Vote For Hunting’s Future… Before It’s Too Late
By John McLaurin, SCI President
Originally published in the 2024 September/October issue of Safari Magazine.
An eventful couple of months it has been since the last issue of SAFARI Magazine. The tone, tenor and composition of the upcoming U.S. Presidential election has shifted significantly to say the least.
President Biden has decided he isn’t running for re-election, and his Vice President is the anointed torch bearer for the Democrat party.
Speaking of torchbearers, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to acknowledge the Paris Summer Olympics. Having lived and worked as an Army officer in the American Embassy in Paris for three years with the French Ministries of Defense and Justice, I was privileged to see much of Paris and France. I know firsthand the beautiful uniqueness of the country and the city itself. I used to run marathons there and would run in the Tuileries every noon from one to two hours. The Tuileries was the location this year for three Olympic flames. The athletic venues were spectacular! The U.S. team competed beautifully, and we can celebrate all of them, each and every one. They are all winners, in my opinion. And that is the nature of athletic competition. Yes, it is great to win gold, just as it is great to make it there to compete.
But there is a different kind of competition. The Olympics are about sport, not life and death. SCI’s Advocacy is also a competition, but we are competing for the survival of wildlife and hunting. There is only win or lose. And if you lose, seldom is there another competition the next day, month, year or multiple years later.
SCI Advocacy doesn’t take place on the athletic fields. The life or death of hunting and the survival of wildlife takes place in the courts, the legislatures, the various departments of government around the world and in the courts of public opinion in every country.
The anti-hunters are basically opposed to harvesting any wildlife; the animal rightists seem to believe that wildlife is just like the Disney characters in cartoons — basically human beings. Perhaps they wish it were true, but facts and science make it abundantly clear that wildlife, just like domestic livestock, must be managed, or it will eat itself out of existence or, in many places around the world, be poached out of existence.
And who is it who literally pays for managing wildlife — HUNTERS, of course. I wish that SCI Advocacy was as simple as showing everyone what the truth is! Unfortunately, it is not. Empty rhetoric and baseless emotional outbursts prey on systems and people who only ever see Disneyesque cartoons and animated creations. These fictionalized creations demand that SCI engage in the courts, in the public media, and in wildlife agencies more and more frequently to protect the freedom to hunt and sustainable use wildlife conservation.
It also means that SCI engages in the political arena here in the U.S. to ensure that elected political leadership is comprised of individuals who value wildlife, who value hunters and hunting as the major pillars upon which sustainable wildlife populations are built, and who will base decisions about wildlife management and hunting upon fact and science and not emotional, baseless rhetoric.
Without competent, thoughtful, fact and science-focused leaders, the freedom to hunt, our hunting heritage and wildlife will suffer and literally fade into the oblivion of unrecoverable history.
As I said in my August message in Safari Times, the track records of the candidates for President of the United States, as well as local and state offices, are clear! If you’re for wildlife and the freedom to hunt, the choices are clear!
It is no longer a question of whether it will work out this year; we’ll just have to fix it in two or four more years. Very likely, there won’t be anything left to fix by then. The downward spiral will likely be cast in unbreakable stone.
Clarity is fine, but action is what is needed.
Vote. Vote early, and ensure your friends, fellow hunters and neighbors vote! Either individually or as Chapters, get the word out and take voters to polling places and vote! Encourage mail-in voting! There are enough hunters/conservationists in America to sway elections. This is the year to do it!
Make hunters, hunting and wildlife count! We all, me included, must do our part!
