunter-boys manage to kill somebody every year; not always each other.

A dead animal in the woods doesn't seem like a problem that needs solving.

You might want to elaborate on cruel killing and maiming. The police are government agents. They often fall short of our standards of humanitarian and professional use of force. What makes you think government hunters wouldn't be every bit as prone to bureaucracy, waste, inefficiency, incompetence, and unprofessionalism as every other government agent might be? How many of the amateur hunters you despise are going to apply for, and get, government hunting jobs, if that becomes a thing?

And the fact that nobody wants to pay good money for game animal offal should be a big hint that there's no untapped market there, for the government to... make more efficient.

 

[bruto]

I can understand some of the motivation for less recreational hunting, but overall I think that if state wildlife agencies are realistic and motivated to preserve wildlife, hunting generally works pretty well. Wildlife is managed at little if any net cost to the citizens, while those willing to spend the time and money to get the game get what they like.

I think the problem with making professional state hunting a more widespread and institutionalized enterprise might be the economics. As soon as someone starts profiting from the killing of animals it's going to be hard to regulate. As it stands now, the profit to states comes from hunters, and regulating that enterprise so that the hunters cull the herd to a planned level but have something to come back for next year. Organized professional hunting probably works best when the goal is to eradicate a species. If your aim is to rid South Georgia of reindeer, or Kawai of pigs, then hiring people to shoot them all and sell the meat seems like a win-win.

 

[mumblethrax]

I can understand some of the motivation for less recreational hunting, but overall I think that if state wildlife agencies are realistic and motivated to preserve wildlife, hunting generally works pretty well.

It's probably more accurate to say that recreational hunting works well to fund preservation of game animals. It does little to help preserve endangered species, particularly where those animals prey on game. Recreational hunters have often actively opposed re-introduction of wolves, for example.

This might also need to be in the past tense: as recreational hunting continues to decline, the loss of income threatens funding of conservation agencies.

I think the problem with making professional state hunting a more widespread and institutionalized enterprise might be the economics. As soon as someone starts profiting from the killing of animals it's going to be hard to regulate.

There's no reason anyone should profit from this, and professional hunters aren't likely to get special dispensation to sell uninspected game without a major overhaul of the food regulation system. I suspect the agencies would be reluctant to move towards more sales of game for the reason you mentioned--the fear would be that creating a market for wild game incentivizes poaching.