Older Hunters and State Officials Lament Loss of Young Hunters

Whats wrong with kids today ask older huntersthey are not hunting. All they care about is social media, smartphones and video games John Sherwood Sr. told the Press of Atlantic City last year. All they want to do is stay home and play with their doodley-doos.

Sherwood is right. The number of U.S. hunters is dropping about 10 percent a year with the greatest losses among the young. "For every 100 hunters who retire, only 62 take up the sport," warned former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell. The steepest hunter decline in Wisconsin, a big hunting state, is males 25-44millennialswhile teen hunter numbers are also dropping fast reports the State Journal.

Overall, hunting is a dying sport with 33 states showing dramatic declines in hunting license sales like New Jersey where yearly sales have dropped by122,000 since 1971. Reasons include urbanization, the distance of hunting areas, competing activities and the growing number of single parent households headed by women. Hunters now constitute only six percent of the nation and are 89 percent male, 94 percent white and old. (Yes, the same demographic as the NRA.)

Ask young people about the decline and many will tell you hunting is just not cool. Kids "think it's boring to sit in a tree for hours and have nothing walk by," Kevin Kelly told the lower Hudson Valley's Journal News. "Only a couple of my friends really hunt," high school student Jonathan Gibbons told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. "The rest have never really found the appeal of sitting out in the cold to shoot an animal."

While longtime hunters lament the loss of ties to nature, the real issue is money since hiking and bird watching are also ties to nature but hunting is a primary source of state Department of Natural Resources (DNR) revenue, providing hundreds of millions of dollars. Deer populations are the bread-and-butter money-maker for agencies that rely on hunting license sales for large parts of their budgets," admitted a hunting web site.

DNRs have tried everything to hook kids on blood sports. In the 2000's, the National Assembly of Sportsmen's Caucuses, a hunting lobby, launched the Families Afield initiative to reduce "barriers" to youth hunting like age restrictions and preventing kids from shooting big game. (Research shows that the more we restrict youths from hunting big game, the more they don't bother hunting at all! ) Families Afield legislation also legalized apprentice hunting licenses so kids could hunt before taking hunter safety training with a licensed adult hunter.

Much of the increasingly urban and non-hunting nation laughed at a Wisconsin bill to reduce the "barrier" to eight-year-olds hunting written by gun shop owner State Rep. Scott Gunderson, R-Waterford--until it passed the House of Representatives in 2007. Opposing the bill, Wisconsin resident Joe Slattery said eight-year-olds "still believe in Santa Claus" and are too young for guns. Slatterys own son was killed by a child hunter. The Senate compromised and raised the age to 10.

DNRs have also launched youth hunting days for deer, waterfowl and upland birds and Take a Kid Hunting programs. The Pennsylvania Game Commission enlists kids in raising day-old pheasant chicks in their own backyards to be shot as game in Youth Pheasant Hunts.

Of course hunting has been an American tradition and, when it comes to meat, may be more ethical than factory farming. But our national attitudes toward guns, animals and food are clearly changing. For example, 12 percent of millennials are now vegetarian versus four percent of Generation Xers and only one percent of post-World War II baby boomers--paralleling the hunting demographic drop off. Also, even though fifteen years ago, former President George H. Bush himself supported lion killing, so many people were outraged by the killing of Cecil last year, Delta Air Lines and six other airlines ban the transport of trophy hunting kills. Longtime hunters may not like it but in the words of a certain Nobel laureate the times they are a changin.