Playing Games With Hunting Statistics

I’m a demographer by training, and one thing you learn when it comes to advocacy and statistics is that if one side is quoting percents, it's a good idea to look at the total numbers, and vice versa.

And so it is in the arena of hunting, as I have noted before.  Now, I am glad to see someone else making the point.  Over at the GearJunkie web site, Nicole Qualtieri notes that while the percent of hunters in the US population has declined, the absolute number has not.

In 1958, 14,138,182 people owned hunting licenses. In 2020, hunting license owners numbered 15,158,443 — over 1 million more. And we’re not all that far away from the peak number of 17 million hunters in 1982.

This is perfectly true, but it obscures the baseline.  What year shall we use?  If we pick 1958, then indeed we have more hunters -- in absolute numbers -- that we did in 2020. But what if we pick the comparison date of 1975?  Then it's less.  As in so many things, where you stand, and what you see, depends on where you sit.

Then there is the question of hours in the field, or person-days hunting.  Has that been rising or falling?  

And what about habitat?  Do we have more forest and farm land or less?  Do we have more access or less?

    

Notice that the real issue -- human population growth -- is still obscured.

Forest and fields are not committing suicide; they are falling to freeways and tract houses due to the inexorable rise of American population growth.

That same population growth means that while the percent of hunters in the US has fallen from 8 percent in 1958 to 4.5 percent today, the absolute number has actually increased because the population of the US has grown from 175 million to 331 million during that same period of time -- a 156 million person increase.