In the face of the biodiversity crisis, attitudes about how wildlife is managed continue to change. New research described here by Mark Elbroch, Ph.D., Panthera Puma Program Director and John A. Vucetich, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Conservation at Michigan Technological University, highlights that people in the United States now prioritize conservation actions, including the restoration of wildlife and degraded habitats, over increasing hunting and fishing opportunities.
The biodiversity crisis is best known through a pair of dire statistics. First, humans have increased the rate at which species become globally extinct by about a thousand-fold in the past few hundred years. Second, of the 60,000 vertebrate species known to science, about 20 percent are at risk of extinction. Horrible as this situation is, the biodiversity crisis has a more important, more insidious and far less appreciated element: most vertebrate species have already been extirpated from most of their geographic ranges. A consequence of those losses is that vast swaths of the Earth have lost shocking portions of their native biodiversity. Any subsequent mitigation of the biodiversity crisis will require humans to restore lost biodiversity at a scale and pace that is unprecedented. This restoration will require a rare kind of leadership.
By the year 1900, every state had established an agency responsible for managing wildlife. They are commonly called Departments of Natural Resources or Departments of Wildlife and Fisheries. These agencies have traditionally considered their top priority to be the interests of hunters and trappers and hence, their top interest has been to maximize harvestable game. At least that’s the kind of language wildlife professionals have used to speak about hunting and trapping. Given that focus, state wildlife agencies have not tended to see themselves as the primary front against the biodiversity crisis in the USA.
Since the start of state wildlife agencies, American culture has changed in two salient ways. First, in the early 20th century, the world entered an ecological awakening during which we became aware of the importance of carnivores to healthy ecosystems, and the dramatic impacts that human inventions were having on fragile environments. A second change, likely occurring for different reasons, is that a smaller proportion of people hunt and trap each year—about 4 percent of adult Americans hunt by last count, and more and more people value ecosystem health over big numbers of game animals every year. State wildlife agencies, however, have struggled to evolve as quickly as our society has. Many agencies maintain objectives and priorities that reflect their history of focusing on the wants and needs of hunters and anglers over other people. But today, that focus is likely too narrow, given the broader interests of agencies’ constituents. But what do Americans really want from their wildlife agencies? We set out to answer this question.
The Cougar Research Collaborative is composed of representatives from three premier conservation organizations: Tompkins Conservation, Northeast Wilderness Trust, and Panthera, and is further supported by conservation scholars from Ohio State University and Michigan Technological University. We surveyed 3,589 residents from Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont and West Virginia on a variety of conservation issues, asking “What are the most important activities in which a state wildlife agency might engage?” They were provided with the following five options:
The results were unambiguous. Forty-three percent of all respondents listed restoration as their top priority, followed by habitat improvement, removing invasive species, increasing land access and last, increasing hunting opportunities. People from across the political spectrum – from liberal to conservative — gave top ranking to the restoration of species. People from every age group also gave top ranking to the restoration of species. No less important — young people gave top ranking to restoration by the largest margin.
Perhaps most important, because we’re talking about the priorities of state wildlife agencies, was the fact that people who identified as hunters also thought restoration should be state agencies’ top priority — more important than increasing opportunities to hunt and trap. Restoration was even the priority for people who identified “strongly” as hunters — these people ranked increasing hunting opportunity second, followed by habitat improvement, removing invasive species and increasing land access.
These results offer state agencies critical insight into the attitudes of hunters and Americans in general, who clearly prioritize species restoration. This is an important message for decision-makers and wildlife managers to consider. State agencies acting upon the interests of their constituents, can directly address the biodiversity crisis. Restoration, such as restoring pumas (also called mountain lions and cougars) and elk to the eastern United States, also offers a path forward that unifies hunters and nonhunters, and will likely increase a state agency’s ability to engage with a more diverse group of constituents in addressing wildlife conservation.
This is exciting news for many species, including pumas. Everyday Americans, including hunters, want state agencies to tackle the broad and pressing conservation challenges of biodiversity loss. Read more about this research and its broader implications for wildlife governance in our paper recently published in BioScience.
*A motivation for this study was in part to explore whether Americans might support potential puma restoration in the eastern United States, where pumas have all but disappeared except for a small population in Florida — this part of our research is still forthcoming. Positive responses about restoration, however, may pave the way for iconic keystone species like pumas to one day return to their historic range east of the Mississippi River.
By joining our email list, you will receive the latest conservation updates, exciting stories from the field, our monthly newsletter, and more.
Join Our Email ListPanthera cares about your privacy. Read our Privacy Policy.
© Sebastian Kennerknecht
