I Believe in Wildlife Management by Kyle Lennemann

In the world today, you rarely go even a week without hearing something about an accident involving wildlife. Wildlife management keeps the population of certain species at desirable and healthy levels for both humans and wildlife. Wildlife management can include game keeping, such as hunting and fishing, wildlife conservation, and pest control. Wildlife management is an essential part of the life we live in today. I believe in wildlife management. Wildlife management has been around since the 1920's and 1930's when Aldo Leopold and others sought to put an end to anti-hunting activists such as William T. Hornaday. Leopold argued that modern science and technology could be used to restore and improve wildlife habitat and thus produce abundant "crops" of ducks, deer, and other valued wild animals. And he was right; today wildlife management has become an integrated science using disciplines such as mathematics, chemistry, biology, ecology, climatology and geography to gain the best results.

There are two types of wildlife management, Manipulative and Custodial. Manipulative acts on a population, either changing its numbers by direct means or influencing numbers by the indirect means of altering food supply, habitat, density of predators, or prevalence of disease. This is appropriate when a population is to be harvested, or when it slides to an unacceptably low density or increases to an unacceptably high level. Such densities are inevitably the subjective view of the land owner. Custodial is preventive or protective. The aim is to minimize external influences on the population and its habitat. It is appropriate in a national park where one of the stated goals is to protect ecological processes. It is also appropriate for conservation of a threatened species where the threat is of external origin rather than being intrinsic to the system.

Some of my favorite memories I have are from experiences I have shared with my friends and family in the outdoors. I have been hunting and fishing for as long as I can remember and still to this day it is my absolute favorite thing to do. To me, waking up on a brisk September morning to go sit in a tree stand and be part of the land around me is the greatest thing in the world to experience. I have humanely harvested multiple animals in my life time and I myself am living proof that wildlife management is the right thing to do.

In conclusion, wildlife management is an essential part of our everyday lives. It is one of the healthiest things to do for the environment, the wildlife, and us. There are anti-hunting groups claiming that hunting hurts the animals and that the animals suffer. In fact as opposed to leaving the animal population sky rocket and have animals suffer from disease and getting hit by a car, hunting is a very humane and painless way for an animal to go. Hunting is a tradition that needs to be carried on from generation to generation because it is the right thing to do, and for some people, it could be one of the greatest things they will experience in their lives. I believe in Wildlife Management because I believe it is the right thing to do for the environment, the wildlife, and people.