Conservation science helps develop hunting regulations. Photo courtesy of Steve Sorensen

Most people know man is at the top of the food chain. Fewer people understand that man is a predator and in modern times his relationship to wildlife has completely changed. Today man is the caretaker predator with a central role in wildlife conservation. As Earth’s dominant species, man is unique among predators. He is a scientific predator, and therefore the essential predator.

The fact that man is a scientific predator is inseparable from the fact that he is also the philosophical predator. Other predators kill on impulse while man can think about why he hunts and why he kills. Man has more reasons to kill than any other predator. One reason is to make sure his prey doesn’t overwhelm and destroy the habitat it shares with other wildlife.

Man is also the egalitarian predator. Hunting is not for a specialized class of people as it was in the days when market hunting was a profession. Any person can hunt — man or woman, old or young, black or white, educated or uneducated, rich or poor. We can all hunt using many methods, many weapons, many purposes.

Since the days when hunters were marketeers (a period roughly parallel to the industrial revolution), hunting has shifted from a market-driven model with ever-decreasing supply to a conservation model with growing and sustainable populations. Conservation has made man the scientific predator and the self-limiting predator. He sets seasons and bag limits. He ensures that his killing does not negatively affect reproduction, so populations are lower, or higher, or remain stable depending on the ability of the habitat to support the numbers.

Therefore, man is the only predator that uses science as a tool to benefit his prey. In modern wildlife management man studies habitat, health, reproduction, diet, disease and more, so that both prey species and non-prey species will live in perpetuity. The coyote doesn’t think about how many rabbits will be available next winter, or know about a disease that can decimate the population. Man recognizes wildlife is renewable, which is why he can refer to an annual deer “harvest” which removes surplus deer to the level the habitat can support through the winter.

The subsistence hunter of long ago gave no thought to the scientific sustainability of hunting. If a prey population became scarce, hunters moved to a place where it was abundant. Likewise, the market hunter. To them, wildlife and science did not intersect. Wildlife was an endlessly abundant resource into the 1800s, until it wasn’t. That’s why conservation hunting with science-based management is the proper and successful replacement for market hunting.

That doesn’t make every hunter a scientist, but it does make hunters indispensable to scientific wildlife management. Hunting is a science-based enterprise with hunters playing a role in the management of wildlife. That’s why hunters and wildlife biologists complement each other — a major difference between modern conservation hunting and the previous forms of hunting history has given us. Although many hunters today don’t think of their enterprise as scientific beyond how wildlife behavioral science helps them make the kill, they don’t need to for the modern conservation system to work.

Wildlife biologist Valerius Geist said it best. “Curing environmental ills requires not a stance outside nature, but a stance within nature, a role not as onlooker without, but as an actor within.” Thus, man is the only predator that makes his pursuit of prey a scientific pursuit using not just his predatory tools to kill his prey, but tools in the hands of wildlife scientists to make sure prey species and those that share habitat remain healthy and abundant.

Thanks to the scientific basis for hunting, wildlife is abundant today. And it’s accessible not only to hunters, but to the broader public. We all love wildlife, but the scientific predator is in the position no one else is in. He loves wildlife enough to ensure it remains abundant and accessible.

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When “The Everyday Hunter” isn’t hunting, he’s thinking about hunting, talking about hunting, dreaming about hunting, writing about hunting, or wishing he were hunting. If you want to tell Steve exactly where your favorite hunting spot is, contact him through his website, www.EverydayHunter.com. He writes for top outdoor magazines, and won the 2015, 2018 and 2023 national “Pinnacle Award” for outdoor writing.