“The nation behaves well if it treats the natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the next generation increased and not impaired in value,” Roosevelt told the Colorado Livestock Association in 1910. The result was the modern conservation movement. Seeing the devastation, influential animal lovers like Theodore Roosevelt, Aldo Leopold, William Temple Hornady, and many others set about looking for a solution. These factors, plus unregulated hunting, decimated populations of our continent’s wild animals. What Is Sport Hunting?Īs European settlers spread westward during the 18th and 19th centuries, they brought with them towns, cities, roads, railroads, and industrial agriculture. I think they’re a good illustration of why this explanation is necessary. I’ll avoid embedding the photo here since it contains a dead bear, but you can check it out here to read those reactions yourself. Upon returning to to port, I posted a picture of that bear and deliberately left it free of context in order to collect readers’ unvarnished reactions. This May, my wife and I visited Alaska to hunt Peninsula Brown Bear, and were successful. This is my attempt to do that, from the perspective of a trophy hunter. Because that ignorance actually threatens the future of wildlife conservation, it’s important to educate the general public about its benefits. But, the act itself-killing animals for sport-remains controversial, often attracting vitriol, and even death threats from non-hunters who claim to care about those wild animals. Hunting is the reason we have such abundant populations of wild animals in North America.

Wild at heart filming with animals