Colorado and Michigan have established Wildlife Councils. Both have skillfully developed marketing and outreach materials about the economic and conservation benefits of hunting, angling, and trapping. In general, messages effectively target the non-hunting, non-fishing, and non-trapping public and explain how wildlife and recreational opportunities like bird watching or hiking benefit from the sale of licenses and federal excise taxes on the sale of hunting, fishing and trapping equipment and supplies.
Yet despite their success, both Councils have important structural defects. Among these are the ways in which Council members are appointed. In Colorado, Council members are appointed by the (politically appointed) Director of the Department of Parks and Wildlife (CDPW). In Michigan, Council members are appointed directly by the Governor. De facto, what this means is that Council members are motivated to toe the company line because they are beholden to the Director or the Governor. A state chief executive with an anti-hunting bias could simply appoint anti-hunting partisans as Council members. In fact, this tactic has been floated in both Colorado and Michigan.
Because budgets are policy, another defect is that Wildlife Council spend plans are subject to agency approval. Disturbing but true, Councils have been prohibited from distributing non-partisan science-based information in much the same way that agency experts are ‘gagged’ from speaking about species targeted in a referendum proposal. Although Wildlife Councils may be prohibited from taking sides on partisan issues, there should be no prohibition on reporting agency activities and why those activities are necessary and important for species management.
Obviously, strategies that mitigate or circumvent these deficiencies are needed. One approach might be for a third-party organization to request and then distribute messaging (perhaps through intermediary hunter, angler, or trapper organizations) in states where ballet challenges arise.
As an illustration of how this might work, the Colorado Wildlife Council developed a variety of effective marketing strategies that promoted the economic and conservation benefits of big game hunting to the non-hunting public. Because the Council was prohibited from commenting on Proposition 127, information was requested from and provided by Council members to the primary organization formed to fight against the ballot proposition (i.e., Coloradans for Responsible Wildlife Management, CRWM) who deployed it in its’ ‘Vote for Wildlife’ campaign, with the result that Proposition 127 failed by 11 percentage points.
This desirable outcome stands in contrast to the unsuccessful ‘Stop the Wolf’ campaign against Colorado Proposition 114 in 2020. In that instance, (mainly out-of-state) organizers chose not to use Council generated data even when it was offered to them. Arguably, this choice was one of the more important reasons that Proposition 114 passed by less than 2 percentage points.
Identifying a third-party conservation organization to act as a repository for messaging and market research is harder than it sounds. CRWM was purpose-built and issue-specific. Even virtual archives cost money and don’t necessarily align with the business models of hunting, fishing, or trapping organizations that compete among one another for memberships based on more traditional on-the-ground conservation efforts and/or hunter recruitment, retention, and activation.
The take-home message is that North American hunting, fishing, and trapping traditions depend on how the general public views these activities. Because mass marketing on fish and wildlife topics is dominated by animal rights and wildlife protectionist organizations, conservationists urgently need to develop the capacity to push back against misleading, if not outright wrong, statements by these organizations.
Wildlife Councils in Colorado and Michigan have demonstrated that accurate science-based marketing changes public opinion for the good. But even if Wildlife Councils were to become common, the inevitable (and to some extent unresolvable) weaknesses in the model (e.g., political appointments, administrative spend plan approvals) means that outside entities are needed to assure that information gets out to the public when it is needed the most.