The animal rights/anti-hunting crowd is large, it’s smart, and it is devious in the many ways it works to try to end our way of life. They employ A-list Hollywood stars as their spokesmen, spend millions of dollars on advertising and direct mail solicitations for donations, co-op social and legacy media, pay scientists to support their false narratives with questionable “facts,” and label hunters as barbarous cretins without acknowledging the fact that it is hunters who, in large measure, have voluntarily funded conservation for generations. I’ll bet you didn’t know that, while America has roughly 14.4 million active hunters, the top 10 anti-hunting organizations have a combined 31 million members, employ more than 7,000 people, and generate an estimated $1.1 billion in annual revenue, did you?

In recent years, these groups have ramped up their attacks on hunting in two ways. One is by lobbying state game commissions directly and pushing to get those with their beliefs appointed to these commissions — most notably in Washington state and Colorado, which I detailed in a previous Counter Culture column. The other is by what is termed “ballot box biology,” in which these groups try to bypass decisions on science-based wildlife management made by state game departments by placing obvious anti-hunting initiatives on state ballots. They do this by gathering enough signatures on petitions, then running hard-charging promotional campaigns supporting these initiatives based on emotion rather than science.

Left unchallenged, this can be very effective. These groups know that less than 5% of Americans are hunters, and that to get their agenda passed at the ballot box, they only have to persuade a small percentage of the voting population that does not hunt and has no knowledge of all that hunters have accomplished for conservation via such landmark legislation as the Pittman-Robertson Act of 1937 and its sister legislation, the Dingell-Johnson Act of 1950, as well as the countless volunteer hours sportsmen put in to work on habitat restoration projects.

But in a constitutional republic, as America is, don’t our elected representatives make the decisions that affect our lives? Well, yes, but … America has 26 states that have the referendum process, whereby the citizens themselves, and not their elected representatives, can make important decisions on certain subjects. What this means for the hunting community is that, while the lobbying efforts targeting legislators by important groups like the NRA and others are valuable, it holds little or no sway when the will of a majority of uninformed voters influenced by special interests like the animal rights’ groups say otherwise.

These groups smartly target low-hanging fruit — in this case, predator hunting. By calling it “trophy hunting,” they jab at the heartstrings of unknowledgeable nonhunters who think hunting for food is OK, but hunting for so-called “trophies” is not. And so, they falsely claim that hunting wolves, mountain lions, bears, et. al., is a sadistic pastime only undertaken by testosterone-fueled Bubbas that have no place in today’s society. And by association, all hunters are trophy hunters, and the practice should be banned.

They also espouse another level of crazy with their idea that people should have no influence on the natural world. I’ve written about, and vigorously fought against, this concept for decades. Basically, it goes like this: Apex predators like wolves, mountain lions, and grizzly and black bears should be reintroduced into any and all ecosystems in which the habitat would support them. No hunting of them should be permitted as these new populations are allowed to become reestablished, then entrenched. As this plays itself out, what happens is the newly introduced predators soon put a very large dent in the local elk, deer, and small game populations, often to the point where available permits for human hunters shrink to keep from permanently harming the game populations. Then the anti’s say, “Why do we need human hunters at all, when the predators are controlling game numbers in a historically natural way? Isn’t that as it should be?”

This scam was first revealed to me in 1990, when I sat in a courtroom in Sacramento and watched a judge bang the gavel and reaffirm the passage of Proposition 117, which banned mountain lion hunting in California in perpetuity. There I sat next to a slick young lawyer named Wayne Pacelle, at the time working for Cleveland Amory’s anti-hunting group Fund for Animals. He told me at that hearing how the strategy of reintroducing grizzlies into the Yellowstone ecosystem, then in its infancy, would effectively shut the region down to human hunting as the bears first took hold, then ate most of the surplus elk. At the time I thought he was nuts. Not now. Pacelle later became the head of the Humane Society of the United States before being forced to resign over allegations of sexual harassment. The irony of Prop. 117 is that it didn’t stop the killing of mountain lions in the state; today, more than a hundred cougars are killed by the state annually at great expense to solve “problem” lion issues.

This is a problem that is not going away. In an increasingly urban world dominated by the wild, wild west of social media, to combat it, hunters need to begin communicating with nonhunters about the positives hunting brings to the ecosystem and wildlife management, as well as in terms of how it feeds our families and our communities with the millions of pounds of game meat donated to Hunters for the Hungry programs nationwide. Most have never heard of the North American conservation model or Pittman-Robertson act and how wild game meat is the healthiest form of natural protein on the planet. It’s up to all of us to teach them so these ballot-box biology initiatives are defeated. Every time.