Antler Points

The deer resource is vast and varied. It has dimensions that range from art appreciation, to hunting and trophies, to zoological basic research. How the resource is used and appreciated is of fundamental importance, so the resource user is of great interest. Equally important is an answer to: who will be the future managers? What is their background, attitude, and personal goals and will these dominate decisions made by resource managers as they have in the past?

In forestry, women now account for 45% of all employees. Fully 25% of university students enrolled in wildlife and forestry are female. Attitudes toward wildlife have been studied and they are very different between men and women.

Summary observations from a study of U.S. citizens, age 18-65:

• Males had higher knowledge of non-domestic animals.
• Females had a strikingly higher "humanistic" score than males (strong affection for individual animals, principally pets; preference for large, attractive wild animals associated with humans).
• Females had a higher "moralistic" score than males (concern for a variety of cruelty issues, opposed to lab experiments, rodeos, leg-hold traps, and sport hunting).
• Males had higher "utilitarian" and "dominionistic" scores than did women (exploitation of animals, exploitation of habitat, personal satisfaction from mastery or control of animals]).
• Males wanted direct contact with animals slightly more than women and had a higher concern for maintaining ecosystem balance).
• Correlated with #1 and #5, females had more fear and indifference toward all animals.

Age and education had effects, but the above statements seem stable.

About 85% of the total hunting population is male. Only about 4% of the females had hunted in the past 2 years. Males were major participants in resource-related organizations.

The attitudes are real, deep, widespread and grounded in developing theory. There is no right/wrong, merely existence of attitudes. Awareness of these attitudes can help reduce conflict and confrontations. It can help people understand and predict individual behavior. Women will be "...far more bothered than men about the possible infliction of pain and suffering on individual animals." This widespread aspect of attitude shows up in opposition to hunting.

The differences are real and will not change due to education or "appeals to reason." Alternative strategies seem to be needed to reduce clashes in natural resource decision making ; new management initiatives may be needed that are grounded in fairness and consensus.

Maybe greater understanding of animals (by women) and more empathy and less emotional detachment (by men) will help, but I'd rather bet on discovering an anti-gravity drug. An alternative is to begin re-formulating these attitudes as group objectives.

Over the years such studies and the classes for attitudes that have been developed have fascinated me. Kellert's work from the 1980's has been particularly perplexing. It remains so. If I have perfect knowledge (no questions about numbers or techniques) about the attitude classes that he uses, what do I do with them as a manager? My view is: not much. I analyze, categorize ... but what then? The alternative that is operational within a resource system is to convert these ideas into objectives. "Moralistic" as an attitude is readily (in my view) translated into one or more objectives that may be assigned weights (by individuals or groups) or levels of importance. For example, the following objectives seem to capture most (not all) of the consequences of having and acting upon a moralistic attitude:

• To maximize the speed of any kill
• To minimize crippling loss
• To minimize the number of people observing animal harvests.

• To maximize public artistic expressions (photography, painting, sculpture) of the deer
• To maximize the number of people observing the natural deer in its environment
• To maximize the scores assigned by people to images of antlered bucks.

By clearly expressing objectives, then cost-effective pathways, whole systems, may be found over time to achieve them. How to do this is the fundamental reason for Antler Points.

This Web site is maintained by R. H. Giles, Jr.
Last revision January 17, 2000.