H Sapiens has been hunting since we climbed down from the trees. Even as recently as a century or so ago, even in the developed world, hunting game was one of the principal ways people put food on the table. Nowadays, of course, game hunting is only a necessity, as regards putting food on the table, for a small subset of the population. As far as the government of Missouri sees it, allowing a managed deer hunt effectively crowdsources a large portion of its critter control. And for the hunters: wild game!!! Everybody wins.
When did governments start regulating hunting, viz, by means of issuing game tags or whatever they’re called in this jurisdiction or that? Note that here I’m not referring to such things as “Only the monarch may hunt in these woods. Your family is starving? Well fuck you.”
Well, that’s kind of poisoning the well. The concept of restrictions on hunting in certain preserves started there, at least for countries influenced heavily by the UK, i.e. the US, the Commonwealth, etc.
The idea wasn’t that only the monarch could hunt. People (usually only nobility or royalty) could obtain licenses to hunt particular animals (especially deer) and the concept was to protect the populations and their habitats from excessive hunting and habitat destruction, i.e. the same reasoning applied these days.
If you lived in a town located inside a royal forest, you could still hunt but with heavy restrictions (on number of animals, types of animals, etc). And the limitations weren’t just on hunting but on cutting trees or using the land to graze animals.
The system in most states is similar to this in many respects. So, basically, at least a millennium and likely quite longer.
I’d agree with poster above me. It’s been regulated many decades.
The lisc. fees and bag limits are not in place to punish hunters. The process of tagging is to show the Game and Fish people the relative needs of a particular hunting area.
I live in the dead center of some of the prime hunting in Arkansas. There are 1000s of deer. Antler size on bucks is restricted as well as the sex of the deer. I live with and know many hunters. Around here it’s easy to get your bag limit. I don’t get a lics. or hunt, but I could get a full bag off my back deck.
Mr.Wrekker and his deer camp buddies hunt for the sport, they eat what they harvest, as well. It takes alot of venison to feed that crowd every year.
Oh, god. It’s October. November is close. I hate deer season. It’s like a shooting range around here.
I saw two does in my backyard, through my kitchen window, a year or so ago. Bit of a treat, I’d say. I’m hardly in an urban area, but my house proper isn’t exactly out in the woods.
My family roots are in Upstate PA/NY - prime deer hunting country. When my dad was a teenager in the 1930s, it was illegal to hunt whitetails. They nearly became extinct in 1890s in some counties and legal hunting only started in 1938 in Allegany County.
This report (pdf) indicates that deer hunting was regulated as early as 1900.
Do you accept “whomever owns this land can hunt in it, and (if the land be big enough) organize hunts”? For some reason a lot of people think of medieval restrictions about hunting rights as being both absolute and valid only in royal land, while in fact I still haven’t met a farmer who wouldn’t get mighty pissy (and a bit salty if you know what I mean) about intruders hunting in their fields.
We have 90 acres. Mr.Wrekker leases another 300 timber land that borders our land. State land on the other side. Not sure how big that is. It doesn’t matter if you own or lease the land, you still need a valid hunting lisc.to harvest deer. You are required to have the deer tagged and recorded. The fines for poaching are severe.
Big field farmers love to get the deer out of their fields. They welcome hunters in these parts.
In the US the first game law was passed by New Jersey in 1719 which forbid non residents from gathering oysters. The second game law seems to be in 1745 where North Carolina required “all persons not possessed of settled habitation” to have a certificate that they had tended 5,000 hills of corn in the previous year to hunt deer.
As others have pointed out it has been considered a “privilege” in western law for at least the last millennium.
A major event in regulating bird hunting was the Migratory Bird Hunting Stamp Act of 1934. Migrating waterfowl were under serious threat because habitat was disappearing and because desperate families were overhunting. The act was a wild success at preserving habitat, birds, and the ability to hunt. The story is told at entertaining length in “The Wild Duck Chase,” by Martin Smith.
Lacey Act of 1900 was a big one, made hunting for profit illegal.
Crucial to the system used by the United States and Canada is that landowners don’t own wildlife, it’s held in public trust, but landowners can limit access to them. They may also have greater access to hunting them, usually if the animals are detrimental to the land or its cropland or wildlife (depredation permits), but that varies greatly.
My understanding is that some Native American tribes are guaranteed the right to fish and hunt in the treaties they signed with the United States government. Do they have to follow hunting laws(on or off their reservations)? Hunting licenses? Bag limits? Endangered species? Or do the Treaties they signed override that?
In Britain, at least from the 18th century onwards, there was a ‘hunting season’ for various game birds and animals, for conservation purposes. The season is different for different species. They can only be hunted between certain dates of the year, set so as not to interfere with breeding seasons.
The Game Act of 1831 established this in law, and made game licenses a requirement.
Perhaps I didn’t word my question as specifically as I should have, then. I was looking for a legislative fiat that limited hunting beyond just saying that “only the monarch can hunt.”
thelurkinghorror’s post about the Lacey Act was as close to exactly what I was looking for as I’m going to get.
Well the Lacey Act is federal legislation. Overwhelmingly hunting legislation is state legislation (migratory waterfowl being an exception). So I am sure there were lots of state predecessors to the the Lacey act.
See recent SCOTUS case Herrera v. Wyoming. What’s going to happen next is anyone’s guess, but it will likely be a long time coming.
A lot of tribes have their own conservation laws, and likely can set their own system. I was just on a reservation yesterday - I bought one of the tribe’s fishing licenses but (even though I already have one) I don’t **need **to buy a state fishing license. I was looking through their regs and they only allow tribal members to hunt, while nobody, Paiute or not, can hunt bighorn sheep. I don’t know if that last one is the tribe’s decision or not.
Well, again, there’s never been a time when somebody just said, “Only the King can hunt”. That’s a bit of historical revisionism that’s just not accurate.
That said, as noted, there have been on-the-book laws that restricted the use of land including the hunting of animals on that land for at least 1000 years. The degree to which hunting and land use was restricted as well as the severity of penalties would necessarily vary with time and place.
In part, it depends on the treaty. They weren’t typed up from boilerplate so there’s considerable variation. I’m pretty sure that the treaty-specific stuff is limited to tribal lands - if, say, an Inuit from Alaska goes big-game hunting in Wyoming he’s going to have to follow the same rules as everyone else (other than a Wyoming Native group, who likewise don’t get special privileges in Alaska).
Sometimes there’s a distinction between “subsistence hunting/fishing” and commercial operations. There are some rivers in Alaska where Natives can take all the fish they want using defined “traditional” methods for their own personal needs, but if they’re using commercial gear and/or doing it with the intent to sell to non-Natives they have to follow the same rules as everyone else.
A few tribes in the arctic are permitted limited whaling, which no one else is. Typically, one whale for a village per year or something of the sort.
ETA: after reading the court case cited above it seems there may be some groups that have a treaty allowing them to hunt at will on “unoccupied lands” regardless of which state they’re in. Interesting…
AFAIK status Indians in Canada have the full right by treaty to hunt and fish anywhere, any time. No “tribal lands” limit, just private property rights. Every so often there’s court cases - say, under the migratory birds act (which enforces an international treaty) plus there are laws about endangered species. Not sure how those work out. Native bands have frequently tried to enforce their own rules, recognizing that uncontrolled hunting can have a detrimental effect on animal populations. Plus, hunting rights AFAIK don’t give natives the right to engage in a commercial harvesting operation and sell to non-natives.
There are frequent issues with the natives and non-native fishermen arguing over quotas on the west coast salmon fisheries, a prime example of assorted ecological and over-harvesting issues as they chase a dwindling resource.
There was the case a decade or more ago, where our supreme court ruled that natives in New Brunswick had the unlimited right to log crown forests. They had to issue an unprecedented roll-back (“clarification”) on that when they found massive opportunistic commercial logging started happening all over the province… one of the hazards of treaty rights meeting modern technology.