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Conservation Visions’ Wild Harvest Initiative®

 
Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep on a meadow in National Bison Range, a wildlife reserve in Montana, USA.

Creating a world where all people recognize the importance of wildlife and healthy ecosystems to both human wellbeing and the planet; where wildlife and wild places are conserved in perpetuity; where people benefit from their utilization of living, wild resources in a sustainable and ethical way; and where policy and management decisions maximize the benefits that wild resources and ecosystems provide.


A Modern Disconnect

Sustainable use remains a crucial mechanism for wildlife conservation in the United States and Canada.  Yet, many people question its value today and also fail to acknowledge that the harvest and consumption of living, wild resources remains critical to the health and well-being, diets, economies, cultures, and livelihoods of billions of people in North America and around the world.

This disconnect is evidenced not just by increasingly negative public attitudes toward wildlife harvesting practices and harvesters, themselves, but by a dramatic decrease in hunter numbers over time and the increasing average age of participants.  This is especially troubling since hunters and anglers are a primary financial contributor to wildlife management and conservation efforts in North America.


The Game-Changer

The Wild Harvest Initiative® is the first serious effort to synthesize and evaluate the combined economic, conservation, and social benefits of recreational wild animal harvests in American and Canadian societies.  

How many pounds of locally sourced, naturally produced meat do we get, on average, from a wild harvested white-tailed buck? What about an elk or an antelope?  How many pounds come from a limit of mallards, a wild turkey, or a brace of quail?  How many healthy meals can be procured from a day spent fishing for trout, bass, or salmon?  How much of this food will be shared with friends and family, with people who don’t, themselves, hunt or fish?  How much will be shared with food pantries and other charitable organizations?  How much would it cost to replace this wild food through supermarket purchases?  How much wildlife habitat would have to be destroyed and how much fuel, irrigation water, fertilizer, and pesticides would have to be used to replace this wild sustenance?  What would the harvesting, processing, and transportation costs be?  What is the actual value of hunting and fishing in modern North American society?      

The Wild Harvest Initiative® is finding out.


Average pounds of wild meat harvested annually by jurisdiction in the United States and Canada (2014-19)

Its innovative and science-based approach, combined with its long-term knowledge mobilization and advocacy plan, is providing entirely new insights concerning the relevance of wild, natural harvests in modern North American society.  

How Much Wild Meat is Shared?

Hunters share the majority of their wild harvested meat and 15-37% is shared outside hunters' households, often with people who do not hunt.


With emphases on food security, health, wildlife use, and conservation, the initiative is tailored to change conversations and provide new ways of communicating the relevance and benefits of recreational hunting and fishing to the broad public.  It is demonstrating the magnitude of annual recreational harvests of wildlife and fish in the US and Canada and is increasing public awareness of the positive health and nutritional benefits of wild food.  These efforts highlight the existing contribution recreational animal harvests make to our food security.  By doing so, they underscore the importance of wildlife and fish habitat as food reservoirs for modern society.  The program also emphasizes the potential for increasing food security through increased reliance on sustainable recreational harvest of wild renewable food resources.

The program is providing irrefutable evidence of the benefits of hunting and fishing to all people – whether or not they hunt or fish, positively influencing public opinion over time, providing new contexts for political and academic debates, and, ultimately, helping to secure a future for sustainable wild animal use traditions, including wild sheep hunting, in North America and around the world.  The Wild Harvest Initiative® is far more than a feel-good exercise.  It is a fast-paced, data-driven, and policy-change oriented program.


Annual average number of meals provided by recreational hunting in the United States and Canada (2014-19)


Advocacy

We have no interest in creating knowledge that will “sit on a shelf” or speaking only to the hunting choir, though we know that choir is tremendously important.

Our first-of-its-kind research underpins our communications and advocacy work, thus forming an incredibly strong foundation for the development and delivery of uniquely powerful messaging and practical educational outreach and promotional materials.  The initiative’s innovative approach is different from previous efforts aimed at hunter recruitment, retention, and reactivation to secure hunting’s future, the majority of which have not lived up to expectations, despite huge investments of financial resources.  We are not asking non-hunters and those presently opposed to killing wild animals to see things from our perspective and to “come around” to our way of thinking.  We are, instead, challenging all perspectives – including our own – to reconceive how sustainable animal harvests actually impact each of us as individuals and communities; to rethink the value of wildlife and wild places; and to reconsider the moral, ethical, and emotional arguments for and against hunting, considering the tangible benefits that we are proving it provides.  


Average annual cost to replace wild meat procured via hunting with domestic, commercially available substitutes in the United States.


Beyond North America

We live in a global village, one in which distant values and perceptions come to weigh on local cultures, often in intrusive ways.  This global visioning also means, however, that domestic initiatives now encounter unprecedented opportunity to engage and influence international debates.  Challenges and opportunities flow both ways.

Understanding the importance of wild meat to food security, livelihoods, and economies is a global concern for international scientific, social, and political institutions, including the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).  There has, however, been a disproportionate focus on the study of subsistence wildlife harvests in tropical and sub-tropical regions.


We believe that recreational wild meat harvests in temperate regions, including North America, should be studied alongside harvests in other regions, and that these are likely to provide valuable insights and help guide solutions to address unsustainable harvests in other parts of the world.  It is remarkable that the United States and Canada have developed an incredibly successful wildlife management system in which human harvests of wildlife have laid a foundation for biodiversity recovery and long-term sustainable management, yet how poorly known our North American conservation model is in global circles.  Our North American system provides a good practice example of how incentivizing environmental stewardship can produce positive gains in biodiversity and ecosystem services, while the Wild Harvest Initiative® communicates these benefits in easy-to-understand terms (food), not just to educate, but to bolster international support and tolerance for sustainable wildlife use.

 


 
Markhor, Capra falconeri

With the recent addition of our first international partners, we have begun to further expand the Wild Harvest Initiative® into Europe and Africa, demonstrating the initiative’s ever-increasing influence in foreign centers of policy influence, where many decisions are made that can directly impact the Wild Sheep Foundation, its members and supporters.
 

A Wild Harvest Community  

We should not forget that hunters and anglers have many natural allies in the sustainable harvest of wild resources. 
The Wild Harvest Initiative® is positively aligning wild animal harvests with other commonly practiced and well-accepted extractive traditions, such as berry-picking, wild mushroom foraging, wild beekeeping, and firewood gathering.  Through our partnerships and our messaging, we are facilitating alliances with other consumptive users of these wild products, in addition to healthy, green-living and, importantly, One Health advocates.

The program’s broad and inclusive focus provides a non-confrontational platform to engage discussions with non-hunters and non-anglers, and even those strongly opposed to traditional sustainable use activities or animal death.  

We forecast powerful social connections of mutual support.

 


The Wild Harvest Community represents an opportunity for hunters to positively engage with other consumers of nature. 


The Wild Harvest Initiative® Partnership Alliance

The initiative’s reach is reflected in a diverse and expanding partnership which features state governments, hunting and conservation-based non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and international non-governmental organizations (INGOs), outdoor industry leaders, and charitable foundations.  There can be no doubt of its potential to contribute to a normalizing of hunting and fishing, to a renewed and enhanced appreciation of wildlife’s value, to encouraging hunter and angler recruitment, retention and reactivation, and to increased efforts for wildlife and habitat conservation.

Thanks to the ongoing support of partners like the Wild Sheep Foundation, we are well-poised to change hearts and minds, to gain real support from communities that have traditionally seemed beyond our reach and realm of influence and to secure a future for hunting in North America and internationally. 

 


LEARN MORE ABOUT WILD HARVEST INITIATIVE


WSF annually supports a select group of strategic partners as part of our overall Mission Program Funding. These partners focus on advancing sustainable use conservation, building community and acceptance of our outdoor heritage, and providing new knowledge and data for these efforts. WSF is proud to include Wild Harvest Initiative among these partners.
 


LEARN MORE ABOUT THESE OTHER IMPORTANT PROGRAMS FUNDED BY WILD SHEEP FOUNDATION:

   
WSF World Headquarters | 412 Pronghorn Trail | Bozeman, MT 59718 USA | Phone: 406.404.8750 (800-OK-FNAWS) | info@wildsheepfoundation.org
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