Back in the mid-1800s, sportsmen recognized the urgent need to reserve rapidly declining fish and wildlife for non-commercial use. They needed to protect wildlife and manage the resource to be sustained forever.
Those basic principles advocated by Theodore Roosevelt and other hunters and anglers came to be known as the North American Wildlife Conservation Model, which is made up of seven different tenets.
The first states “wildlife is held in the public trust.”
In other words, our wildlife and natural resources are managed by state agencies to ensure that current and future generations will always have wildlife.
Billions of dollars in funding generated by hunters through excise taxes on guns, ammunition and archery equipment as well as hunting licenses and fees pay for on-the-ground conservation work and wildlife management from coast-to-coast.
This continuing conservation framework promotes wildlife diversity and abundance, and stands as a testimony that Hunting is Conservation.