"When did you stop beating your dog?" "Hey! I never started!"
If your audience isn't sharp, you can get any answer you want by asking a question cleverly. Practiced lawyers know how; practices judges prevent leading questions. Citizens have few protectors or protections against pollsters, phone surveys, or questionnaires with leading questions. Even more help is needed to analyze the claims that some analysts make based on otherwise appropriate questions. "Why do people hunt?" is a difficult question to phrase properly and to know what the answers mean. Different people with their own objectives may use the answers in quite different ways.
"Why do people not hunt?7quot; is a different question than "why don't people hunt?" and the answers may not be the other side of the "why do they hunt?" coin. The going is tough.
The literature suggests that positive aspects of deer hunting are:
- To be close to nature
- To enjoy the great beauty of a natural situation
- To escape the daily routine; to diversify experiences
- To escape family and work responsibilities
- To gain companionship with respected friends
- To gain meat or trophy
- To gain excitement, suspense, and challenges
- To gain (yes, some have said) to get a "rush"
- To use firearms
- To show hunting and related skills
- To return to pioneer-like conditions and re-live history
- To test personal survival skill (partially as related to pioneering)
- To engage in the diverse pleasures and skills of camping
- To display a trophy
- To display prized equipment.
Other studies show some strong correlations that point to factors that influence whether a hunt is good. The higher the perceived abundance of deer, the better the hunt; the higher the perceived number of bucks, the better the hunt (even if no deer are taken since it is the hunter's luck, fault, or choice that no deer were taken). Even if other hunters in the party take a deer, the feeling of success goes up.
The fascinating aspect of these studies is that they are not analyzed separately for hunters. We group and "average" when we live in an age with computers. We are in an age when an average is no longer needed because such lumping hides the details. For example, see the figure:
If 60% think abundant deer suggest a good hunt and 40% think it is irrelevant, then 50% (a) is average. If 60% of those who think abundant deer and also think that taking a deer is very important, then these people are 54% of the population, not 50% (an average). If there are 40% who care little about perceived abundance and, among these, there are only 30% that think that taking a deer is very important, that being the case, then there are only 12% of the population of this type... not 50%. There are for these simple 2 criteria, four unique states, or four very different human "publics."
There are many factors and many attitudes but Langenau (1981) suggested from his studies that a hunter must at least see a deer if success or a high quality hunt is said to have been experienced. All of the other factors, no matter what their weight, or correlation, or asserted importance, over-rode the "killing" or "seeing" criterion.
One of the R* Deer concepts of resource management is of maximizing the quality of the seasonal hunt for all participants. Perfect achievement of 30 people would result in a total score of 3000 quality points. This would be rare; nearly impossible. Ten people achieving average quality hunts of 50 and 20 achieving scores of 80 results in a total score of 2100. There are many ways to get a score of 2100. The more evenly distributed the scores, the better. A special procedure is used to adjust the score to inflate it based on this evenness. (A program to make the computations is available.)
The R* Deer concept is on a parallel to "conditional probability." The probability of a hunt being assigned the highest quality is when one or more components of the hunt are achieved, conditional upon others being achieved and conditional upon some unpleasant events not occurring. We are of the view that most of the major, dominant factors of successful and high quality hunts are known.
Inadequate analyses, not insufficient data, have prevented our understanding these important relationships.
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This Web site is maintained by R. H.
Giles, Jr.
Last revision January 17, 2000.
