It's Worth Fighting For.
I'm fresh off a plane back into North America, spring is in the air here and amongst the spring growth, the bears are awake and stuffing their faces with fresh clover.
All hunters here have been sitting on their hands and dreaming of the mountains here since early December waiting for the season to open, outside of a few late-season winter mountain goat and buffalo ballots there has been zero hunting going on for over 4 months. Even now it's a very limited spring black bear season, not everyone's cup of tea, so those Canadians who want to hunt have to wait a few more months to mid-August for a chance at a deer of any description.
Back home in NZ hunters have freezers brimming with fat summer venison and pork; now we are moving from the wapiti bugle, to the red roar, to sika squeal, to fallow croak, to the Tahr and Chamois rut. What a hunting paradise New Zealand is!
One thing I have done a lot of over the past decade is "back and forward" between NZ hunting and international hunts all around the world. One byproduct of this is perspective; sometimes it's hard to see what you have until you get outside of the bubble and see the bigger picture.
As kiwis we can hunt 365 days of the year, we have access to a wide and wonderful range of game animals and hunting types across any measure of terrain. We're only limited by our own personal ethics on what to shoot, how much to shoot, and when to shoot it.
That's great, but how do we keep it?
The social license and ability we have to hunt in NZ is not a right, it's a privilege that the non-hunting public affords us.
We have our own challenges in NZ on how to manage our game animals as a valuable renewable resource. The answer, unfortunately, is not sitting on our hands and hope nobody screws around with our own personal hunting patch. One thing the impending Tahr cull did was illustrate that united, as a group, hunters could channel enough passion to get noticed.
The trouble with this is that politicians who are actively fighting to eradicate our game species and the lobbyist for forest and bird alike are cunning, they have learned what happens if they "go big" as they did with the Tahr. Now to avoid being called out in front of the nation they will change their tactics in order to achieve the same goals. The difference is that this time it will be done covertly, in small increments, using bureaucratic smoke screens and public misdirection. This will still upset hunters who are close to the issue, but each movement won't be enough to ignite the passions of the whole hunting community, and thus will go largely unchecked.
How can we make a difference?
Join NZDA - they may not be perfect, you may not want to show up at meetings, but when it comes to politics and policy numbers matter. We need a strong national organization to represent us at the table. You can join as an associate member, put $90 bucks towards the cause, and be counted
Care about the animals you hunt - if you want to hunt Wapiti one day, join the Fiordland Wapiti Foundation. If you hunt sika, join the central north island sika foundation, if you're a Tahr hunter support the Tahr foundation!
Even if you don't want the be part of the politics, even if you don't agree with everything these great volunteers are doing 100% of the time, trust me when I say it's much better to be counted and have someone fighting the battle than it is to stick your head in the sand like a dumb ass, just sayin.
Catch you on the clearing,
Matt Gibson
The Educated Hunter