EP 480. Boone and Crockett Club: Fair Chase Ethos Then and Now

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast, where today I want to dig deep into this topic. Every single thing my granddad taught me about fair chase and about ethics in the world of hunting. He didn’t just advent, he was a smart man, I held him up on a very high pedestal, but he didn’t invent things like hunting ethics and fair chase. He was inspired from generations, 4 generations at his time, 3 generations at his time and I believe that the source of everything that you and I accept in hunting as fair chase and ethics stems from a blue chip organization named Boone and Crockett. And here to dive off into this topic with me today is Mr. Tony Schoonen, CEO of Boone and Crockett and Luke Coccoli with Boone and Crockett, he is their conservation ed. Is that right, Luke?

Luke Coccoli: Oh, jack of all trades, master of some, conservation program.

Ramsey Russell: That’s why were you got to be today. Yeah, conservation programs. Guys, really glad to see you all today, I’m glad to visit with you all, I’m excited about this program. I think not long, many years ago, after I pulled the trigger for the first time and killed an antlerless deer in the state of Mississippi, I’ve aspired to be in a record book, shoot a big old buck, big old white-tailed deer and join the Boone and Crockett Club. But I’ve kept up with you and I feel sincere in saying that Boone and Crockett is the source of what we here in North America recognize as fair chasing ethics. And I know a little bit about the history of Boone and Crockett, but what is Boone and Crockett and why did Boone and Crockett develop? Was it just a record book? Was it just a bunch of guys wanting to register their big bucks or was it something more profound than that?

The Origins of Modern Conservation

Well, Ramsey, your questions and your thoughts on fair chase and the record book, it all goes back 137 years, now. Boone and Crockett was founded in 1887 by Theodore Roosevelt and George Bird Grinnell, Gifford Pinchot, a few famous conservationists and then a few that weren’t so famous.

Tony Schoonen: Well, Ramsey, your questions and your thoughts on fair chase and the record book, it all goes back 137 years, now. Boone and Crockett was founded in 1887 by Theodore Roosevelt and George Bird Grinnell, Gifford Pinchot, a few famous conservationists and then a few that weren’t so famous. But the story really goes be past that to 1883, when Roosevelt lost his mother and his wife on the same day, Valentine’s Day. And so he went west, he owned 2 ranches in Medora, North Dakota. He went west and rode around the Dakotas, he rode around Montana, he rode around Wyoming and Idaho. And he looked at the landscape and he witnessed the decimation of our wildlife species, the pillaging of our natural resources. And in 1887, he returned to New York City and called a group of his friends together and these were people of influence. These were people that were politicians, they were industrialists, they were scientists, very well heeled group people, very diverse. But the one thing that, the one common thread they had between all of them was they were hunters and they were sportsmen and they wanted to figure out a way to bring these populations back. And they started in 1892 with the Yellowstone Preservation Act, they expanded the boundaries of Yellowstone, they protected the park and then when Roosevelt became president in 1900, we were really able to gain a lot of traction in conservation. And to begin with, these folks thought that we need to go out and we need to harvest a male specimen of every animal on the planet because they’re all going extinct and they started that and so they put this in a national collection that debuted in 1922. But in the meantime, while Roosevelt was president, we made some giant steps forward in conservation. We started the National Forest Service, members of the club started the National Wildlife Refuge system, they started the National Park System and they conserved a large landscape and they also were involved in getting state management in place, doing away with market hunting and making sure that states had the authority to manage wildlife as they saw fit. So when you fast forward a little bit further in the 1930s, they wanted to figure out how to measure the success of all these conservation efforts that they’d done for the last 4 decades prior to that and they created the records book because the science at the time said if a male specimen is harvested in an ecosystem, that’s an indicator that that ecosystem is healthy. And so the records program was actually formed and still is today as a measuring tool that wildlife managers use, academics use, universities use to tabulate how well a population is doing among all the North American big game species. So that was a measuring tool, so we started in conservation policy, we continue to do a lot in conservation policy, even to this day. We were involved in forming Ducks Unlimited in 1937, we were also involved with the Pittman Robertson Act and the Dingle Johnson Act, our members were and we were involved the Wilderness Act in 1964, the Endangered Species Act in the 1970s and the list goes on and on about these different efforts that the members of the club undertook and today unbeknownst to most sportsmen, our community is probably better organized than we ever have been. One of the things that happened back in the 80s and 90s is you saw a lot of single species groups emerging and they were all vying for the same slice of the pie, whether it be in Washington D.C. at the state level fundraising, what have you – And the president at the time of Boone and Crockett was a fellow by the name of Dan Pedrotti, who was a Texan and he said we need to get all these people gathered in one spot so that we can define some common ground among all these groups. And this happened in 2000 in Missoula, Montana, right at our national headquarters, where I’m standing today. And what came out of that 2 day summit was a coalition called the American Wildlife Conservation Partners and it started out as a letter signing group and so people would have groups would have a letter, whether it addresses waterfowl or big game or what have you, that they would send to members of Congress and they would ask their fellow coalition members of AWCP, American Wildlife Conservation Partners, to sign that letter. So they started out in 2000 with 17 groups, today they have 50 and it represents 15 million votes and pretty much when one of those letters hits the desk of one of our members of Congress, they know that and it’s influential and so it’s a very – well, it’s still a coalition and not anything formal, there’s not a formal entity. These groups have hung together for 20 years and they have advanced access for sportsmen, they have advanced shooting opportunities and shooting ranges for sportsmen, they have conserved habitat, they have addressed wildlife diseases like chronic wasting disease as a coalition, moving everybody in the same direction. So that’s kind of a real brief snapshot, Ramsey, of the history of our club, kind of where we evolved to today, but we still focus primarily on issues that address wildlife health and habitat health. So, we’re involved with things like forest health and active forest management, we’re involved with just recently The Explore Act, which opens up lands and gives people more access to our public lands. We worked hard on the Land and Water Conservation Fund and designated additional dollars within that fund to purchase easements across private land to public land and we’ve also done a lot of work on chronic wasting disease. In the last appropriations that literally happened a month ago, we got 17 and a half million dollars approved to go back to the states for CWD monitoring and controlling the spread of chronic wasting disease. So those are some examples of some of the things that we’re working on. And again, we’re still the same group, we’re 100 members, they’re all diverse from a career perspective.

Ramsey Russell: When you say 100 members, you mean 100 employees?

Tony Schoonen: No. So when Roosevelt formed the club, he limited it to 100 regular members and those are those people of influence I was talking about and they still are today, but we also have a group of professional members. So we have a category of professional members, those are people that we call worker bees, they’re academics, they’re scientists, they’re people who run state wildlife management agencies, federal wildlife management agencies. There’s members of the outdoor media that are professional members of the club, there’s about 150 of those and then we do have our grassroots base, which is about 4800 people that folks can join for $35 and get Fair Chase magazine once a quarter, so we have all the levels covered. But my point is, we haven’t changed a lot in 100 years because not only what our focus is and what we do, but the structure of our organization is largely the same and we tackle the tough problems, we’re a problem solver, we’re a facilitator, because we don’t have an axe to grind with any other group, we don’t have banquets, we’re self funded, so we don’t really compete too much for funding and that’s why we’re able to facilitate these gatherings of groups like the American Wildlife Conservation Partners and bring everybody together and we also have the brain trust within our professional members to solve most all the problems. We’ll identify a problem, we’ll find a group of our professional members that are experts in that area and they’ll work on that problem, come up with language to put into a piece of legislation and then we turn it over to our partners that then push it through Congress or the state level, whatever you have, whatever the issue is that you’re addressing. So there’s a couple things there that I think makes us unique, our power to facilitate, our power to solve problems, we’re small, but we run silent, we run deepest.

A Consistent Mission in a Changing Landscape

We are borrowing our natural resources today from the next generation, it’s our responsibility to leave those the same or better than when we got them and so that’s a mindset that the club has and we look down the road.

Ramsey Russell: What impresses me about an organization like Boone and Crockett is 137 years ago, that’s a long time ago, your mission stays the same, but the world has changed immensely in the last 137 years. And I mean, it was changing and that change began right there, when Roosevelt went out west, there was still a lot of true wilderness, it seems like out there in the mid to late 1800s. Wow, I can’t imagine taking a train and going back out and seeing those herds. But at the same time, they were being massively depleted, in just a very short amount of time, America had gone from an untapped ecosystem of epic proportion to world envy to almost depleted. And I got to agree on wildlife, same as Luke and it’s just hard for me to fathom that around the time that Boone and Crockett was invented, world leaders like Roosevelt and others had kind of sorted the wildlife management field did not even exist, but they kind of sort of accepted it like a depleting resource, like money in a piggy bank, you’re going to spend it and when it’s gone, it’s gone. And the vision that group of men had to begin to aggressively carve out parts of that wilderness to keep it like that in perpetuity, to protect that land and protect that habitat and protect that wildlife resource in perpetuity and then to set up a system that is still alive and vibrant and growing and relevant, increasingly relevant 137 years later is amazing. I mean, it’s kind of like the guy that wrote the constitution, only this is for wildlife, that’s very important, that’s what gets me is we’re still tackling a lot of problems today, it just seems to be that the problems have grown, not gotten better, they’ve gotten worse with just so much humanity on earth and in the United States competing for these resources, I wonder, I mean, I’m thankful that there’s a group like Boone and Crockett still around to carry the torch, but golly, I just, times are so changing, it’s got to be a more daunting battle than it was in their day. For example, like before the show, I can imagine back in the 1800s, late 1800s, early 1900s, I can imagine seeing all that raw resource and going, I can scale conservation, I can build it, I can make millions of acres, inviolate habitat forever in perpetuity. Whereas today, man, I just wonder, I don’t see a scalability, I say, God, we got to hold the fort. We got a million different directions pulling at it that want to turn some of these areas into solar farms and wind farms and different land uses, want to tap them for oil, want to build subdivisions on them. I mean, there’s so much going on right now today, it’s got to be a daunting process.

National Treasures: Our Natural Resources

You can’t be thinking short term because that’s you’re going to get hung up pretty quick.

Tony Schoonen: Well, I think Ramsey hit on one word there that I think is pretty important and that’s vision, those guys back then had vision. And I’d like to say today we still do have that vision, we don’t think in terms of what’s going to happen tomorrow, we don’t think in terms of what’s going to happen a year from now or even 5 years from now. We got to look at what’s going to happen in the next 25 to 50 years and that’s how you plan, that’s how you make effective planning. Roosevelt had a quote, we are borrowing our natural resources today from the next generation, it’s our responsibility to leave those the same or better than when we got them and so that’s a mindset that the club has and we look down the road and I can tell you what, the challenges down the road are basically revolving around 2 things, people and land. You’re going to have less land and more people. So how can we make sure that we protect our heritage, our outdoor heritage, including hunting and angling so that my kids, Luke’s kids, our grandkids, their grandkids are able to enjoy the same things that we have grown up enjoying. And I think the vision there is important because again, you got to look down the road, you got to see what’s coming and you got to think about how you’re going to address it and how you’re going to be able to effectively address it given the fact that the political climate or the landscapes changing and that’s the way you have to think about these things, if you look at things like you were talking about sub development and you were talking about oil exploration and things like that we’re a multiple use group, all these things to be done the right way. And I think the issue is that – and this goes back a long time, back in Roosevelt’s day, the conservation movement and the preservation movement were 2 different things, right? John Mayer took the road of preservation, that basically is a no use concept, where conservation, where Roosevelt’s heart was at was a multiple use concept, you’re going to have to share the landscape with people, you’re going to have to share the landscape and make sure wildlife have a place there and you got to look out for water quality and all these different things that make a America great. Another quote from Roosevelt, our natural resources are our single most important national treasures that we have. So I think the vision piece of this is when you’re thinking about conservation not only in North America, but globally, vision is a pretty important piece to have. You can’t be thinking short term because that’s you’re going to get hung up pretty quick.

Ramsey Russell: That’s a really good topic, Tony, you bring up about a preservation versus conservation because Gifford Pinchot is the one that came up that quipped the quote and I’m going to butcher it, but wise use is – conservation is wise use the greatest good for the longest time. But he understood as the first head up of US Forest Service that timber doesn’t just sit there, we’ve got to use it to keep these forest ecosystems healthy and the same principle got applied to wildlife, so that’s a very good topic. I want to talk just a little bit more about how Boone and Crockett, they set aside this land. They brought a whole ethic to it, but they really are, even though the focus kind of, sort of is big game, they are interwoven into the fabric of North American conservation in ways that I didn’t realize until this morning, Ducks Unlimited, Pittman Robertson Act, The Endangered Species Act. I mean, they scaled beyond the borders of set aside land into a whole ethos and a conservation ethos in America more than big game, they scaled back in those days. Why was that important to them and how exactly were they involved in the formation of that kind of stuff?

Tony Schoonen: Well, I think when you conserve habitat for big game, you’re going to be conserving habitat for all species that inhabit that same area. I mean, you’re going to be looking at songbirds and waterfowl and non-game species as well. And so when these issues came up, when species started disappearing and going extinct that’s when they formulated the thought, well, maybe we need to have a national act that was passed in Nixon’s administration, the Endangered Species Act and most of these things were well thought out and well planned out and brought it about for a good reason, to address an issue that the club and our members thought was important to maintain stability for the future and also to be able to protect our outdoor heritage and our ability to enjoy the great outdoors. So, yeah, it does go beyond just big game by far. We were instrumental in forming Audubon, The Audubon Society and several other groups that are not just about habitat, but they’re also about other species of game as well, yeah, we go well beyond big game.

A Hunter’s Role in Conservation Efforts

Yeah, I think when you look at the 7 pillars of the North American model, the club was involved in the development of all 7 of those pillars. 

Ramsey Russell: Conservation is all of us in a life raft together and we I’m a deer hunter, I’m a duck hunter, I’m an elk hunter, I’m a goose hunter, I’m a bird watcher, maybe I’m an anti-hunter. We all want kind of sort of the same thing and that’s why it’s okay to reach outside of our comfort level and I’m an elk hunter, but I’m a support Ducks Unlimited. I’m a duck hunter, but I’m support the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation or Boone and Crockett or somebody else because more is better. And it doesn’t matter what that primary goal is, more habitat is more habitat for everything and that’s kind of what strikes me is very interesting. How instrumental was Boone and Crockett in the formation of what we revere as the North American model of wildlife conservation? Because they had to be at the cusp of it, they had to be one of the major wagon pullers going into this massive model that is the envy of the world.

Tony Schoonen: Yeah, I think when you look at the 7 pillars of the North American model, the club was involved in the development of all 7 of those pillars. And I think the model itself is a system of wildlife management that has evolved over time. It’s probably the most enviable system in the world. There’s no other country that has anything even remotely close to the North American model and it’s proven very effective. So, it’s a system of management that persists to this day, that continues. I think the big challenge to the model, quite honestly is funding, because the system is one piece, funding that system is another piece and there’s all kinds of revenue sources that help fund that model, going from you and me and Luke going out and buying a fishing license and supporting our state wildlife agency to major pushes in Congress, to appropriate funds through the USDA and Department of Interior to go back out into landscape and help maintain healthy habitat for wildlife. And so all of us play a role in the model for all piece of it and I think it’s important that sportsmen realize that and I mentioned earlier about the American Wildlife Conservation Partners and people coming together in that coalition, you have groups like Delta Waterfowl, like Ducks Unlimited, you have the Rocky Mount Elk Foundation, you have the Mule Deer Foundation, you have all these different groups, there’s the Trappers Association. I mean, all these different groups that have come together and have pursued common interests at the state and national level. So I think it’s important that they all support the North American model, they all are making that system work and they battle every day for ways to fund that system.

Ramsey Russell: I’m sure I memorized those 7 tenets in college or high school, but I recently stumbled across them and if I had learned them, I had totally forgotten and I’d just like to share, we talk about this North American model of wildlife conservation that is the envy of the world, I’d like to read those tenets for anybody listening that just never hurt them and I’ll be quick. Wildlife is a public trust, held in public trust to be managed by governments for the future benefit of all citizens, present, future unregulated commercial markets for wild game that historically left wild populations plundered were eliminated and continue to be prohibited, no market hunting. Regulations exist, developed by citizens like us and enforced by government agencies that mandate hunters and anglers to secure licenses and they make clear how animals will be quilled by quota proper method for harvesting them. The freedom to hunt and fish, as well as viewing wildlife should be an opportunity made available to all citizens, those opportunities are enhanced in the west by presence of public lands. Number 5, wild game populations should not be killed casually and only for legitimate purposes as defined by law. Number 6, wildlife is considered an international resource because animals migrate across political boundaries and number 7, science is the basis for guiding wildlife policy and management, not opinion or conjecture, in order to sustain healthy wildlife populations. And there’s a whole lot said in those 7 tenets, Tony, a whole lot said, it’s a public trust. Those ducks and those white-tailed deer and elk and bite and belong to everybody, whether you hunter, fish or wildlife view or live in New York City or drive a pickup truck down dirt road, it belongs to everybody, you’ve got to have a license, it’s owned by the government, but you got to have a license to access it. And my favorite is science based, it’s got to be science based. But my friend Heath Hagy, he coined this term and I’ll never forget it. It’s crowdfunded conservation. My expenditures, your expenditures on license sales, on sporting goods, on everything else, that’s what forms that critical link to it all, which is funding and it’s a important – and I’m seeing where we’ll talk about this a little bit later, but I’m seeing where maybe we’re getting away from it or maybe some people say we should get away from it, where maybe separate interests are exploiting it at face value to try to do something else with it. But I think that that North American model of wildlife conservation is, it is on the one hand, you think it’s fair to say it is a pay to play, it’s a pay to play model, but at the same time, because of the intrinsic and the actual value that wildlife brings to civilization and for our recreational value in that resource allows it to persist and to grow and just to be around for everybody’s enjoyment. Is that a pretty fair statement?

Tony Schoonen: Very fair. I mean, it’s a user shared and a user funded system and when you talk about crowd, that’s an interesting term, because I mentioned earlier the national collection of heads and horns. So when they figured out that they weren’t going to just hang these heads on a wall for so future generations remember them, they decided to save those species. What they ended up doing with that national collection, which exists at the wonders of Wildlife Museum today in Springfield, Missouri, to this day, it exists. But what they did back in 1922 is they opened up an exhibit at the Bronx Zoo and over the top of that exhibit was a saying it was a vanishing big game, species of the world. Well, people came and they saw this exhibit and they say, why are these species disappearing? And so basically, it was a huge PR move at the time to get people upset about the fact that they were losing these animals and the public went ballistic and they started pushing a lot of this legislation through their legislators, representatives in Congress, what have you. So it was really a public uprising for conservation and that exhibit was the one that triggered that public uprising. And there’s still a lot of people today, it’s not as in bread in our fiber as we’d like to see it. But at the same time, there’s still 77% of Americans support hunting, especially subsistence hunting. If you get to trophy hunting or other types of hunting that that support goes down, but 77% and that’s what we have to look at as a community, as a conservation community of hunters and anglers. We have to keep those people in our camp, you’re never going to be able to bring on the fringe, 10%, 15%, 20% on either side, that’s going to be a losing battle. The battle has got to be keeping those 77% of the American public in our camp and that public image is important, right? I mean, as hunters, are responsible to act responsibly. It’s buried in the tenets of the fair chase, it’s illustrated in the pillars of the North American model and we’re responsible for acting responsibly and if people look at us and we aren’t acting responsibly, then that’s a black eye on honey. And so it’s important that people understand that fact that 77% looks at us as a responsible group of people and we don’t want to do anything to tarnish that.

Ramsey Russell: Amen. Boone and Crockett has a lot of position statements that continue to reinforce hunting ethics and the hunting position on that I’ll sum up is, what’s a black guy and what’s not. What would you say was the first position statement Boone and Crockett ever took? What would be the first position statement Boone and Crockett ever took as a formal record? And then I’m going to get in, ask you about some of these other ones.

Tony Schoonen: Obviously, we’ve been around a long time, so a lot longer than I’ve been around, so I’m pretty sure they had some positions that were around a long time before I ever came along, but we formulate positions today to try to help educate the people who follow Boone and Crockett and also educate the media about issues that you could term are sticky issues. But I think that, by and large, we try to outline a thought process, we’re not trying to dictate to people, we’re not trying to, if you don’t follow these rules, you’re not a good this or that, that’s not how we do things, we try to make people think, think before you pull that trigger, is it too far a shot to make? Is the animal running? Is it standing still? I mean think about things before you do them and that’s really the purpose behind most of our position statements, the vast majority of them.

Ramsey Russell: I just want to hit a couple of them to give listeners an idea and context of what we’re talking about. And I read through you got all these posted up on your website, may want to pull it up for ask you a question, but I just picked some that were, seemed important to me and seemed important to a listener. I’ve got 4 of them, first would be animal welfare, we hunters love animals, but I was in a duck blind, of all places, with a non hunter, not an anti hunter and I should have known that something was up, we were filming a documentary, I should have known something was up when he showed up without a shotgun, we’re going duck hunting, he showed up without a shotgun. It was cold morning, he kept his hands in his pockets and he asked me questions. He says, why do you duck hunt? Just what I do, I mean, how do you answer that? But he says, well, I love nature, just how I interact with it, I hunt. He said, well, I love nature, but I choose not to kill it and that’s a, talk about a sticky situation, especially when you got a camera sitting on you, that’s a sticky situation to try to talk about but we all love animals, but I consume them. What is Boone and Crockett’s position on animal welfare and what was going on, contextually that Boone and Crockett, a pro hunting organization, felt the need to make a position statement on that.

Tony Schoonen: So I think the important part of that particular position statement is trying to outline the fact that animal welfare is dependent on good management. And good management depends on being able to have professionals making decisions, scientific decisions on how to manage that wildlife and also that again, it’s a user shared, user funded system that hunters and anglers basically fund in one way or another, whether it’s through excise taxes on a hunting and fishing equipment or buying licenses or what have you, they fund that good wildlife management that ensures the welfare of those animals. So they’re again, of a initiating a thought process there, Ramsey, more than anything.

Ramsey Russell: It’s just, you see some of these anti groups get touchy feely about the individual. Kill a single deer, kill a single wolf, kill a single coyote, kill a single animal and they tend to view at the single level. But I think we hunters and conservation organizations tend to look at the population level, to me, its easy, wildlife management is easy to understand as a forester, wildlife management was born in forestry, we all sit there and look at this beautiful stand of trees sitting out there, but those trees are growing, those trees are crowding each other for space and forest harvesting some for the greater good. It is an acceptable and reasonable form of forest management and wildlife is no different. We have to harvest some for care and capacity and everything else to have healthy populations. But animal welfare is a sticky one, in the world of hunting, it’s what the – I see that animal welfare is being the badge or the t shirt slogan of an anti hunting organization, because they get down in the little visceral feelings of each individual animal and it’s just really, it’s hard to manage at a continental level if we’re touchy feely about a single animal, a Bambi deer, I mean, that poor little fawn of course, his daddy scored 192 inches, according to the latest estimates I’ve heard, but anyway, it is a – What about baiting? I want to ask about baiting, because baiting is an interesting position statement, fair chase versus baiting. And here’s something interesting as an aside, Tony, Luke, I’m convinced and haven’t seen numbers to the contrary, that the United States harvests more waterfowl annually than maybe any other 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 countries combined. And baiting, in the world of migratory birds, because of the migratory Bird Treaty Act, baiting is prohibited, punt guns are prohibited, hunting at night is prohibited, there’s a lot of little laws that are prohibited in the United States to ensure that maximum sustained yield of waterfowl. But you go to other parts of the world and baiting for ducks is legal, electronic calls are legal, punt guns are still legal in parts of Europe and they’ve got healthy populations of waterfowl so now we kind of start getting into a North American syndrome based on what our model is, how we want to produce ducks under that maximum sustained yield and somehow or another us having those laws to ensure that in the United States might make baiting for ducks elsewhere seem illegal or unsavory or unethical, but it’s really not, you got to keep it in context, when in Rome. How does Boone and Crockett and especially the big game world, how do you all relate to baiting?

Tony Schoonen: Well, just we harvest more ducks on an annual basis than any place else because we have more ducks and the reason we have more ducks is because we have rules and regulations that are scientifically developed for the appropriate reasons and the same kind of goes with baiting on big game, I mean, those are state agency decisions on to control populations and it’s really in the mind of the hunter himself if he wants to bait, is that a fair chase thing in his mind? But if the state allows it, they’re allowing it for a reason and who is Boone and Crockett to argue with that? We initiated state management in the first place 100 and some odd years ago, so we’re not going to get ourselves in a position where we’re going to try to tell them how to run their program.

Ramsey Russell: Right.

Tony Schoonen: So the baiting issue is one that it varies from state to state and we’ll support our state agencies in whatever those decisions are.

Ramsey Russell: As long as it’s scientifically justified. I mean, that’s the whole, one of the major tenets, its science based, it’s regulated. Therefore, it kind of sort of can be a personal decision and still be sustainable and ethical. Here’s an easy one, lead shot, we all know lead’s bad for the environment, but, I mean, you all have got a position on lead shot and that’s kind of relevant to waterfowl hunting so I picked it out, it’s just a position statement to talk about.

Tony Schoonen: Yeah, lead has been an issue for a while, you have your anti lead groups that are leading the charge. But again, those decisions need to be made on an ecosystem basis by professionals based on science, in some cases maybe lead is creating a huge problem. I know, like, California condors is a good example, they’re endangered species, yeah. They eat a lot gut piles and they have ingested lead and we know that that is damaging to those birds and I think raptors in general, but not every place needs to have a lead rules and regulations. I mean, I think again, it needs to be done on a ecosystem basis by, those decisions need to be made by professionals if it warrants steel versus lead or bismuth versus lead or whatever that needs to be made by the scientists, by the biologists who have been trained to make those decisions and in the best interest of the game species involved.

Subsistence Hunting Vs Trophy Hunting

You said previously that 77% of Americans seem to get along with hunting at the subsistence level or for eating organically sourced meat, who can argue with a man feeding his family?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, lead’s an interesting topic to me because I’ve heard and have reason to believe that anti-hunters will use increasing non-toxic mandates on public lands to marginalize hunters from hunting and to disable that North American model of hunter participation. And so California seems to be leading the charge on it, on ways they can marginalize hunters by increasing expenses or increasing the red tape under which we can access physically or monetarily public lands and I found that interesting and I saved my favorite for last because this is going to bring me back around to a great Boone and Crockett conversation would be trophies and trophy hunting. You said previously that 77% of Americans seem to get along with hunting at the subsistence level or for eating organically sourced meat, who can argue with a man feeding his family? But you start getting off into trophy and trophy hunting, boy, then things start getting sideways, I cannot think of a more inflammatory word in today and age in the context of hunting, whether we’re talking birds, boy, I killed this beautiful trophy mallard or this beautiful trophy red crested pochard or a massive elk. I cannot think of a more inflammatory word to invite hate in social media, especially than the word trophy or the word rare. Boy, those 2 words will set somebody off in a New York second, if they’re not in our tribe, what is you all’s position on trophy hunting and how do you navigate that gap between 77%? I’m okay with Ramsey going to shooting a deer to feed his family versus, wait a minute, now he’s going off and shooting these granddaddies. How do you all – let’s get into this topic a little bit.

Tony Schoonen: Well, I think trophy is an interesting dialogue, Ramsey, because it goes back 4 decades, back 4 decades ago, 1980s trophy was a term that was used to apply to that mature male specimen I referred to earlier in an ecosystem and the harvest of that mature male specimen, which we call the trophy, was an indicator that that ecosystem was healthy, what happened to the term trophy in the late 80s and the 90s and the 2000s, early 2000s is the media you had 2 outdoor networks, you had all these different outdoor shows and it basically victimized the term and so people think of trophy differently today than they did 40 years ago. Basically, what we need to do to describe what we do in our record book is we need to come up with another term because the term trophy is not one that resonates well with people simply because they really don’t understand what the word was originally intended to mean.

Ramsey Russell: It’s been misappropriated by people that don’t have our interest at heart, hasn’t it?

Tony Schoonen: Exactly. Now, there is a YouTube film out there that I would recommend your listeners watch and it’s called selective, it was produced by Jason Matzinger, the Wild Sheep Foundation, Boone and Crockett Club, Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, several of our industry friends sponsored that film, but it’s all about harvesting a mature male specimen and what that means. It talks about the fact that harvesting those older animals and taking them out of the gene pool leaves room for the younger animals to come up and it actually results in it directly in a, not indirectly, but directly in a healthier population of wildlife and so once they’ve served their purpose and they’re tough to get, I mean, they don’t get big by getting shot, right? So, I mean, it’s a hunt, it’s not something that you’re going to go out and shoot off out of the window of your pickup truck. It’s one of these things that it’s a dedicated hunt and that really articulates and it’s a doll sheep hunt, which is not something everybody can do, but the concept applies to all the North American big game species universally. So that’s the big issue with trophy is the actual word itself has been plagiarized for the last 40 years and now public, the public sees this as an evil thing versus what was originally intended to describe. So, but I would encourage watching that film, if anybody has any questions about the value of harvesting a mature male specimen, not only to the hunter but to the animal population itself, it’s articulated very well.

Ramsey Russell: I look at the benefit of trophy in my world. It’s easy for liberal mainstream media to misappropriate that word by conjuring images of somebody shooting an animal, just to saw the head off and put it on the wall behind them. It’s very easy to do that. But you were talking about the record books being a barometer of wildlife health and I look at just in my lifetime, hearing my grandfather around the supper table talking about somebody coming and getting him when he was younger and him driving out and going to a turn row in the Mississippi Delta and bending over and looking at the first time he’d ever seen a deer print, to me coming up and wanting to shoot a deer, shoot a buck, shoot any buck, shoot more than – brown us down if legal coming in. And then gravitating more towards wanting that mature animal, wanting that harder to hunt animal, wanting that better quality animal, wanting something that looked better on the wall that I also fed my family with to now. And I’m using the state of Mississippi because I think it’s a great example, we’ve got a lot of whitetail deer, but whereas when I was young, in my teens and 20s, dog, it was bigger landscape, dogs were running, we were shooting legal bucks, sawing off the horns, maybe, maybe nothing and to where now a lot of private property management is for under some form of quality deer management, trophy deer management and we’ve got a just an abundance of mature bucks that have left their genes in pass ruts across the landscape and we’re harvesting more does, we’re harvesting management bucks and we’ve got this great production of trophy whitetails and a truly healthy white-tailed deer population in the state of Mississippi, an enviably healthy white-tailed deer population. I mean, so there’s your benefit right there, just the smoking gun of the benefits of trophy management. How do you articulate to somebody that doesn’t want to listen to those 10% outliers you’re talking about? I don’t know but they’re the smoking gun, I had a question when you were talking about, I’d never heard the record book explained as having been set up as a barometer, all right, let’s put these systems in place, let’s have a record booked where we can go back and track ourselves through time. Have you seen or can you see a trend like I expressed in the state of Mississippi? Can you see a trend and antler horn production over time, over the last 130 years, can you see that trend? Does that Mississippi example hold true continental wide?

How Well Are Conservation Efforts Working?

And so, our records books are indicating right now that our trends are going up, which is good news for the American sportsmen and women of our country and a big thank you to those people, because again, they’re a big part of that model. 

Tony Schoonen: Absolutely. I mean, most North American species have rebounded remarkably well, our record book entries are going up every year, we’re breaking world records consistently, we just took in a new world record musk ox here a couple of weeks ago and so by and large, those species are doing well and our record book entries are telling us that they’re not only doing well, but they’re, by and large, getting bigger, which is a good thing, which is a tribute to our wildlife management agencies because that shows that they’re doing their jobs and what you’re seeing in Mississippi that’s a credit to the wildlife managers that are doing a good job of managing wildlife. And so, our records books are indicating right now that our trends are going up, which is good news for the American sportsmen and women of our country and a big thank you to those people, because again, they’re a big part of that model. Now, there are a few species like woodland caribou that have huge habitat challenges that are not doing as well. But again, the wildlife managers are stepping in and they’re trying to either relocate those animals to more receptive habitats or they’ve cut back on the hunting licenses or eliminated the hunting licenses for a period of time. So they’re on top of it, whether the animals are doing well or whether they’re not doing well, but by and large our trends are going up, Ramsey.

Ramsey Russell: That’s good news. Speaking of woodland caribou Andrew McKean, outdoor life was on here recently and he actually went on one of the last woodland caribou hunts and was talking about that situation, it’s not hunter harvest, it’s habitat. That’s what’s going on in the instance of woodland caribou, what about bison? One of the most iconic species of North America would be our bison. What do you all think about, I mean, talk about an animal that’s wrestling with habitat issues because that’s an animal that historically roamed from Mississippi to Montana in great big herds, what is you all thoughts on bison?

Tony Schoonen: Well, we love bison.

Ramsey Russell: I mean you do, we all do.

Tony Schoonen: The bison logo was one of our very first logos that we had. And unfortunately, the American bison is the one North American biggest game species that literally can never recover to its former numbers simply because we don’t have the landscape to support that kind of a number. Now that said, there is landscapes, especially tribal landscapes, that are adaptable for buffalo and we are working with tribes and states to see where restoration of buffalo is appropriate and where they can manage those animals. So, there’s a kind of a sad story there, but there’s also a good story where it’s not a species that we’re ignoring by any stretch, it’s just one of those species that we’re never going to get back to where they once were and due to situations beyond our control.

Ramsey Russell: That reminds me of – I cannot remember what this movement is called, it’s a private conservation movement, they’re acquiring a lot of land and trying to build a big contiguous block out west. I look at it like borrowing from Ted Turner’s model, Ted Turner went out west and took down the fences and set up the original prairies and introduced a lot of wildlife that seemed to be doing well from what I’ve heard from managers and people that have been on those properties. But what is it, there’s a big movement right now trying to put together a massive block of land, do you all see that as potentially beneficial to bison or maybe it’d be possible tying some of those native, those tribal lands? Plus, this movement, American Prairie or whatever they call themselves, it seems to be catching some funding, some root. Is there any potential for something like that to help us set aside additional land of what we’ve got?

Tribal Lands are Key for Wildlife & Habitat Preservation

I mentioned the tribes because the tribes are sovereign nations that can govern these animals the way that they need to be managed and I think that there’s huge contiguous tracks of land under tribal governance.

Tony Schoonen: Yeah, I mean, that’s actually, that effort’s going on here in Montana and I actually met with those folks yesterday and had a nice chat with them. Anytime you get a major landscape that’ll support buffalo, I mean, that’s the big thing buffalo need, they need a lot of land to wander around and do their thing and so whether it’s publicly owned land, whether it’s privately owned land, you mentioned Ted Turner, as long as you got enough land out there on, if you got a big landscape out there, you can put a buffalo on it anywhere in the west. And I think that, I mentioned the tribes because the tribes are sovereign nations that can govern these animals the way that they need to be managed and I think that there’s huge contiguous tracks of land under tribal governance. And plus, I think that there is a revenue source there if they would, like, auction off trophy buffalo hunts or something like that to sustain their population model and their management efforts. So, yeah, anytime you have a major piece of land, public or private or tribal you have an opportunity to restore buffalo there.

Ramsey Russell: What’s the name of that group you met with yesterday? Their name always alludes me, their project name.

Tony Schoonen: Yeah, they’re the American Prairie Reserve and they’re located out, well their efforts located out in eastern Montana around the CMR, the Charles Russell Wildlife Refuge, which is a million acres in and of itself. Plus, there’s the national monument out there that’s probably another half a million acres. So they’re trying to add space and land around and contiguous to that landscape so that they can expand it and there’s buffalo out there now that are doing pretty well, as I understand it.

What Has Shaped the American Hunter?

Ramsey Russell: I support movements like that because, honestly, I mean, look in the picture behind me, you see all waterfowl, not much big game and I’m a waterfowl hunter and right now we’ve got 2% the native prairie grassland remaining in which a lot of those birds nest and so in the same way that Boone and Crockett saw benefit to groups like Ducks Unlimited, I see benefit to a group like that. If they can set aside blocks of native prairie, convert some of this landscape back to native prairie, certainly the bison will win, the big game animals out west will win, but my beloved ducks will win, too at a continental level, we need all the help we can get. So that goes back to that unity we’re talking about, conservation is bigger than just what we chase, it’s a team effort. A question I’ve got, how would you say? Because you all deal with this on a daily basis, how have hunting ethics changed or have they changed between Teddy Roosevelt’s era and now? How has time and a shrinking landscape and competition and the Internet and everything, has it shaped or changed the American hunter’s ethos?

Tony Schoonen: I’m going to let my good friend and co worker Luke take that one on, because he’s been up to his neck in this project now for over a year.

Luke Coccoli: Yeah. And I might answer that by backing up again and maybe even repeating some of the stuff we’ve covered, because it’s all great content and I think it almost needs to be said 2 or 3 times for the listener to really wrap their head around it if they haven’t heard it before, but to answer your first question directly before Teddy Roosevelt’s time or right during Teddy Roosevelt’s time, when he was thinking of this term conservation, people didn’t like it, I mean, we had just ended an era of unregulated meaning, no laws, no regulations, commercialized market hunting. So hunting for profit, hunting to sell deer hides for a dollar, that’s where a buck came from, like, can I borrow a buck? Can I borrow a dollar? So, from thousands of years ago, from what was all of our primitive ancestors would consider subsistence hunting, hunting for survival, for meat, for clothing, to what developed into a market hunting, a hunting for profit, this unregulated, ungoverned, all out kind of manifest destiny wave of people straight up exploiting natural resources as they came westward, that brought us near extinction and that is really the complete alternative to successful, active conservation in today’s standards. Like Tony talked about the national collection of heads and horns, we literally thought all these species in this room are going to go extinct, they’re trending that way and we need to do something about it. So when regulated hunting came along, as did fair chase ethics and that created game laws because again, there were no laws, there were no regulations, there was no bag limits, there’s no quotas. So you can imagine if a new regulation comes in your state today, people are maybe a little bit cautious, maybe a little bit upset, if they’re working with –

Ramsey Russell: We all have an opinion anyway. Yeah, we all have an opinion regardless.

Luke Coccoli: Yeah, exactly. And back to trophy hunting, the way people dislike that word is if they define it as the selective taking of only mature male animals. But again, that term came up for a reason and that reason was a critical component of the club’s early efforts to establish the concept of wildlife conservation when there was such small population numbers that the populations couldn’t sustain harvest of females, the breeding females or younger males. So to aid in that recovery and to ensure they wouldn’t be ever threatened again or become extinct, the club believed several things needed to happen, protect that harvest, protect the core breeding animals and put in place some regulations and laws. So they did that, they elevated and promoted the concept of fair chase and then they came up with a records keeping system so we could keep track of where these animals are coming from and how good they’re doing. But honestly, it’s been thousands of years hunting has existed as a human activity and it’s a lasting importance, it remains a vital part of our systems of conservation and wildlife management and I believe the single most critical element facing the future of hunting and our wildlife is the continued public acceptance of recreational hunting. And that’s where chase ethics certainly comes into play, there are many aspects of hunting that make it one of the most complex yet satisfying of all human activities you could participate in today. But again, by the late 1800s, the unregulated commercial market hunting had taken its toll, wildlife was no longer abundant, only in the furthest reaches of the west and in the wilderness areas, some of those areas that TR knew he had to protect, Yellowstone National Park, for example. The logical solution to some people was preservation, no use, set it aside, hands off, let nature do its thing, which could have included or would have included an end to hunting. And TR and other sportsmen close to the situation didn’t want to see that they had a different idea. So the Boone and Crockett Club, when they were founded in 1887, still had this critical problem to address the rapid decline of big game populations on a national scale and their solution was to promote this new natural resource protective system, if you will, that they termed conservation. So they promoted or regulated hunting as a foundation for this system. Wise use, sustainable use, shared use and it was based on the fact that no matter what, I mean, we’ve just come out of this huge kind of industrial revolution over exploitation phenomena, if you will. But that’s based on the fact that people need and will use natural resources. I mean, these hides weren’t going nowhere for no reason, they had a somewhat fairly legitimate use. But this use would now have to be regulated and guided by science, going back to the North American model. So for society to accept this new idea over complete protection, the preservation idea, Roosevelt and the club began to also promote another new concept, fair chase. We can’t just drive down railroads and train cars and shoot all the buffalo out the side to mass produce hides, there’s got to be a more ethical solution, a higher moral principle and standard to use, but care for respect and enjoy the resource we have, again, back from the brink of extinction. So fair Chase really became part of an overall conservation ethic, I mean, it’s embedded there in the roots of it from the earliest of days, yes, the question earlier of what was the first position statement the club came up with and I believe it was the usage, the definition of the term fair chase. It was published in the 5th article of the Boone and Crockett Club’s constitution, which dates back to February of 1888. And again, at this time, I mean, it’s hard to imagine, but there was no laws governing the taking of game or – for food or for sport, it was complete and total free reign. So this was the most drastic of ideas you could ever imagine, placing regulations on these things that were free for the taking for decades.

Ramsey Russell: Fair chase in and of itself was a very radical idea. I mean, it was like unprecedented, I mean, I’m sitting here imagining primitive man coming across the barren ice bridge in North America in the first place, wearing furs and chunking stones at mammoth, they didn’t go for the big trophy mammoth, they went for the whole herd, they got every single one of them they could kill. That was fair chase enough, just surviving an encounter like that. But then the buffalo jumps later, the Sioux were just running indiscriminate herds off these buffalo jumps to feed and to live, later, we come in with a capitalistic ideal, European, very European Adam Smith type ideal and we see a natural resource to be exploited, I never heard that a white-tailed deer hide or a deer hide sold for a buck, that’s where we came up with a buck, but that makes perfect sense. I mean, there were bucks to be made because there was an endless resource or a depletable resource out there for anybody to take and along comes a group of hunters that say, no, this landscape has shrunk in these eons, it’s shrunk over these hundreds of years and if we’re going to have these things for our kids and grandkids to see, we’ve got to have a different approach to it. And that all started with Boone and Crockett’s ethics of fair chase, that’s amazing.

Luke Coccoli: Society as a whole and even our understandings, our thought processes, everything has changed from before the Ford Model T, I mean, put yourself back there and then just imagine how tough life is to just live, the article in the club’s constitution where fair chase was coined, determined that the killing of game while swimming was an offense for which a member could be suspended or expelled from the club.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Luke Coccoli: Today’s standards, I really don’t think anyone would ever consider it right to shoot a swimming moose or deer or whatever, even a duck, for example, that the duck sitting on water is one of the most often used examples of fair chase.

Ramsey Russell: A sitting duck.

Luke Coccoli: Waterfowl, yeah.

A Code of Conduct for Waterfowl Hunters

So, we have to hold ourselves to a standard, to a level of respect for the animal, for its habitat and for the way we pursue it in order to keep this thing we love so much around. 

Ramsey Russell: I’m just being facetious, but not really there are people to say the advantage of shooting a duck on the water is you don’t have to lead him as far, but I may have said that myself in the duck blind, but go ahead. That’s a very novel concept. Do you think, though, since those days, since the inception of fair chase and that that initial landmark ethos have the past 137 years, have we hunters evolved or – Because how it is, I mean, you were telling me, you were telling me before the show, it’s no 3 inches and it’s cold up there where you’re living, Luke. And I’m sitting there thinking it was 730 this morning on my front porch, but if every 3 inches of snow, I take for granted the fact that I’m jumping in a Silverado pickup truck, not a Model T and running to the grocery store, I mean, so we tend to take things for granted, we forget our history, we become more relaxed. Have hunters become more relaxed or our ethics, have they changed since fair chase or we’re going in one direction or the other or are we still down the middle road of a fair chase?

Luke Coccoli: I think a lot of us go full circle and it just depends on your hunting style, depends on your location, it depends on the species you’re pursuing. Do you like rifle hunting? Would you rather bow hunt? Are you into muzzleloaders? Is there season restrictions in your area? But really, the ground truth remains consistent. The clubs always believe that there has to be a code of conduct for sportsmen, leaving no doubt that hunting could be conducted ethically in a manner which would aid wildlife recovery, I mean, without wildlife, without animal welfare or animals well being, if you will, we don’t have hunting, we don’t have a chance, what more is there to work for if populations gone extinct? So, we have to hold ourselves to a standard, to a level of respect for the animal, for its habitat and for the way we pursue it in order to keep this thing we love so much around. I think hunters love wildlife exponentially more than non hunters or anti hunters, because we see it, we live with it, we study it, we consume it.

Ramsey Russell: To your point, it reminds me of a story. I was in Northern Russia, north of St. Petersburg, hunting capercaillian ducks and things of that nature, one spring. And the guide, just an amazing personality, I just enjoyed him, he had a really kick ass little dog, little German hunting terrier, the first day I watched this little 35 pound Airedale looking dog tree about a ton, half a ton of bear cub up a tree, it was just fearless. But I got to wondering about how wildlife over there is managed in broken English, broken Russian. He explained to me that their model, quite simply was, well, the government gives hunters the responsibility of managing this wildlife because we care about it, it’s our livelihood, it’s how we feed our families, it’s our responsibility. And they entrust us not to overexploit it to our own derision and I thought that was kind of an oversimplification, but basically, we’ve got a lot more laws and regulations, we’ve got a model we operate in that’s scientifically based and crowdfunded and everything else, but at the same time, this resource is in our hands to take care of. Whether we’re talking ducks or bison or grizzly bears, it’s in our hands to take care of.

Luke Coccoli: Absolutely. And bears and baiting, I mean, that comes up as a hot topic for fair chase. But ultimately, coming back to today’s age, our game management objectives primarily are focused on maintaining healthy, sustainable and socially acceptable, I mean, that’s a huge one here in Montana with grizzly bears. What is the social acceptance level of grizzly bear populations expanding eastward? So in situations I can think of the Montana Idaho border. Idaho allows for baiting, Montana does not. So in situations where a dense, deep, dark forest where you can’t see all the black bears that are living in that ecosystem, hunter harvest could be extremely low and that results in an increase of wildlife populations that are extremely high and higher than the land itself can even sustain. So managers are state trust, those in charge of managing this resource for us need to reduce animal numbers somehow and baiting is one option, one tool in the toolbox that they may allow hunters to employ, they may not.

Ramsey Russell: That’s a very good point about baiting. Very good point. Yep.

Luke Coccoli: Reductions in those apex predator carnivore populations are very necessary to mitigate the spread of disease, protect bears from other bears, non hunters, anti hunters, some people just misinformed, may not know that one of the biggest threats to grizzlies themselves or even black bears is predation from other bears, boars competing with boars, boars chasing sows with cubs, it’s a wild world out there, but game damage, animals damaging property, creating safety concerns for people moving into cities, subdivisions or other negative impacts with other wildlife species like deer, elk, moose and a high population of predators consuming prey species. So there’s a lot that goes into it and it all goes back to that North American model and all these things are so intertwined together, I love it and that’s a big reason why I chose to study and work in this field.

Ramsey Russell: I just assume you all deal with a lot of anti hunters because of the word trophy and because you all are in the hunting spectrum and everything else, just public opinion, but personal opinion, maybe. But why do you think it is that the anti hunting movement has this thing for what I call the animal cracker animals, boy, when you start seeing animal activists become particularly vocal and involved at an emotional level and an extreme level. It always involves bears, grizzlies and black bears and wolves and coyotes and cats. Why do you think that is? What is it that triggers them about those particular animals, that set of animals, that a white-tailed deer or a mule deer or pronghorn doesn’t initiate that visceral response?

Luke Coccoli: Tell you what, if I could, if I knew what an anti hunter was thinking, I may not be here today on this podcast, go ahead, Tony.

Tony Schoonen: Well, I was just going to say, Luke, and I didn’t want to interrupt you, but here’s the thing and a good example of this is the wolf. So most of the anti hunting movement is not based on science, it’s based on emotion and there’s a big difference, because science isn’t sexy, emotion could be sexy. So taking the wolf as an example, going all the way back to the 1990s, mid-1990s, when they decided to restore, re-establish a wolf population, Montana, Idaho and Wyoming, it was a group effort and we were at that table but we also all agreed that when wolves hit a recovery goal of 300 pairs between those 3 states that we were going to take them off the endangered species list. Well, half the people left the table in 2002 when those goals were hit and they litigated our ability to get those wolves off the list, they went to court and we didn’t get those wolves off the list until 2011. And there was litigation after litigation. And mind you, when that litigation happens, the American taxpayers pay for it, it’s not something that these groups raise money to do themselves, they get reimbursed by the federal government under the Equal Access to Justice Act. So it’s a revenue stream for them, it pays for them to cause these emotional appeals to people. People send money when they see a wolf, beautiful picture of a wolf in a green pasture or whatever. And they’re ignoring the fact that science has dictated that those species are recovered, we still have not been able to get the Midwest population off the list and I will tell you, those wolves are up there doing very well. And they need there comes a time and Fish & Wildlife Service will be the first one to admit, when these animals need to be given back to the states for management, that’s the whole idea the Endangered Species Act, you take care of species, you bring them back to where they once were and then you take them off the list and it’s the exit strategy there in the litigation that causes a lot of problems. And so I think the anti hunters, yeah, I think they come there’s groups out there that they join these groups because of the emotional attachment to an animal, but they don’t really understand the science behind the management of that animal.

Who Will Fund Future Conservation?

It got me, but we hunters are a diminishing resource, we don’t own that resource, it belongs to all 330 million Americans, and if only 4% of us are footing the bill, 4% of us care about it.

Ramsey Russell: Well, you go back, it is emotional but to the groups themselves, it’s a profit stream, it’s a revenue stream, by making their membership become emotional, these guys, like Center for Biological Diversity, have found a very profitable business stream that’s duplicitous. I think about those tenets, because I’ve seen how some of the non-hunting or anti-hunting groups are taking issue with some of those North American tenets we talked about earlier. And there’s one I can’t get my mind wrapped around is it’s a public trust species, which means that those elk and those bear and those deer and those cats and those wolves and those whitetails are not the hunter’s property, they belong to everybody in America. And now we comprise 4% to 5% of the American public, we hunters do that have a, whether we’re funding it or putting the money into conservation or whatever the case may be, that’s beside the point, that resource belongs to all 330 million Americans based on the public trust doctrine. Therefore, they say, who cares if Ramsey’s footing the bill for it, he doesn’t own it, why are these state DNRs and these conservation NGO’s and these federal government agencies, why are they operating under a maximum sustained yield to make 4% of the ownership happy? Why don’t they make us happy? I mean, that’s a daunting argument right there. It got me, but we hunters are a diminishing resource, we don’t own that resource, it belongs to all 330 million Americans, and if only 4% of us are footing the bill, 4% of us care about it. It’s just a matter of time before the majority stakeholder, according to the anti-hunter, should take control of it. And never mind the fact, who’s going to foot the bill? Who’s going to put the billions of dollars into this wildlife management model that we’ve created in our absence? So I just, that’s what I take, that’s what I find most interesting about this topic is the fact that we’ve got anti-hunters looking at the tenets saying, wait a minute, wait a minute, these guys are falling short of their ethics, they’re not doing what they said they’re going to do and they’re trying to pick it apart. But mostly they’re looking at that first tenet, that it’s a public trust species and that 4% of us shouldn’t be driving the management of those species. And that’s a, boy, I tell you what, that’s an uphill battle trying to fight that, I think.

Tony Schoonen: Well, there is pushes right now and within DNRs and Fish and Wildlife agencies in some states to get people on the commission that are not hunters and anti hunters. So that’s a very real concern, the fact of the matter is, yes, those animals belong to all of us. But again, it goes back to they got to be managed professionally and that’s why we have those animals in the first place and those populations are now growing. So it’s important to understand that, yeah they belong to all of us, but somebody’s got a management and that’s the way the system set up the state agencies and the federal agencies that manage these species. Yeah, they get funding from hunters and fishermen, but the hunters and fishermen aren’t the ones that are calling the shots, it’s the wildlife professionals that are calling the shots and that’s who should be calling the shots and that’s have been calling the shots for decades and that’s why we have good, healthy species. But we do have concerns about some of the movements and some of the states that are pushing now to have not non wildlife professionals in places where they shouldn’t be making decisions. And that is going to be a growing concern and we do have our eye on that issue. As a matter of fact, several of the groups within AWCP have that have their eye on that issue and see it as a looming threat.

Hunting Ethics Education & Technology

It’s a 6000 acre kind of working laboratory, if you will, to teach and show people, hands on, boots on the ground, what wildlife conservation looks like on a working landscape. 

Ramsey Russell: Good answer, great answer, Tony. Luke, I’m going to throw the ball back in your court because I become aware, we were talking about ethics, went off the anti hunt trail for a minute, but we’re talking about ethics and Boone and Crockett has a new ethics platform, tell me about what you all have developed and why you all developed a new Boone and Crockett ethics course. What is it, why is it and who does it apply to?

Luke Coccoli: Yes, sir. So the listener can check it out if they just search in their web bar, learn.boone-crockett.org, you’ll find our very new, very innovative free online fair chase and hunter ethics e-learning module. So in 2018, I started a master’s program evaluating the effectiveness of electronic environmental education curriculum, that’s a mouthful. So basically, how can we use computers, devices, mobile, smartphones, whatever it may be and get kids interested in the outdoors? And that began with me from kind of a hobby that became an obsession, that became another cool facet of the club’s educational outreach stuff involving trail camps and pictures of wildlife that we have here on the Boone and Crockett Club’s Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Ranch in North Central Montana. It’s a 6000 acre kind of working laboratory, if you will, to teach and show people, hands on, boots on the ground, what wildlife conservation looks like on a working landscape. So with that kind of technology side of engaging new audiences, I would repeatedly get calls or emails from individuals from all across the country, a lot of middle school, high school science teachers saying, hey, Boone and Crockett, I found your education program here. I’m a hunter, I’m an outdoorsman, I love conservation and I’ve got a AP science class that I want to tell your story too. I want to tell them about the North American model, I want to tell them about Teddy Roosevelt and I want to especially talk about fair chase ethics because again, they kind of saw that that was somewhat at the epicenter of how this whole conservation movement began and is still so successful today. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any content or curriculum to hand over to them, I had some great position statements like we talked about, I had some great magazine articles, web articles, so I’d point them in that direction. But I didn’t have an activity or a to Z guide to really walk them through what fair chase is, what ethics and haunting mean and why they’re so important. So a couple years went by and I was sitting at a industry convention and the NRA, the National Rifle Association got up and they started talking about their hunter education platform online and this was just post Covid, so the whole world had kind of changed over to zoom meetings and distance learning, all the schools were shut down, as were hunter education courses, states were making it okay for students to learn hunter ed online and here in Montana they even dropped their requirement for field courses or a field practicum. We’re actually crossing fence lines and learn safe firearm handling and that sort of thing. And I am happy to say Montana has since brought that back, we do now have required field days to earn your hunter education certificate. But still, everywhere I saw these hunter education manuals or chapters, there was a section on fair chase, but it wasn’t as good as I thought it could be, it talked maybe a little bit about sighting in your rifle, making sure you get a broadside shot and taking care of the meat afterwards and that was kind of their ethical repertoire. So I figured, well, Boone and Crockett really flies the flag high and proud of fair chase, we came up with the term in 1888. Let’s do our own module, let’s do our own kind of 2.0 additional homework assignment and let’s see if NRA wants to help us out. Sure enough, they did, they awarded us a grant to work with the same web developer, which is a whole new world to me, but they’re based out of Salt Lake City and they took our content, we developed with a team of professional, regular members and staff, a 17 page outline of all the fair chase content we already had that we thought was important to get across in this module, we sent it to these developers. Mind you, they’re in a skyscraper somewhere in Salt Lake City, staring behind price several computer screens and an interesting thing was they themselves weren’t hunters, most, if not all.

Ramsey Russell: Most of these guys aren’t, Luke. Yeah.

Luke Coccoli: Hard to believe. But during this process, it was educating them as far as to the messaging we wanted to get across, what is fair chase? Why is conservation so important? And they got it really quick, at one point during one of our revisions, one of the main design engineers even said, I was out walking through a park the other day and I was with my friend and we saw this pond and she said I’d really like to fish that, her friend says this, I’d really like to fish that pond, but man, I don’t want to buy that $25 fishing license and our web developer said, well, do you know where your fishing license dollars go? They help stock this pond with fish, they help build that nice boat ramp over there, these benches and they even help pay the salaries of game wardens to come and educate, enforce folks about laws and regulations. And this friend couldn’t believe it, so right there, we already had multiple connections educating people about fair chase conservation, the license dollars, PR funds going back towards wildlife for enjoying wildlife and nature and it continued to blossom with several revisions. If you’ve ever worked in the tech field, you can only imagine how many different prototypes are pushed out, again, our team of professional regular members, I think there’s about 10 or 12 individuals about half of them had PhD behind their name, one of them is even getting a PhD right now in philosophy, in fair chase ethics. So we really believe we had the best of the best, a top team, people who had worked on our position statements before for the club and finally we got a finished product, we’ve launched it here just recently, mid February. We’ve had several 100 individuals take the course you can get on, create an account and come and go as you wish from the course, it’s about an hour long, it’s all click through different tiles to work through, there’s about 5 chapters going all the way from preparing for the hunt to enjoying the gift and preparing a meal of the venison, these 2 kind of late adult onset hunters end up harvesting a deer and sharing it with their friends and there’s lots of dialogue throughout, video, text, audio, it ends with these young kids as friends coming over and asking themselves, well, why do you think they hunt? What do you think it tastes like? Do you ever want to go hunting? Things like that. So it’s just a great conversation starter, it’s a great educational tool the club had never had before. It’s really gauged to a broad audience, kind of hunter ed 2.0, we’d like to see most young hunters, ages maybe 10 to 12, take their same state course that’s offered in their area, go out in the field, learn from some practical hands on experience and then reflect on what ethical decisions have they had to make already and that’s probably where we get into the primary user of this topic, it’s not super down deep into the weeds as far as what is the maximum distance you should shoot with a rifle? Should you use trail cameras on water holes or not? It’s not that kind of ethical breakdown, but it applies to all hunters and especially non hunters, to tell the message of conservation like we’ve been talking about today, to describe what fair chase is, but also what fair chase isn’t and to just open people’s minds as to if the privilege to hunt is at risk because of unethical hunting practices, then wildlife conservation and management are also at risk, so we want to educate as many people about the topics as possible, have them spread the word, get friends involved, get more people taking this module.

Ramsey Russell: That’s fantastic. I mean, you all can get that into high school. So it may be some high schools wanting hunters to look at it, but their non hunters will too and it’s a good way to just get the content out there, let people become accept – that middle ground Tony was talking about, forget that outliers, we’re never going to convince, see, our way, it’s a good way to introduce all of the American public into what hunting does as a form of conservation and as a cultural tradition. That’s a fantastic program, Luke and a great explanation for it. I’ve got one last topic I want to hit you all up with. We’re talking about ethics, we’re talking about hunting, talking about public acceptance, that 77% that don’t mind me going out and hunting, but I looked at you all social media, one of my favorite recent pictures is a picture of Teddy Roosevelt wearing buckskins. Man, he looked like a Jeremiah Johnson and as I recall, he was standing over a massive mountain lion that he had killed with a bowie knife. It’s just great, it’s just amazing, it speaks to him as a person and everything else. Then again, there wasn’t instagram back in the day. He didn’t run to his cabin and break out his phone and upload it or upload right there from the kill site. What are you all’s about social media and as it relates to hunting and hunting ethics and the perception of a non hunting public, an increasingly non hunting public to what we do? Do you all have guidelines on that or thoughts or opinions? Me personally, I post it up, try to post it up tastefully, try to educate the public, educate my people, whatever. But at the same time, why shouldn’t I be able to share that? It’s what I do, it’s legal, it’s ethical, it’s moral in my part of the world. What are you all’s thoughts on social media?

The Role of Social Media in Hunting Ethics

Is this picture something that I’m proud of that I think people are going to resonate well with or is it going to be something that’s going to turn people off? 

Tony Schoonen: Well, I’m going to let Luke have some thoughts here, too, but I’ll start off with this, that is that we have a strategy here at the club because we’re known for records and big animals, we generally use our, not only our social media, but our magazine. If you look through our social media and our magazine we’ll talk about big animals. But we use that as a hook, because when you’ll see sidebars in association with these kinds of things, with these animals that, why did that animal get so big? How did it get so big? And that’s where you weave in the conservation philosophy of the club is using the records as a hook and then bringing them in and those stories about Theodore Roosevelt, he’s a hot button. People love that guy and including us and so that is, again, a way to stimulate people coming to our social media network and reading about that, but then they also get educated on what the club actually does by prompting them to come back to our website and that strategies worked extremely well. I mean, we’ve got more people visiting our website now than we ever have and that’s a good thing because we’re very proud of the material that we have on that in terms of how to educate people who come there about all the different things that we do and how they can be involved. So I think when it comes to social media, again, there’s a thought process, there, is this going to put, what is the optics of this post going to look like to the average American hunter or maybe even the average American non hunter? What is the optics going to look like? Is this going to be a tasteful thing or not a tasteful thing? And I think social media can be a powerful tool when it’s used, I also think it’d be a huge detriment when it’s not. And I think people just got to think about the same thing they think about when they pull the trigger, is that animal, is this a fair chase moment for me or is it not a fair chase moment for me? Is this picture something that I’m proud of that I think people are going to resonate well with or is it going to be something that’s going to turn people off? And I think that again, it’s stimulating the right thought process to make people at least think about it before they do it, is the whole strategy behind that and I don’t know, Luke, if you have anything to add to that or not.

Luke Coccoli: Yeah, there certainly are a couple of guidelines the club put out there to help with this because at the end of the day, our ethical compass does now transfer over to the technical age we live in and social media. But to blame the Internet for people coming after hunting for distasteful images is kind of like blaming little Debbie for gaining weight. You might kind of bring some of it on yourself, so step one is make sure you know your privacy settings and who this photo is going to be seen by, if you’ve got a public profile and you put something out there, you’ve got to know that anybody can see it, anybody can react to it. So if you want to keep it personal and close to friends and family, I think that’s an easy one to accomplish, we do encourage avoiding images showing blood or the tongue hanging out, bullet entry or exit, gaping holes from a hollow point tend to be distasteful, not something everybody scrolling wants to see, per se. Arrows sticking out of animals, obviously there as well, standing over or sitting on the animal can come off as distasteful, posing as your animal or birds as props, as if you’re better than them, you’re over them, kind of in a dominant stature may get some reactions, hanging things from machinery, putting the animal in a posture that’s not naturally in is just not tasteful to the eye, you really want to see the animal in its own habitat, in its own form and shape and then the images we use a lot on our website, in our yearbooks, in our magazine, in our record books, really try to tell the whole story of the hunt. So we want to see the habitat, we want to see the rifle, we want to see the weather, the sky, the mountain range, not just the end result kind of grip and grin. Like I say, as hunters, we never need to apologize for all that we do or what sportsmen have done for wildlife and for conservation. But we do however, ethically and morally, have an obligation to demonstrate respect, it all comes back to respect for the hunted and for the sensitivity of all others who care about wildlife.

Tony Schoonen: One thing, one little story for you, Ramsey, that your listeners might be interested in thinking now about the story of Theodore Roosevelt harvesting that cougar with a bowie knife, when he was president, he was invited to Louisiana on a black bear hunt and that the outfitter down there, he was a fellow by the name of Holt Collier, was so determined that the president was going to kill a black bear that he actually tied one to a tree. And so Roosevelt shows up and he refuses to shoot the bear tied to the tree and the artist that was on that trip drew a picture that appeared in the New York Times of Roosevelt not shooting that black bear and it talked about fair chase. Well, this toy maker got this idea about making a bear, a toy bear and he called up Roosevelt and he said, can I use your name to name this bear? And it was called a teddy bear and the teddy bear just had its 150th anniversary in February and that’s where the teddy bear came from. It was basically a fair chase hunt, well, it wasn’t a fair chase hunt, it wasn’t, that’s why Roosevelt didn’t take the bear. But it all came off that illustration way back when in the New York Times and so just an interesting little sidebar about the ethos of our founder.

Ramsey Russell: That’s exactly right. And for those of you all listening, we actually did a 2 part series, several years ago on Holt Collier that the hunt with the teddy bear took place in Issaquena County, Mississippi, on what is now very close to Delta National Forest and because President Roosevelt would not kill a tethered bear, that Holt Collier, the bear was killing Holt Collier’s dogs, Holt broke his gun over the bear’s head and then roped him and a couple of years later, that was the Louisiana black bear, a couple of years later, he went, the president then went to Louisiana to hunt with the Metcalf brothers and lot of those guys from Mississippi had hunted with and it was, I can’t remember where exactly, somewhere around Tensas Parish they were hunting and luckily, Holt Collier from Mississippi, a famous bear guide and commercial hunter, had been invited to hunt with them and they fired the guide from Louisiana, more or less that the president was then hunting with and Holt Collier put him on his bear there in state, that’s when he finally, the president finally killed his Louisiana black bear was with Holt Collier in Louisiana. But the guy that invented that teddy bear was just a street vendor and come up with his great idea, it was the number one toy at Christmas that year, the teddy bear and that man went on to found ideal toy company with a major international conglomeration, based on that one story you just told, what a great story.

Tony Schoonen: But yeah, and you’re right, I made a mistake. It was a Louisiana black bear tied tree in Mississippi. But you obviously know a lot more about that story than I do.

Ramsey Russell: I’m a huge Holt Collier fan. He’s buried in my hometown. I grew up about a – I was born and raised about a quarter mile from what would have been his home place there in Washington County, Mississippi.

Tony Schoonen: So we were just involved with an effort to restore his cemetery he’s buried in where Boone and Crockett was. And we also were involved in the establishment of the Theodore Roosevelt Wildlife Refuge in part of the world. So, yeah, we have some good folks in Mississippi, including our sitting president James Cummins is from Amory.

Ramsey Russell: Absolutely, he sure is. Guys, I really appreciate you all’s time today, this has been a such an enjoyable conversation, thank you all very much. We tend to think Boone and Crockett, the club, the trophy club, the record book, well let me just start this way and say this, that everybody listening, we are all the benefactor of this great resource and the model under which it’s managed, thanks to the Boone and Crockett Club. So, thank you all very much for coming on today. Thank you all very much for the insight into this organization.

Tony Schoonen: Thank you, Ramsey, for having us.

Ramsey Russell: Yes, sir.

Luke Coccoli: Thank you, our pleasure.

Ramsey Russell: And folks, thank you all for listening to this episode of MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast. We’ll see you next time.