Hunter participation plummeting! Hunter numbers down! Conservation revenues at all-time lows!
Hunting license sales at all-time lows! Sharpshooters hired to reduce deer numbers! Record number of nuisance bear complaints!
The doom-and-gloom, end-of-times headlines for hunting in America are everywhere! And all for absolutely ridiculous, nonsensical reasons as far as I’m concerned.
For starters, we are being regulated to death with rules and laws that not only have absolutely nothing to do with wildlife science, but are to my way of thinking in this politically correct and corrupt culture-war world, intentionally created by soulless, ignorant, criminal bureaucrats intentionally doing all they can to destroy the American family hunting heritage and way of life.
When the law forbids families from feeding or baiting deer and bear, but hire tax-paid government hunters to kill them using feed and bait to clean up our failure to harvest adequate numbers, you know the bureaucrats have lost their minds and souls.
When a hunter can go to jail for killing an extra deer while tax-paid “sharpshooters” are killing extra deer by the hundreds, and everyone from the agriculture, wildlife, highway and insurance agencies are screaming for more deer to be killed, something has gone extremely haywire in America.
Hunters are quitting their beloved sport in droves, fed up with the insanity of arbitrary, punitive, capricious, asinine laws.
Not a day goes by in my life that I am not approached by my fellow hunters, here, there and everywhere, angry and dejected with heartbreaking stories of woe due to the tsunami of anti-hunting regulations forced down our throats by idiot bureaucrats that know absolutely nothing about hunting, wildlife or conservation.
With this runaway engineered attrition obvious everywhere, the hunting industry continues to hold their mega conventions trying desperately to sell more sporting goods to an ever-diminishing population of enthusiasts, totally ignoring the flamethrowing pink elephant in the room.
Somebody write this down and do something about it:
“WE ARE BEING REGULATED TO DEATH BY LAWS THAT HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH WILDLIFE MANAGEMENT OR THE SAFE ENJOYMENT OF THE GREAT OUTDOORS!”
The industry should go to war on bureaucrats and bureaucracies to gut the state and federal regulations of anti-hunting, stupid laws.
Sunday hunting bans. Minimum age laws. Minimum draw weights for bows. Lighted nock bans. Trailcam bans! Three shell limits on migratory birds. Closed seasons on squirrels. Bow case and gun case laws. Baiting and feeding bans. Unnecessary bag limits. Unnecessary limited season lengths. Arbitrary shooting hours. Confusing arbitrary fishing regulations. Tax payer dollars for so called sharpshooters killing our wildlife. Counterproductive arbitrary protection of wolves, cougars, bobcats, coyotes and bears. Limits and nonsense restrictions on varmints. Calling gamebirds songbirds! Protecting avian predators that wipeout small-game populations.
None of this is hypothesis or conjecture. These are the nonstop complaints that I hear everywhere, all of the time from otherwise dedicated hunting families across America.
Hunting, fishing and trapping should be fun, easy and sensible. When it is not, people don’t do it, wildlife suffers and wildlife management revenues disappear.
The message to the anti-hunting bureaucrats and factions out there is simple: We will gladly pay to harvest the annual surplus, finance game departments, we will hunt safe and ethical, we will reduce the annual surplus and conserve these precious wildlife resources, keeping wildlife in the asset column. Just leave us the hell alone and let us enjoy ourselves.
If each of those points above were remedied, we would see an explosion of recruitment and retention overnight, increased value of wildlife and wildground, and dramatically increased revenues for conservation.
At last year’s NRA convention in Indianapolis, I saw all of the big, colorful signs and heard all of the exciting announcements for the NRA Hunter Leadership Forum.
Son Toby and I decided to attend the seminar, so we followed the signage to the designated room.
With some of the most respected outdoor writers and professional guides and outfitters on the panel, it was painfully clear what was wrong with our industry.
There were maybe six people in attendance other than Toby and me, and if this represented hunting industry leadership in any way, shape or form, the future of our sport is doomed.
The NRA is huge! The tens of thousands of families on the main floor of the convention were surely mostly hunters and outdoors people, yet nobody attended this so-called Hunter Leadership seminar.
And I will tell you why, though many do not want to hear it.
I know and respect all of the men and women on the panel, all of whom are as good as it gets in the hunting world. Professionals and hunting masters of the highest order, all of them.
But with all due respect, and the empty room is irrefutable proof, none of them could sell a blanket to a naked man in a blizzard.
The old guard status quo modus operandi of our industry is glaringly detrimental to any meaningful forward motion, or any semblance of attrition reversal in the foreseeable future, if ever.
If ever there was a time that American hunters can fix these glaring failures, it is now with President Donald Trump. Both of his sons, Eric and Don Jr., are the real McCoy when it comes to hunting and conservation. Believe me, these guys know their stuff and have been dedicated hunters their entire lives.
They and an army of conservation warriors are dedicated to Hunter Nation as the only organization focused on getting out the vote for God, family, country, freedom and the natural hunting rights that go hand in hand with these traditional American conservative values.
Nobody out there has the faintest idea what the letters SCI, DU, RMEF, DSC, B&C, P&Y stand for because, for the most part, those organizations have zero relationship with the public.
Even with some of their enormous budgets, they have all failed miserably at any PR whatsoever.
If you believe that the future of hunting is worth fighting for, if you live the spirit of opening day like you mean it, if you cherish the traditional American values that makes America the last and only best place, I hope you will visit HunterNation.org and join the battle for the soul of America.
Without proper access to hunting, fishing and trapping, wildlife value diminishes exponentially, and will vanish from the asset column and end up in the liability column before you know it.
Like California, Washington and Oregon lions and bears. Like Colorado bears and Estes Park elk and mule deer. Like Michigan’s wolves, bears, doves and cranes. Like Isle Royal moose and wolves. Like Long Island deer. Like furbearers nationwide.
Hands-off mismanagement is detrimental all around. Access and sound, science-based management is win-win-win every time.
HunterNation.org. Please. I for one will never quit fighting for truth, logic, commonsense and sound science-based wildlife management, not politically correct denial and bureaucratic corruption.
Multi-platinum guitar legend TED NUGENT has a new full-length album THE MUSIC MADE ME DO IT, on Round Hill Records. The album is available now for order everywhere, and the title track “The Music Made Me Do It” is available to download and stream wherever music is sold.
With more than 40 million albums sold, rock legend Ted Nugent is equally well known as the nation’s most outspoken proponent of our 1st and 2nd Amendment rights, conducting thousands of pro-gun, pro-freedom, pro-American interviews in major media worldwide. Nugent is a New York Times best-selling author whose works include Ted, White & Blue —The Nugent Manifesto; God, Guns & Rock ‘n’ Roll and Kill It & Grill It.This year, his award-winning Ted Nugent Spirit of the Wild TV show celebrates its 500th episode! For all things Nuge, visit www.tednugent.com