Antler Points

This article appeared in Whitetail Times, 1998.

It is hunting season again, and hunters' thoughts easily turn to deer, the camp, and the woods. People who have studied hunting and game management learned a long time ago that getting ready for the hunt, thinking about past hunts, fellowship, working with clothing and equipment, getting the bow or gun ready, practicing shots, scouting out some areas, planning and preparing, and then telling tales about the trip -- all of these things together -- are much more important to hunters than getting a deer. I'm not an economist but as I read through research articles on this subject, I believe hunters are interested in benefits and I think this long list of things associated with hunting is a list of benefits. Certainly getting a deer, at least seeing one, is a part of a having a successful hunt, but many people report great success if they had fun, no one got hurt, the weather was ok, and friends or a member of the party got a deer.

One way to look at the deer hunt is in terms of what some experts call conditional probability. Hunters are playing the odds. They win, conditional upon them or someone within their party, getting deer. This has a reverse spin on it because the successful hunt is conditional upon no one getting lost or hurt or not having major vehicle problems. Even with a few deer cooling outside the cabin, no hunt can be called a success if there was a major accident!

Many things can be considered in terms of probability - including playing the horses or buying bonds. A "win" is usually considered, but it is always stated that it will occur if certain conditions materialize. That is the general idea of conditional. Things exist, things happen - but many things that happen depend on conditions being right. Not long ago I stumbled across a very important idea related to the deer, natural resources, and the practical meaning of conditional probability. It is a small example, but it opened my eyes to deer and a new way of looking at them after 50 years.

The comparison with football is the easiest way to make the point. Football is a multi-million dollar industry. It is the stadium, food, drink, the costumes, uniforms, travel, tickets, the playing field, the programs...and more. There is a football, that small leather thing. The football is almost irrelevant to the football enterprise! It is essential, but insignificant. The football enterprise is conditional upon the presence of a good football.

By comparison, I think we hunters, game managers, and wildlife managers have had our eyes on the deer too long. We have seen it as if it were the football within the football enterprise. We have never seen deer as an enterprise, always as an animal or an animal population; we have never associated with it as if it were the core of a large, complex resource. We need to explore the relations within a hard question: the football is to the larger sport enterprise, as the deer is to what? What is this larger deer-related enterprise? Just what is the real resource production, maintenance, and management system? The deer resource that I see includes the deer but resources have to be discussed in terms of their net good or net benefits for people. Deer can be seen as both good and bad. They need to be managed so that the good outweighs the bad. The resource is not the deer themselves but the actual and potential elements of a complex enterprise - one much more like a factory or stock portfolio - than a mom-and-pop grocery. The parts of this enterprise (some already exist) are clothing, outfitting, land management, software, equipment sales, integrated damage management, insurance, printing, security services, local and international tours, educational programs, herd management, contests, area development, and memberships. Publications (Whitetail Times is an example in hand) are a part of the deer resource. I believe that the deer resource, this newer concept of it, is at a point where sophisticated modern management is badly needed. Millions of dollars of research findings about deer and their habitats are now available (a gold mine that has no gate; vast capital exists). Deer populations have grown. Damage from deer is widely reported. Social forces are causing agency action to shift. There are fewer funds, costs increase, and the criteria for spending money are more partisan than political (in the highest sense of that word). Participants now using the resource shift from hunters to observers. No one wants any more crop or forest damage. Fewer youth are being brought up with experience or a positive attitude toward responsible hunting and to animal population controls when needed. Agency staff and operating funds decline at the same time that the needs and demands of the public increase. Wildlife resource agencies, once created by thoughtful people to do for people what they could not do alone, may have succeeded, and now people in profit-oriented enterprises can do for themselves much of what the agency once did. Perhaps a regulatory role and public area management will be sufficient for the wildlife agency in the future as a few viable, cost -effective enterprises emerge.

Maybe I am dreaming about the enterprise. I dream to avoid the nightmares. The nightmares are about continued crop damage, auto strikes, and deer on airport runways. The nightmares are about loss of a hunting tradition and effective means of deer population control. Grim images recur about deer ticks and Lyme and other diseases. The unpleasant hours are spent trying to see how declining or threatened agency staffs can deliver modern wildland management advice for thousands of owners of millions of acres. I do not think that they can in the old fashion ways, and so I dream, and the dream that returns is one about a complex, totally integrated natural resource enterprise that includes deer as the basis for one of the "companies" or divisions of the larger wildland enterprise. Sustained profits, not fluctuating and unpredictable taxes, licenses, and fees will sustain the deer resource and all of the things dependent upon it and upon which it depends. Whether such an enterprise will emerge, whether the dream becomes a reality, is conditional upon many factors. Most of them are part of the nightmare, but they can be overcome.

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Last revision January 17, 2000.