North American Model of Wildlife Conservation

This is the third in a series of articles about the North American Wildlife Conservation Model. The series is dedicated to helping hunters and anglers throughout the United States and Canada appreciate their own history of achievements in wildlife conservation, and encouraging greater commitment to the cause. The author outlines the pillars of North American Wildlife Conservation Model as: the public trust, prohibitions on commerce, democratic rule of law, hunting opportunity for all, non-frivolous use, international resources and scientific management.

This is the 5th in a series of articles dedicated to helping hunters and anglers throughout the United States and Canada appreciate their history of achievement in wildlife conservation and to encouraging greater commitment to the cause. In this issue the author concludes the story of one of the greatest North American conservationists of them all.

He was many things: scientist, hunter, explorer, naturalist, entrepeneur and author. Above all else, however, George Bird Grinnell was and remains the most influential conservationst in North American History.

Hunting traditions are perceived to be highly threatened by a number of factors including the animal rights movement, general cultural change, increased urbanization, and habitat and wildlife depletion. Surprisingly relatively few studies have, even with this imminent threat, investigated the cultural importance and conservation achievements of hunting. As a result even wildlife agencies and professionals are rarely able to articulately describe the value, merits and overall importance of hunting to present societies.

While unrestrained killing of wildlife for market purposes was the main force that endangered North America’s wildlife, regulated hunting became the founding influence and remains the backbone of the world’s longest standing movement for wildlife protection, use, and enhancement. This social and political movement eventually coalesced into a systematic arrangement of conventions, policies, laws, and institutions that we recognize today as the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation. Wildlife abundance in America today is often taken for granted.

Upon North America's settlement by Europeans wildlife, harvested for commercial use, suffered great losses in population numbers. The North American Model emerged as a sustainable solution to manage wildlife by maintaining wildlife as a public trust, prohibiting the commerce of wildlife products, allocating wildlife by law, using wildlife for legitimate purposes, preserving hunting for all, recognizing wildlife as an international resource, and using science as the basis for management and policy.

Wildlife conservation in Canada and the United States emerged during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, recognizably distinct from other forms found worldwide. Deemed the "North American Model," it has endured a test of time that has seen dramatic changes in society and the landscape of North America. The Model has also become a system of sustainable development of a renewable natural resource that is without parallel in the world.

As a modern engagement with nature, hunting is a much-debated and often highly controversial undertaking. Its critics portray it as a cruel anachronism, unnecessary and irrelevant, while its proponents argue not only its legality, but also its capacity for inspiring concern for wild nature and its use as both a management tool and mechanism for wildlife conservation. In few regions of the world has this contrasting view of man's original and longest lasting profession been so forcefully expressed as in North America.

The hunter-conservationist movement of Canada and the USA arose in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. Many complex forces influenced its emergence as one of the great North American inventions: citizen activism for nature based principally upon sustainable use and vested interest - the North American Model of Conservation. Although unrestrained slaughter by commercial hunters had endangered North America's wildlife legacy, regulated hunting became the origin of the world's longest standing continental movement for wildlife protection, use and enhancement.

Shane Mahoney delivers a message about the history of conservation and the important conservation challenges we face today.