For starters, we have science-based wildlife management funded by dedicated taxes and license fees collected from shooters, hunters, trappers, and archers.
The license fees help pay for state wildlife management agencies, while the dedicated taxes collected from gun, bullet, and archery sales fund the purchase and long-term lease of 50 million acres of dedicated hunting lands under the Pittman-Robertson Act.
It’s not perfect, but it’s the best in the world, which is we why we have more bear, wolves, lions, beavers, fox, raccoons, deer, eagles, hawks, groundhogs, alligators, coyotes, and geese than we did 25, 50, 75, 100, or 125 years ago.
In the U.K. they have a 500-year track record of terrible land and wildlife management and, after killing off the last wolf and the last bear, they have shifted the persona of these two top-end predators onto the small shoulders of the mouse-eating fox, and the worm- and bulb-eating badger.
A bit ridiculous? Yes.
Meanwhile, the British have banned bow hunting, banned all leghold trapping, and all but banned regular rifles.
Hunting with dogs is on its back legs, and freshwater fishing has been mostly reduced to carp and what we would call “trash fish”.
Instead of collecting taxes from licensed trappers and hunters, the folks in the UK pay their government to hire professional killers to go out and shoot or pump poison gas down tens of thousands of badger settes in order to control Bovine Tuberculosis.
Here in the U.S., we regulate and license hunting and trapping with real seasons, bag limits, and protected areas based on wildlife surveys and sound science.
How long a hunting season is, and how many of any particular game species are harvested or killed in a state, or within a defined area within a state, is determined by science in consultation with wild lands and wildlife professionals whose career and salary is based on harvest sustainability.
We control our predators, as needed, but it’s generally a light hand.
America values its predators, as they are part of the fabric that has made this nation, same as woods and fields, fire and rivers, mountains and plains.
Most states that have legal trapping actually produce manuals on how to trap (as does the National Audubon Society), and trapping is seen as an important way to control meso-predator release (raccoons, fox, possums) in bird nesting areas where wolf, lion, and coyote populations are not high enough to do the job.
And YES, the US Government produces a trapping manual and it features Red Fox on the cover.
For the record, what’s true in the US is also true in the UK, which is that 70 percent of all fox die every year, even in the absence of all hunting and trapping.
Mortality drivers are distemper, mange, starvation, parasites, vehicle impact, respiratory diseases, and (in the US) predation by coyote.
Banning fox and badger hunting does not save fox or badger lives, nor does it reduce fox or badger suffering, as anyone who has seen the ravages of distemper, mange, and starvation can confirm.
A sensible government would license hunting, raise revenue and improve professionalism through licensing, and put science-oriented biologists in charge of deciding the annual number of tags.
In the UK, however, there’s no history of sensible wildlife management. As far as I can see, it’s been a 500-year shit show.
See >> https://www.fishwildlife.org/application/files/5516/7891/6935/AFWA_North_American_Trapper_Edcuation_Manual_2022.pdf
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