to just about every post in this thread. I really feel for the guys in divided states like CO, OR and even CA. And there certainly is a very noticeable pendulum effect going on politically at multiple levels. At the federal level it’s truly frightening how opposite the two political parties are. What’s a centrist to do ?
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@pods8 (Rugged Stitching) said you almost have to vote for whatever party is not currently in power because things swing so hard and fast in one direction that we have to put the brakes on every 4 years or we go off the rails. Voting for Trump, knowing full well he was going to come after public lands for the extraction industries was a very hard pill to swallow for me personally. But I did it because the left was on the verge of very literally destroying the country.
It has always struck me as odd that the founders wouldn’t have put hunting into the constitution as a human right- to provide for one’s own existence seems like the most basic human right of all. You would think that the King’s Forest of Britain would have been fresh in their minds and that they would have seen the abundance of game as the great treasure of this new nation and taken measures to protect it and make it a part of the document that defined us. But manifest destiny may have played a part in it…
At the state level, 24 states have adopted hunting and fishing rights into their state constitutions. You guys would probably remember better than I do, but Colorado had it on the ballot in 2016 and it didn’t pass. The next time the pendulum swings right that amendment needs to be an all-in effort by everyone to get passed. Without it, the issue of hunting as a human right will always be up for debate, which is a debate we will lose in the long run.
I think there are a lot of centrists getting pushed left by the current administration but I think there are still many of them that would support hunting rights if the hunting community as a whole had it’s shit together a little better. The larger issue though is new hunter recruitment. If trends continue, at some point down the road hunters will be such a minority that we may no longer have enough votes to do anything at all.
IME non-hunters have no idea that hunters are the ones paying for wildlife management. They have no idea about Pittman-Robertson or the fact that our dollars also go to non-game wildlife management. I like to show them this poster I took a pic of at the F&G office …
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Yes, market “hunters” almost wiped everything out, but real hunters also brought everything back. The problem is, to the uninformed, those two types of hunting are the same thing. Once non hunters hear it explained this way and I show them the above poster, they usually come away with a much more pro hunting lean and some of them ask me a lot more about my hunting experience and a few of them actually start hunting. Even if they don’t, at least when they go back into their more left-leaning circles they can have more enlightened conversations about hunting with their friends. Bring more centrists back to center and we might just turn the boat. If we just keep preaching to the choir in our hunting forums and such, the population of hunters will eventually just go the way of the buffalo, as they say.
