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Conservation Efforts supported by the Low Country Chapter

Since our inception, the Chapter has been involved locally, nationally, and internationally. We were "New Chapter of the Year" in our rookie year. A partial list of our donation recipients follows:

Sportsmen even fund non game animal conservation more than all other non-governmental interests combined.

That is plenty of reason to Be Proud. In Europe they call hunters "Game Keepers." That’s right! We are the foremost keepers of the game. No one has done better. We’re entitled to BE PROUD.

WE ARE INDISPENSABLE

Sportsmen pay more for wildlife conservation than all other groups combined. In the USA, 85 percent of state DNR budgets are derived from hunters and fishermen. It is over a billion dollars a year in license fees alone. We also pay a third more through special stamps and excise taxes as well. These are voluntary taxes. It is unmatched and apparently, un-match-able. That contribution is IN-DIS-PENS-ABLE to the whole conservation paradigm. Reason to Be Proud.

But wait, there is more! There is no equal to the additional contribution of sportsmens’ conservation organizations singularly or combined. Ducks Unlimited has 6200 fund raisers a year! It has 800,000 members and has spent 1.3 BILLION dollars where it counts. Mostly in Canada - where it really counts. The hunters of Ducks Unlimited have no match in the conservation world, from pole to pole. BE PROUD!

The Foundation for North American Wild Sheep puts "sheep back on the mountain" by adding millions each year to joint state or provincial projects. BE PROUD.

The Turkey Federation has spent over 100 million dollars reintroducing turkey that were on the brink of extinction at the beginning of the 20th century. BE PROUD. North American Hunters’ organizations, tens of thousands of them, large and small, compliment and even overshadow governmental wildlife conservation. BE PROUD.

CONSERVATION SUCCESS CYCLE

There has never been anything equal to this sportsmen FOUNDED and sportsmen FUNDED system in the history of the world. Knowledgeable scientists recognize it as the foremost wildlife conservation development of the 20th century. This remains true as we enter the 21st century. BE PROUD. It is a self-funding, perpetual cycle of success. The more hunters, the more revenue. The more revenue, the more habitat, enforcement, incentives, research and all it pays for. In turn, more wildlife. The more wildlife, the more sportsmen – an enormous army of stakeholders, of game keepers, the foremost force for wildlife conservation. It is time that it be acknowledged that we are, like it or not, the engine. Don’t accept any less credit any more! BE PROUD!

BIG GAME HUNTING POPULARITY

Our activity that is most under attack by detractors is doing the best. That is Big Game Hunting. Big Game Hunting in the USA is more popular today than it has ever been at any other time in our history. Big Game Hunting is on the rise. This facet of hunting stands alone, having risen to a level of unprecedented popularity despite a slight decline in overall hunting participation during the past several years. The growth in the USA is dramatic! Most astonishing, its growth rate surpasses that of all other popular outdoor activities such as fishing, taking trips to watch wildlife and even watching wildlife near our own homes. In the USA, it is the only popular outdoor activity that has a growth rate exceeding the human growth rate. Between 1950 and 1996, the USA population increased 49 percent, while Big Game Hunting increased 615 percent (1950 at 1.5 million to 1996 at 11.3 million.) It is a long term trend that is the bedrock of the system in the USA. There is nothing with such a rate of growth, nothing else with such a long term rate trend of growth either. BE PROUD.

ALL SPORTSMEN

All hunting and fishing sportsmen as a group and per capita (1) contribute more revenue for wildlife conservation, (2) spend more time in touch with the natural world, (3) have more conservation organizations, (4) are more likely to belong to a conservation organization, and (5) are more truly proven to be stewards of our natural world. It means we care more. BE PROUD!

GIVERS NOT TAKERS

You pay for the management. You pay for the law enforcement. You pay for the research. You pay everyone and are paid-by-no-one. You are the givers, not the takers. Stand up. Don’t take it anymore. STAND UP. BE PROUD!

HUMAN VALUE

There are those that don’t care about our contribution or about us, our ancestors or our children! In fact, they don’t really care about the resource. Teddy Roosevelt said, "We grieve only for what we know." "The erasure of (a species) is no cause for (real) grief if one knows it only as a name in a botany book." They don’t know what hunting is, what it means in human terms. We know the trees, the soil, the beauty, the solitude. We have not simply seen or been in it, we are still a part of it. We are hunters! BE PROUD.

Aldo Leopold said "that hunting and fishing are an indispensable social resource of tremendous national value." He said "Of course we hunters have always known this, but until recently we failed to tell the public." Perhaps that is still correct. Let’s stand up and let everybody - I mean everybody know what it means to us in human terms. When we do, we honor our ancestors and create a legacy for our progeny. STAND UP. BE PROUD.

Karen Blixen, that the Out-of-Africa movie was made about, was a hunter. She wrote that safari hunting "is really Africa’s greatest charm" and upon returning from a hunt that "I have never in my life enjoyed myself more." It "was like returning to the really true world again." "I most kindly apologize to those hunters whose delight in the chase I failed to understand. There is nothing in the world to equal it." BE PROUD.

Aldo Leopold, the father of wildlife management, liked to "arrive too early in the marsh" just for "an adventure in pure listening." He wrote that hunting "is not merely an acquired taste; the instinct that finds delight in the sight and pursuit of game is bred into the very fiber of this race... the love of hunting is almost a physiological characteristic .... We are dealing, therefore, with something that lies very deep. Some can live without opportunity for the exercise and control of the hunting instinct, just as I suppose some can live without work, play, love, business, or other vital adventure. But in these days we regard such deprivations as unsocial. Opportunity for exercise of all the normal instincts has come to be regarded more and more as an inalienable right." He was so right. STAND UP. BE PROUD.

Although many of the foremost social scientist of our times, including Freud, Jung and Fromm, consider hunting instinctual in man, it is much more. It is the highest order experience and expression. It is the pinnacle. Kings and Queens, as well as common men, have held it in the highest esteem since the beginning of time. It is time-honored, time-proven. Be Proud.

Jose Ortega y Gasset wrote that "Hunting submerges man deliberately in that formidable mystery and therefore contains something of a religious rite and emotion in which homage is paid to what is divine, transcendent, in the laws of nature." It is a transcendent experience. We know the cathedral of nature as only those in the choir can know it. BE PROUD.

Probably the most practical and clearly stated ethic for hunting and for judging all environmental action in general was Aldo Leopold’s "land ethic" in A Sand County Almanac. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends to do otherwise.

The bottom line is - we are the greatest force for the biotic community and our detractors unwittingly tend to be otherwise. They should be gone and we should BE PROUD!

Stand up! Be Proud!

 Author unknown

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Last modified: 11/12/08