Ethics in the field

10 years later, author of "Fair Chase" releases new book on hunting heritage and ethics

It's early evening on a Sunday, and you've just finished a hard day of big-game hunting. Your legs are tired and you haven't seen an animal all day. While driving out of the darkened forest your headlights sweep across a field, illuminating a trophy white-tailed buck standing next to a doe.

In that instant a line is drawn; you are confronted with the ethical decision that all hunters will face again and again in their lifetimes. To shoot or not to shoot?

Most hunters would not shoot the deer as they remained frozen in the glare of the headlights. But take a second look; are those deer for real?

On this Sunday night, in a field on public land near Whitefish, they are not. They are mechanical decoys operated by game wardens from Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks to catch poachers. The deer heads move mechanically but realistically, and even the deers' tails twitch on command from a small remote control operated by a game warden hiding in the bushes. The deers' eyes remain icy green, frozen and unblinking.

No shots are fired on this night, and the hunters pull away in their rig, having approached - but not crossed - the fine line that separates an ethical decision … from poaching.

Ethics play a large role in hunting, a pastime where hunters patrol themselves and are responsible for a natural resource owned by every public citizen.

Ten years ago Jim Posewitz wrote the book on hunting ethics.

The year 1991 was a critical time in hunting ethics in Montana. It was just after hunters killed over 500 bison near Yellowstone National Park as the animals migrated out of the park. Anti-hunting activists descended on the bloodied killing fields and a national outcry resulted, the images of bison dying being replayed on national television.

It was time for wildlife managers to take a closer look at the role that sportsmen played in wildlife management; rather than being the merciless killers that anti-hunters made them out to be, hunters were now forced to look closer at themselves and their role in wildlife conservation.

The book "Fair Chase" evolved from that situation and Posewitz, a Helena author and founder of "Orion, the Hunter's Institute." The book was a resounding success. It sold over 400,000 copies and became a textbook for hunter-education courses in Montana and around the nation.

Now Posewitz, 69, has released another book, "Rifle in Hand: How Wild America was Saved."

In the 10 years since Posewitz wrote "Fair Chase," ethics has taken on a much larger role in hunter education, he said. With the release of his new book, Posewitz, a former employee for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, takes a deeper look at how hunters helped save America's big-game animals from near extinction.

By exploring the rich history of conservation and how hunters helped bring back near-extinct species in the last 100 years, Posewitz hopes to usher in a new school of thought regarding hunter ethics. By showing hunters what they've accomplished, he hopes to show hunters what they're capable of.

His book, recently released by Riverbend Publishing in Helena, examines how men like Gifford Pinchot, George Bird Grinnell and Theodore Roosevelt brought conservation from the White House to the fields and mountains of America - with "rifle in hand."

In a letter to congressman and friend Henry Cabot Lodge in 1883, Roosevelt wrote: "I am very fond of hunting and there is nothing I enjoy more than riding over open range with rifle in hand."

Roosevelt became president in 1901 and took to the task of preserving nearly 230 million acres of wildlife habitat in refuges, game ranges and national monuments.

This rich history should help to educate hunters the important role that they play - and have played for 100 years - in wildlife conservation, Posewitz said.

After the 1994 Yellowstone bison hunt, wildlife managers sat down to rethink the way the bison hunt was being conducted. At a staff meeting for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, where Posewitz was assistant to the director, Posewitz asked, "Is there anyone here who thinks we're doing the right thing?" regarding the hunt. "No one raised their hand," he said.

Later that winter, 6,000 elk died on the northern border of Yellowstone. The anti-hunting activists were long gone.

"The only people who stayed behind to work on that were the conservation groups like the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation," Posewitz said. "This was the classic case of hunters being vilified, then going to work to make things better for wildlife."

The following year, the Legislature took the recreational hunter out of the bison management equation and convened the Governor's Symposium on North American Hunting Heritage.

"We wanted the hunting community to do an examination of themselves," Posewitz said. "In the words of the time, hunters had to clean up their act. We had to do a much better job of teaching the conservation heritage of hunting."

Posewitz' book on the tradition and heritage of hunting comes on the heels of Montana voters overwhelmingly passing a constitutional amendment that would recognize and preserve the rights of Montanans to hunt and fish.

Has ethical behavior changed since his first book was released and hunters began taking a closer look at their actions? It's difficult to quantify, said Posewitz, who received the 2004 Outdoor Life Conservation Award. One thing is for sure:, however, ethics have become a primary topic of hunter education.

THE DECLINE of the western plains bison herds preceded Roosevelt's election as president. Bison-hide shipments from Fort Benton on the Missouri River peaked at 80,000 in 1876, the same year that Lt. Col. George Custer was killed at Little Big Horn and the same year that Roosevelt entered the freshman class at Harvard. By 1874, those buffalo shipments dwindled to nothing, due to the fact that bison had been all but eradicated from the plains, Posewitz said.

On the front lines of hunting ethics are the game wardens who witness what is being done in the field.

These law-enforcement personnel get to see firsthand what kinds of decisions are being made by hunters to preserve Montana's wild game resources. By most accounts the news is good, says Ed Kelly, warden captain for Region One of Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks.

After 33 years in law enforcement, Kelly said, "sportsmen are now more responsible than they've ever been."

The decoys are put out by wardens throughout Montana as an aid to see if hunters will cross a fine, ethical line.

FWP has several types of decoys, from bear to deer and elk, which are put out when the department gets reports of poaching on private property or spotlighting on public land.

"It's a deterrent," Kelly said. "It's like seeing a highway patrolman when you're driving. What do you do? You slow down and look at your speedometer."

The decoys helped one man approach that fine line - and back away from it.

The hunter thought he had seen an elk decoy in the field and told a game warden how proud he was of himself for not shooting it, Kelly said.

Actually, the elk was NOT a decoy, but "it helped him get over the temptation," Kelly said. "It may have helped that guy stay within the acceptable boundaries and it saved that elk to be taken legally by another hunter."

For people who cross that line, the consequences can be expensive.

A fine for shooting a decoy - which is normally placed where another law can be broken, such as shooting on private land, on or from a road, or after dark - can be upwards of $1,000 and the hunter can loose his hunting privileges. The violator may also have to make restitution for the damaged mechanical deer. "Sometimes the guy makes a really good shot and disables the servo that operates the deer," Kelly said.

So far this year, Kelly said, "we're not having a run" on poaching, but there is "illegal activity occurring out there and we're aware of it. There are people taking advantage of the resource."

Kelly helps run an undercover operation that helps snare wildlife criminals. "We have an excellent covert team that makes big cases every year and they'll be making them until the end of civilization," he said. The lawbreakers came from a wide range of economic classes, he said.

Older hunters, he added, generally abide by the law. "Grey hair cures a lot of things," he said.

Posewitz said hunters do a good job of policing their own ranks and making good ethical decisions in the field. "The average hunter and angler wants to be involved," he said. "They want to keep this model of conservation viable."

The American legacy of conservation and hunting ethics runs deeper than you might think.

Posewitz tells the story that when U.S. Marines had surrounded Saddam Hussein's palace in Iraq, they supplanted their military-issue meals by hunting gazelles from Hussein's private preserve. They instituted a self-imposed bag limit to protect the herd from being wiped out.

"The first thing we think of is protecting the wildlife," Posewitz said. "It belongs to all the people and we all get to participate."

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