Continued:
As a result, big game draw odds
have plummeted, private lands are increasingly leased for hunting and thus off-limits to the public, and public land hunting often begins with struggling to find parking at the trailhead, followed by struggling to find animals so pressured they suffer from PTSD. According to 2017
survey data, over half of hunters have abandoned spots due to crowding. In short, hunter numbers have grown beyond what the resource can support. I believe social media is largely responsible for this because it draws people afield under false pretenses and encourages hunting for unjust reasons.
I’d be remiss if I ignored my own history with hunting social media. I was never big on posting grip-and-grins online. Years ago, I completely stopped after seriously asking myself why I wanted lots of people to see what I had shot. Upon reflection, I realized bragging was my sole motivation. This troubled me. I’ve always had a low tolerance for bragging by others, so I disliked realizing I was guilty of it myself. It didn’t help that I was bragging about dead animals harvested for food. This seemed more consequential and perverse than the soccer trophies, kitchen remodels, and other inane shit people brag about online.
The Negative Consequences of Hunting Social Media
For proof that social media, and hunting television, are increasing hunter numbers on already overcrowded public lands, consider what hunting influencers sell their followers on Facebook and Instagram and
through their TV shows. In addition to hunting products, influencers like my brother
sell books that teach rudimentary hunting, game cooking, and backcountry survival skills. Many are now
teaching classes where students learn elementary woodsmanship, game calling, map reading, and strategies for applying for tags.
The target audience for all this is clearly hunting-curious nonhunters because seasoned hunters don’t need
101-level how-to content. If you have any doubt that motivating people to hunt and selling them products is big business, consider how many influencers do it.
Here, for example, are more than 200 of them on Instagram. In addition to inspiring people to hunt, influencers inspire people to become fellow influencers. They do this partly by example and partly by teaching the relevant skills to do so, like
how to attract sponsors and
how to film their hunts. In other words, influencers motivate people to hunt for the same shitty ego- and profit-motivated reasons they hunt themselves.
Top hunting influencers like to call themselves conservationists, but the fact of the matter is influencers are terrible for habitat. No matter how great areas look in terms of feed and cover, game can’t live where there are hunters on every ridge. That’s exactly the situation influencers have created in their quest for more hunter-customers. Most influencers don’t have to hunt the places they’ve blown up because they largely hunt private land, take expensive trips to remote hunting destinations, and enter pricey limited tag lotteries throughout the US and beyond.
Influencers like to believe they’re elevating our reputation among the nonhunting public, but social media has severely damaged our reputation among nonhunters as well as reduced hunting opportunity. For example, read about the
banning of grizzly bear hunting in British Columbia or watch
The Women Who Kill Lions on Netflix. Or Google something like “
social media hunting controversy” and settle in for a very long read.
Moreover, hunting influencers routinely engage in selfish, greedy behavior that poses threats to our reputation among nonhunters. Generating enough content to gain big followings and attract sponsors necessitates gobbling up tags and killing more than one needs. Top influencers commonly kill three or more elk a year along with a variety of other game. If you’re reading this, you’re probably following several of them right now.
If I was a nonhunter doing a quick scan of hunting social media, my gut response would be one of shock. It is a cornucopia of carcasses with zero explanation of what they plan to do with all that meat. If you’re a nonhunter reading this, please believe many traditional hunters are as disgusted by all this greed as you are. Traditional hunters believe wild game is a precious resource, and we harvest only what we need to eat between seasons, thereby increasing the chances for other hunters to take an animal.
