The Hog Blog

I’ve always kind of enjoyed the articles in Newsweek magazine.  While there’s a detectable tilt to the left, the publication always seems to manage some semblance of balance on most issues.  I’ve got to say, though, that I can’t remember ever seeing an issue with a positive word on guns or hunting.  And this latest issue is no exception.

“Gracing” the pages of this week’s issue is an article titled, It’s Survival of the Weak and Scrawny: How Hunting is Driving Evolution in Reverse.  The author, Lily Huang, goes to some lengths to argue that hunters, through our pursuit of the biggest and best specimens are causing species to evolve less “desirable” animals. 

Researchers describe what’s happening as none other than the selection process that Darwin made famous: the fittest of a species survive to reproduce and pass along their traits to succeeding generations, while the traits of the unfit gradually disappear. Selective hunting—picking out individuals with the best horns or antlers, or the largest piece of hide—works in reverse: the evolutionary loser is not the small and defenseless, but the biggest and best-equipped to win mates or fend off attackers.

Now those of us who’ve been in the anti vs. pro hunting debates for a while have heard all of this before.  It’s been pretty well discredited, so I was actually surprised to see it reappear… especially in a magazine like Newsweek.  We were told, over and over again that, “hunters only kill the best animals and that weakens the herd.” 

This flies in the face of the fact that most hunters, while they’d gladly take a real “trophy” animal, usually take whatever legal specimen they can kill.  The percentage of “trophy” animals taken in any given season is pretty low… although it appears to be increasing of late… in contrast to the argument.  Hunters seem to be entering more and bigger animals into the record books every season.  It’s also a fact that by the time most big game species have reached trophy status, they’ve spread their genetics across the herd for at least a few generations, and their offspring have begun to do the same.  It’s pretty hard logic to argue with, even for those of us like myself who are not wildlife biologists or geneticists. 

So anyway, when I was told about the article, I started to blow it off… but then decided to give it a read to see if it shed new light on an old subject.  I’m always ready to be enlightened, and maybe this would be the article that would do it.

It didn’t.

First of all, the “evidence” in the article was pretty scattered and largely based on species that are heavily poached and in other countries, as opposed to species that are hunted under wildlife management principles such as those in place in the US.  This includes the Australian red kanagaroo, killed by poachers for leather, and the elephants killed for ivory, as well as an isolated population of bighorn sheep in Quebec.  The author mentions other game animals, such as elk, but offers no research or statistics to support the argument that “trophy” animals are diminishing. 

So let’s start with the premise.  If a particular trait causes unusually high rates of death in a species, then that trait will eventually disappear as animals without the trait are more successful at breeding.  That sort of makes sense, if you buy into the idea of evolution and natural selection (which I do, generally).  The case of the tuskless elephants seems to make a compelling argument that there is something, at least, to this. 

Tusks used to make elephants fitter, as a weapon or a tool in foraging—until ivory became a precious commodity and having tusks got you killed. Then tuskless elephants, products of a genetic fluke, became the more consistent breeders and grew from around 2 percent among African elephants to more than 38 percent in one Zambian population, and 98 percent in a South African one. In Asia, where female elephants don’t have tusks to begin with, the proportion of tuskless elephants has more than doubled, to more than 90 percent in Sri Lanka.

So something is going on there, but is the change the result of hunting (poaching), or are there other causes.  The big problem is that nobody knows, for sure.  The kind of research to support this kind of theory simply doesn’t yet exist because it’s impossible to create control groups or measure any kind of relative data.  The information is largely circumstantial, and Huang does go so far as to admit that later in the article.  The jury is out.  The evidence is not anywhere near conclusive or widespread.  But even if it is proven that the change is caused by the excessive harvest of animals with large tusks, it’s critical to note that this is illegal and unmanaged hunting. 

So why then, did Newsweek and the author decide to publish this article as a damning assault on hunting?  If this were a court of law, they’d be bounced out on their ears.  In a debate class, they’d get heckled off-stage and get a big, fat “F” for their efforts.  But a national news magazine sees fit to publish it? 

There is not any evidence supporting an argument that trophy hunting practices are having any kind of negative effect on big game populations.  In fact, as most wildlife biologists have learned, the biggest problems are occurring for the opposite reason… too many hunters are shooting young, under-developed males from the breeding pool.  While I don’t completely agree with QDMA programs on public land, it is clear that encouraging hunters to take only mature males and more females is allowing more young males to grow to “trophy” status. 

Likewise with elk, it’s a pretty easy argument to make that any perceived dearth of trophy bulls on public land is the result of un-selective harvest of younger bulls.  The youngsters, four and five-point animals, tend to bear the brunt of the slaughter during the season.  The ones that escape, or those that live in the back of beyond where the average hunter never treads are doing just fine.  You’ll see them every year on the feedlots after the hunting season is over.  Trophy animals are also alive and well on private and limited entry areas, or at least as well as they can be due to various environmental factors (drought, severe winters, etc.). 

You can pretty much run the same argument across the gamut of North American big game.  Trophy hunting, for all the hype, isn’t having much of an effect on the species.  Most hunters are not trophy hunters, and most hunters don’t harvest the best specimens from their areas.  The most widely pursued game species are doing fine, in some cases too well, despite the hunting pressure.  I can’t speak so much for other countries like Africa, where unmanaged areas are being decimated by poaching, not only of trophy animals but of all animals.  The managed areas are a whole different picture, and incomparable to anything we have in the States (with the possible exception of Texas). 

To wrap this up, I think my biggest problem is in the way the article is focused on “hunting”, as opposed to poaching and/or poor game management.  It’s also an issue to me that the whole piece is based on shaky theory derived from isolated populations of animals and unrelated data points… and it simply doesn’t hold up on a large scale.   Maybe the majority of what I “know” about the issue is anecdotal and I have stated before that I’m not an expert.  But when even the real experts in the article state, clearly, that the whole thing is really just a rough theory…  it smacks of agenda pushing on the part of the magazine and the author. 

It is piss-poor journalism at best, and a poorly disguised anti-hunting propaganda piece at worst.  You choose for yourselves.

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