A lot of the big money spending on hunting is people in their last few years of hunting, and people who do it because their friends do. When the fads die, things will change a lot. Look at all the other fad recreation hobbies. Number of hunters has been declining since the 1960s. Steep decline since the 90s. Both the actual number of hunters and the percent of the adult population hunting have declined.
The genie isn't going back in the bottle. While there may be a few less hunters than at peak, say in the 1980s, hunting isn't the same. That's lumping all hunters together as well. Deer hunters used to hunt the back 40 that the neighbor owned. Now the game is to buy up 1000 acres as a NR and hunt it a few weeks a year. The name of the game is land development, cameras, leases, and large tracts. Supply of resources has been consolidated for something like deer, and the supply of something like a sheep is flat or declining.
And at the same time the demographic of the hunting community has changed just as much. Slightly fewer, but wealthier hunters consuming more of the resource.
How many sheep get killed on all tags in all places in a year? A couple thousand(I'm guessing)? It takes a very small percentage of the hunting community to consume that supply. If even 1% of the hunting community pursued sheep hunts the supply is already toast 10 times over.
Hunter numbers aren't going down because people suddenly lost interest. The barriers to entry have gotten too great for many people, be it for deer, a western elk, or a sheep. We get told by states that we need to recruit, we get told by conservation orgs like WSF(I'm a member) that we need to recruit. We get told by influencers that we need to recruit. Just in the past 10 years alone, the collective resource of wild game has been squeezed at an alarming rate. Pick your favorite animal and the story is the same.
I get told hunter numbers are down. Then I see 2 point a year creep on elk tags and sheep prices doubling in 3 years. It doesn't wash when all factors are considered.