Privilege Has Strong Ties To Responsibility

Fifty years ago, Jim Posewitz crawled out on the snow with the new BB gun Santa had delivered and did pretty much what you might expect a boy to do.

He killed a sparrow.

Posewitz grew up to be a wildlife biologist and a top official in the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Department.

In retirement, he holds a position with the Montana State University philosophy department, where he’s had time to ponder his first kill, and the many game animals he has subsequently bagged.

On reflection, he said, he didn’t kill the sparrow because he was curious, although he remembers picking it up and stroking its feathers and studying it in detail.

He killed the bird, he thinks, because he wanted to be a hunter.

“Little did I realize that this singular event connected me to some fur-draped Pleistocene hunter who had once a very long time ago rammed a spear into the heart of a mammoth,” he wrote in his latest book, “Inherit the Hunt,” (Falcon Publishing, $14.95).

From Stone Age beginnings, he said in an interview from his Helena home, hunters have been the backbone of support for American wildlife.

The book documents the connections hunters have with this country’s abundance of game.

Posewitz is scheduled to speak tonight to hunter education instructors in Moscow, Idaho. His message is steeped in history. At the same time, it’s urgent.

Hunters took up their arms to become the Freedom Fighters who won our nation’s independence. The ranks of hunters produced the depression-era wildlife conservation movement heralded by `Ding” Darling and Aldo Leopold.

Above all, Posewitz says, the common man’s access to hunting has been the key to recovering game from the brink of extinction.

The pioneer spirit and market hunting of the 1800s had a catastrophic impact on many wildlife species, igniting a sport-hunting ethic and response that likely wouldn’t happen on continents where average citizens are denied the freedom to hunt.

“Theodore Roosevelt was a Harvard-educated man of considerable personal wealth,” Posewitz says. “He and others of his time could easily have adopted an elitist attitude and simply acquired privilege.

“Roosevelt, George Bird Grinnell and their associates, however, used their considerable power not to separate themselves from the less advantaged, but to champion a common cause.”

Although American common law evolved from the English system, the Declaration of Independence gave sovereignty to the people. An 1842 Supreme Court decision over the taking of oysters in New Jersey confirmed that fish and game belong to the public.

“Out of that system, hunters have spearheaded federal and state programs to fill this continent with game,” Posewitz says.

“In England, where hunting has remained a sport of privilege, six major species of big-game are extinct, and the hunt is just about finished.

“In this country and Canada, the reverse is true because all people were empowered to be the hunters. With significant numbers engaged, we have restored game to an abundance unlike anything in the world.”

Posewitz, who also wrote the book, “Beyond Fair Chase,” said the messages hunters pass on to each other have profound implications.

“New hunters must be indoctrinated in the context of hunters who preceded them,” he said. “They are part of something special. Hunting isn’t just a casual activity to shoot something, but rather a movement that’s been extremely beneficial to wildlife and the hunters themselves.”

“Beyond Fair Chase” deals with individual experiences to provide recipes for hunter behavior. The five short stories in the book deal with themes that have been used in courses ranging from hunter education to high school literature.

Most adults tend to respond to the story about a hunter dealing with a wounded elk, Posewitz said.

Young people, however, respond to the story about the relationship between a senior hunter and a youngster.

“It seems that kids are looking for mentors,” he said, noting that coming fresh into any activity is scary to the point of exclusion. Tonight, Posewitz will tell the hunter education instructors they are part of a continuing success story.

“During the hunting season In 1909,” he says, “Pennsylvanians killed one hunter for every 90 deer. If that ratio had not changed, 5,000 hunters would have died in 1997. Instead, only one fatality was recorded among the 700,000 hunters who killed 450,000 deer.

Hunter education, he said, has made hunting safer than billiards.

A nation of hunters, he reminds us, can do wonders.