State wildlife agencies, including the Indiana Department of Natural Resources (“IDNR”), depend on the sale of hunting licenses and matching federal funding derived from the taxation of ammunition and hunting equipment.
Source: NPR
This financial reliance on recreational killing positions hunters as the agency’s primary constituency. Policy is crafted in accordance with the hunters’ demands and preferences. Understandably, this funding scheme is problematic to IDNR’s financial stability when hunting participation declines.
As IDNR is painfully aware, hunters are hunting less often and in fewer numbers each year. Fewer young people are taking up hunting and older hunters are “aging out” of the violent hobby. Panicked wildlife agency officials recognize the clock is ticking and have been scrambling to RECRUIT new hunters (women, children and city dwellers), RETAIN older hunters, and REACTIVATE former hunters (by making it as easy as possible to find animals to kill and more places to kill them).
Source: NPR
This decline in hunting participation represents a significant cultural shift. Overall, the public favors non-violent interactions with animals and nature. Hiking, wildlife watching, photography, and the like continue to grow in popularity. This preference is of little value to IDNR as these activities do not generate a participation fee akin to a hunting license, nor is the necessary equipment for animal-friendly activities similarly taxed or subsidized by the federal government.
Due to IDNR’s reliance on revenue generated by recreational killing, the Department is unable to merely adapt to this cultural shift. Instead, IDNR and wildlife industry think tanks, have set their sights on programming and policies that offer IDNR’s preferred constituency free access for recreational hunting on private lands through its Community Hunter Access Program (“CHAP”).
Pandering to local towns and municipalities, IDNR promises modest amounts of grant funding in exchange for free hunting access within primarily residential communities. In accordance with the agreement, hunting participants must purchase deer hunting licenses from IDNR for every deer killed. The increase in hunting license sales, along with the demonstrable increase in acreage of hunted lands now available in Indiana, triggers larger matching federal dollars for IDNR’s coffers.
Cue the current debate in Long Beach, Indiana. Deer kill proponents cast the narrative by presenting deer as nuisance trespassers fixated on destroying the Town while those who value nonviolent wildlife interactions struggle to reconcile how the annual killing of countless deer can possibly be a reasonable or a proportionate solution to any perceived problems.
Notably, in May of this year, the Long Beach Town Council voted unanimously to submit a CHAP grant application to secure funding for a deer kill within the town. The proposal allows 20 armed strangers hunting access 24 hours a day, seven days a week for 4 ½ months. The endorsed hunting weaponry is compound bows, inherently dangerous devices that shoot bolts up to 1,500’, or, for Long Beach residents’ purposes, well over a dozen residential lots.
As explicitly stated in the CHAP Development Agreement, the Town will “enroll 530 acres into the Community Hunter Access Program for hunter access…Long Beach will provide at least 2,860 potential hunting opportunities…”
As evidenced by the CHAP Development Agreement, the issue in Long Beach is not about managing “nuisance” deer – IDNR lacks the statutory authority to sell licenses for that purpose. Rather, the CHAP program is about providing fresh hunting grounds and bolstering IDNR’s revenue-generating cycle.
Animals, specifically the white-tailed deer, are renewable resources that naturally respond to population removal by reproducing in equal or higher numbers. Consequently, hunters, once established in an urban community, leverage this biological certainty to justify the ongoing need for their ongoing services. The more deer, essentially created by the CHAP program itself, the louder the cries of “overpopulation” in the years to come, which begets more licenses and ammunition sold, and therefore, more revenue for IDNR.
Whether or not opening up Long Beach’s charming community for recreational killing is appealing to the residents is entirely up to the Town to decide. What’s important, however, is that the residents and elected officials fully understand that the only problem they are being asked to fix is the sharp and continued decline in hunting participation.