Bullshot
Well-known member
This is not hot off the press news or anything but I read this in a 2017 article on trends in nationwide hunter numbers and it got me thinking about it all over again:
"The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has been conducting a nationwide survey of hunting and fishing participants every five years since 1955, primarily for the benefit of fish and wildlife agencies across the country as they try to understand participation trends in these activities.
The recent release of the preliminary 2016 survey indicates the gloomy fact that the number of hunters — in a steady decline for many years now — has experienced a sharp drop-off of over 2 million hunters since the last survey in 2011.
Since 1980, the overall nationwide number of hunters has dropped from nearly 18 million to the current level of 10.5 million."
Based on declines like those mentioned, tag should be easy to come by with millions fewer competing. But for some reason, with all the magazines, TV, internet chatter, increasing fees, low draw odds and preference point creep, one could be forgiven for thinking that we are at the high-water mark. But if all we are doing (with fewer and fewer people) is just chasing fewer and fewer tags each year, we are blind to our ultimate fate. It would seem that for competition for tags to have heated up to the extent that it has over the last 20,30 years, not only are HUNTERS declining, but hunting opportunity must be declining insidiously at a far faster pace. I'd expect some of that, due to development and other causes, but is it really that much worse than it appears on the surface? We bicker a lot about it being a rich mans game -vs- a common man's birthright, but what if it is going to end up just that few people can do it in few places, chasing few animals. I know we are far off from that, right now, but the trends seem really bad if they are what USFWS reports. This is not abstract... they report > 40% drop in participation just within less than my lifetime!
Are there any big-picture guys reading this that can put this into context insofar as how it relates to western states big game hunting and put some relevant numbers to these trends? For example, how many deer tags/ elk tags did, for example, Wyoming, or Colorado have over the past couple decades, compared between then and now?
"The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has been conducting a nationwide survey of hunting and fishing participants every five years since 1955, primarily for the benefit of fish and wildlife agencies across the country as they try to understand participation trends in these activities.
The recent release of the preliminary 2016 survey indicates the gloomy fact that the number of hunters — in a steady decline for many years now — has experienced a sharp drop-off of over 2 million hunters since the last survey in 2011.
Since 1980, the overall nationwide number of hunters has dropped from nearly 18 million to the current level of 10.5 million."
Based on declines like those mentioned, tag should be easy to come by with millions fewer competing. But for some reason, with all the magazines, TV, internet chatter, increasing fees, low draw odds and preference point creep, one could be forgiven for thinking that we are at the high-water mark. But if all we are doing (with fewer and fewer people) is just chasing fewer and fewer tags each year, we are blind to our ultimate fate. It would seem that for competition for tags to have heated up to the extent that it has over the last 20,30 years, not only are HUNTERS declining, but hunting opportunity must be declining insidiously at a far faster pace. I'd expect some of that, due to development and other causes, but is it really that much worse than it appears on the surface? We bicker a lot about it being a rich mans game -vs- a common man's birthright, but what if it is going to end up just that few people can do it in few places, chasing few animals. I know we are far off from that, right now, but the trends seem really bad if they are what USFWS reports. This is not abstract... they report > 40% drop in participation just within less than my lifetime!
Are there any big-picture guys reading this that can put this into context insofar as how it relates to western states big game hunting and put some relevant numbers to these trends? For example, how many deer tags/ elk tags did, for example, Wyoming, or Colorado have over the past couple decades, compared between then and now?
