Do Hunters Pay for Wildlife Conservation?

Question: Do Hunters Pay for Wildlife Conservation?

The Truth about Hunters Paying for Wildlife

Hunters in the United States claim that they pay for wildlife conservation, but the truth is that they pay for a very small portion of it.

Answer:

Do Hunters Pay for National Wildlife Refuges?

The short answer: Not nearly as much as they would have the public believe.

Over 150 million acres of land are in the U.S. National Wildlife Refuge System, and there is at least one refuge in every state. One way that hunters support wildlife habitat is through the purchase of Duck Stamps. However, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, only 3% of the land in National Wildlife Refuge system was purchased with funds from the Migratory Bird Conservation Fund, which has six sources of funding:

1. sale of Duck Stamps, 10% of which are purchased by nonhunters
2. import duties on firearms and ammunition
3. appropriations from the General Fund
4. right-of-way permit and/or easement fees and the sale of surplus refuge lands
5. any monies remaining after refuge revenue sharing payments have been made to the counties each Fiscal Year, and
6. any Federal Aid monies that are unexpended by a state each Fiscal Year.

So, if funds from hunters paid for only part of 3% of the National Wildlife Refuge System, who paid for the rest of the land? "Most refuge lands (almost 90 percent) have been withdrawn from the public domain." So, one could say that the lands were stolen from the indigenous people, or that no one paid for them, or that all Americans paid for them. But it was not purchased with money from hunters.

Do Hunters Pay for State Wildlife Areas?

On the state level, money from the sale of hunting permits supports state wildlife agencies, some of which may go toward purchasing land. However, the money also goes towards salaries of wildlife management agencies, which are run by hunters, for hunters.

Also, an excise tax on the sales of firearms and ammunition under the Pittman-Robertson Act gets distributed to state wildlife management agencies and may be used for land acquisition, but these funds come mostly from non-hunters. According to the latest available figures from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, about 13 million Americans hunt, but estimates of the number of gun owners in the U.S. range from 60 million to 90 million. This means that only 14% to 22% of the people paying into the Pittman-Robertson fund are hunters.