At 10:00 AM 10/4/97 -0700, you wrote:

>Also, I'm not "anti-hunting" (some of my best friends are hunters...).
>But I can only imagine that the cost of regulating hunting is huge. So
>it makes sense that hunters foot some of that bill.

Well, you're still making an assumption that hunting costs taxpayers more
than the revenue hunting taxes, licenses, required stamps, and the like
raise.

Nope. Regulation and enforcement is a fraction of my State's ODF&W
operating expenses, at least. This doesn't even count capital expenses
paid for by hunting revenue (habitat aquisition, facilities improvement).

There's no dodging the *fact* that hunters pay for most targetted conservation
activities in this country. There's a bunch of what might be called
collateral
conservation that isn't paid for by hunters, i.e. the very existence of
National
Forests conserve many species of flora and fauna but there were no aquisition
costs targetting conservation associated with the creation of the system - the
vast majority of National Forests were carved out of land that has always been
federally owned (I'm indulging our national pastime of ignoring aboriginal
rights, of course:)

Is it a bad thing that hunters foot most of the direct costs of habitat
aquisition
and management? Well, if we can buy, restore, manage, or otherwise
preserve all
the habitat that we feel is needed for the continued existence of significant
numbers of wildlife, and get hunters to pay for it - far out! It's a great
thing!

But...I don't think we can depend on hunters to do so. First, hunting is
declining
while land prices are rising. And, for all they do, most Pittman-Robertson
dollars
go to wetlands aquisition and the resulting refuges are most frequently
managed
for waterfowl. There's a certain lack of scope and completeness to
depending on
this source of funding and the aquisition and management programs spawned
by it.
Should we end or diminish this source by stopping hunting? And end to
hunting in
this country, as some ARs would like to do, would also bring an end to the
largest
source of habitat aquisition funds in this country. Hmmm...

(I know you're not anti-hunting, but I do meet birders who are, and who
also oppose
TWW and the like, and I just have to wonder where they think they'd be
birding if
hunting had been banned say 50-75 years ago?)




- Don Baccus, Portland OR <donb at rational.com>
Nature photos, on-line guides, and other goodies at
http://donb.photo.net