Poaching an elusive term
Poaching is an elusive term, loosely defined depending on time, place and context. The word arose in Europe in the early 1600s, when it was applied to anyone who dared trespass on the royal forest to take the king’s deer, salmon or grouse.
Today, the word is widely used to describe large-scale commercial killing of rhinos, elephants, tigers or other wildlife to sell certain body parts, such as rhino horn, on the world’s black markets. The same kind of commercial killing also happens in America. Black bears, for example, continue to be killed for their gall bladders, which are valued in Asia for pharmaceutical uses. Large white-tailed deer bucks are shot in a spotlight’s beam every autumn because someone, for some reason, is willing to pay large sums for a set of “trophy” antlers.
The word “poaching” can also refer to any of a variety of illegal methods or excesses in taking wildlife. Killing a deer without a valid hunting license, hunting illegally over bait, or killing two wild turkeys when the law allows only one to be taken are all considered poaching. Research has documented that people poach wildlife for a wide range of reasons — economic, as a food source or for sale; to gain an advantage over the quarry or other hunters, for the “thrill” of eluding apprehension by wildlife officers, or because some people do not believe they should be subject to laws that limit the methods, seasons or numbers of wildlife that may be taken.
Killing a deer in 1620s England was a personal crime against the reigning king or queen because wildlife, then, legally belonged to royalty. But here — and this is something all Americans can take pride in — wildlife belongs to everyone, or to no one depending on how you choose to view it. In America, no one possesses any particular game animal or bird until it is legally taken by hunting. So, poaching in America amounts to a crime against every other citizen, against one’s self and, especially, a crime against future generations.
While it is true that state wildlife agencies have authority to set and enforce hunting regulations, and landowners have the right to restrict access to private property, wildlife itself is a natural resource held in common by everyone.
Our American approach to wildlife ownership (or non-ownership) is known as the North American Model of Wildlife Management, a unique legal and practical framework that has enabled many wildlife populations that were once greatly diminished to rebound. The model depends on hunters funding conservation work by purchasing licenses, and then obeying laws and regulations passed to ensure fair chase and adequate reproductive potential among wildlife species.
Among the sad tragedies of poaching is that conservationists already brought much of our wildlife back from the brink of extinction. Poachers, by selfish acts, destroy a resource that others have helped to restore.
When European explorers first arrived in America they were astounded by the unfathomable bounty of wild birds, mammals and fish. As settlers continued moving west they found, always, the same incredible natural wealth. Early Americans encountered clouds of passenger pigeons that darkened the skies, salmon and shad runs that choked rivers, bison herds that stretched to horizons and other examples of wild abundance we cannot even imagine. Spurred perhaps by that very abundance, and in the absence of any regulation, they destroyed nearly all of it, within a couple hundred years of the first ships’ landings.
By the late 19th century, conservation leaders like Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir and George Bird Grinnell noticed the impoverished state of American wildlife and resolved to awaken the public.
As president Roosevelt pushed a national conservation agenda and most states simultaneously launched their own wildlife protection and conservation agencies, such as the Pennsylvania Game Commission, established in 1905.
Through providing and protecting wildlife habitat, and by enforcing seasons and bag limits among hunters, this conservation movement restored populations of deer, wild turkeys, bears, elk and many other species of hunted game. Every increment in that success took money, work, ingenuity and persistence. We present day hunters are the beneficiaries of that resolve.
That proud history is why it is so tragic that people continue to abuse wildlife by poaching. It is easy to rationalize poaching, and you will hear it said around here: “What difference does it make? The one deer, bear or turkey I take illegally won’t even be noticed.”
But that’s really the point of wildlife conservation laws.
If everyone ignored the laws, thinking only of their own immediate gratification, wildlife would once again plunge toward extinction. Our modern laws depend on every one of us to be our own policeman, our own game warden so to speak.
Because there are never enough conservation officers to patrol every wooded ridge or every mile of stream, we hunters and anglers must accept and welcome the self-imposed responsibility to police ourselves, not hard to do if we value wild things.
Writing about ethics in hunting and fishing, Aldo Leopold the American conservation visionary of the 1930s and ’40s wrote that “Ethical behavior is doing the right thing when no one else is watching.”
Often, that’s what respect for wildlife and our conservation history come down to-doing the right thing when we’re all alone in the woods or on a stream and no one would know our actions, except ourselves.