A Tribune op ed and some thoughts on outfitters and locals.

We recently ran the item below.

The Agrarian's Lament: Two Hunting Season Reflections

A column appears in the Tribune today, by an outfitter, congratulating the Legislators involved in this matter (voting the bill down) for their thoughtfulness.  Interested folks can find it here:

Outfitters: Senators deserve our thanks for taking a thoughtful approach

The argument basically is the one I noted.  The bill would have reduced, the way the op-ed termed it, "hunter tourists" by 50%.  And that's true.

That doesn't rise to the level a good argument in my view. After all, legalization of marihuana was subject to the same pocket book interest. And Colorado was, and probably still is, getting stoner tourists. But that is the way that a lot of people tend to look at any question, and this question in particular.

The bill claims the Senators were verbally attacked, which if true is inexcusable, but which probably does show the deep seated cultural feelings on this issue here in this state.  Natives, of which I am one, tend not to be too sympathetic to this argument.

Why would that be?

It's  not, by and large, that most natives and long time residents are opposed to people keeping their jobs and we generally don't want to hurt the owners of restaurants and hotels and the like.   And we're keen on sporting goods stores. So none of that is it.

What is it, is being locked out.

Hunters and fishermen have sort on odd admiration/aggravation relationship with farmers and ranchers (quite a few of which, we should note, are hunters also).  And outfitters have made this worse.  It has to do with access to land.

Now, I'm not going to wax too romantic about this and there's always been places that hunters and fishermen, and from here out we'll just refer to both as "hunters" as fishermen are simply fish hunters, could not go.  But they were much fewer before outfitting became a big business in the state.  

That wasn't until the 1980s and the impact wasn't immediately felt. But by the 90s it was.  Outfitters were part, but not all, of that.

Indeed, out of state land ownership was also a big part of that.  Rich people would buy ranches in Wyoming and lock them up, if they could, whereas the same lands before had been ones of ready access for hunters.  Outfitters, however, came in and bought the hunting access, often locking up public lands that were landlocked by private lands at the same time.

Ranchers and farmers of course participated in this for a variety of reasons, simple economics being one but also because that often meant that they didn't have to deal with the minority of hunters who were some sort of a problem to them.  The outfitters guided their clients and hence controlled them.  

The entire development has impacted the local land culture a lot.  Access to private lands is harder to come by than it once was.  Given that, local hunters are unlikely to love outfitters if they've been pushed off of their former hunting lands.

The Game & Fish, for its part, has tried to redress this and has done so fairly successfully by effectively becoming sort of an outfitter, sort of, itself, by buying access to hunting lands under various agreements with landowners. That's a great program that I highly encourage, but of course it still isn't going to engender love by the locals for outfitters.

With only so much wildlife to go around, and so many places that it can be found, reserving licenses for out of state hunters, while generally supported by the locals, loses some of its appeal when the argument fails to ignore the impact of what outfitting has helped to create in the state.  

It's a classic agrarian conflict.

Indeed, it very closely replicates the agrarian conflict that took place in the 30 years following the Civil War in the South, to some extent, a conflict that came near to violence on multiple occasions.  That won't occur here, but that local hunters will back such bills if they can, and that the outfitting industry will oppose them, should be no surprise.

All of which gets back, in some ways, to my earlier arguments about creating a subsistence hunting license in the state, but that's not seemingly too likely to happen any time soon, and if it did, chances are that those with a trophy focus, and outfitters, might oppose that.  Or might not.