State lawmakers are considering a bill that would create an Oregon Wildlife Council. But it’s not what it seems.
House Bill 3187 proposes a council of representatives from hunting and fishing businesses, as well as individual hunters and fishers. Their task is to create a pro-hunting public relations campaign “with a third-party marketing or advertising agency.” This campaign, funded by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, will “inform the public” on television, through social media and in print, of the benefits of the hunting and fishing industry.
Critics are calling the name misleading, saying a council of hunters isn’t a “wildlife council” because it leaves out the voices of wildlife conservationists who don’t hunt or fish. Critics of the bill have also claimed that it duplicates an existing council, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife Commission, which was established in 1975.
Supporters say while the existing commission deals with policy, the new Wildlife Council is for public education, to make people aware of the conservation supported by sales of hunting and fishing licenses.
But the money trail reveals a murky world of hunting lobbyists, political action committees and out-of-state Christian right-wingers at work. And the Department of Fish and Wildlife is losing faith in the future of the hunting and fishing industry, a considerable slice of Oregon’s economy, with flagging support from a changing public.
A ‘misleading’ label
The name Oregon Wildlife Council is “duplicitous” and “misleading,” said Samantha Bruegger, a campaigner in Salem for conservation lobbying group WildEarth Guardians.
Bruegger emphasized that she’s not opposed to hunting, adding that while she’s a vegetarian now, she used to be a hunter herself. But there are problems with the hunting system, she said, such as how the state lets hunters kill predators to increase game populations, creating bigger herds to hunt.
“While it’s true that you can hunt and be a conservationist, you don’t have to hunt to be a conservationist,” she said. “I think these groups kind of mislead folks into thinking that all views of wildlife are represented, and that’s not necessarily the case.”
“These groups” are popping up across the nation. There’s currently a Colorado Wildlife Council, which is a multimedia marketing campaign lauding the benefits of hunting and fishing, even for people who don’t hunt or fish. One jaunty TV spot encourages Coloradans to “Hug a Hunter” for financing trail maintenance. The Colorado Wildlife Council also reached a Portland audience when it paid for sponsored content — an advertisement that looks and feels like a news article — in The Oregonian.
The Michigan Wildlife Council is similar. Environmental groups objected to it in 2013 for reasons similar to those of conservation groups in Oregon today. They said a wildlife council should not be made up exclusively of hunters and fishers.
The proposed Oregon Wildlife Council is patterned after those in Colorado and Michigan. But Stan Steele, president of the Oregon Outdoor Council, said the Oregon Wildlife Council is intended to be inclusive of all conservationist views.
“This isn’t designed to make more people hunt and more people fish,” he told Street Roots. It’s just as much about protecting the redwing blackbird and the monarch butterfly as it is about fish and game, he said.
“We all share a common goal,” he said of Oregonians. “Good habitat and preservation management.”
The Oregon Outdoor Council, Steele’s group, has a stated mission of “Fighting the Anti-Hunting Agenda.”
Steele, a retired Oregon State Trooper, wrote H.B. 3187 with Rep. Bradley Witt (D-Clatskanie) in 2017, and it was based on a template from a quasi-religious nonprofit, the Nimrod Society. The Michigan-based nonprofit is built around the “sportsman’s” worldview, one that promotes the myth of the empty wilderness and assumes the rights of non-Natives to claim land as recreational playgrounds.
Steele caught wind of a program the Nimrod Society offers called “Be Like Teddy.” It’s a program that urges hunters and fishers to start a “wildlife council” in their home states and tells them how to do it. It cites Michigan and Colorado as success stories.
The Nimrod Society, named after a hunter mentioned in the Bible, states its purpose is “to facilitate programs to educate the general public on the positive role anglers and hunters play in society through accurate and factual education and media programs.” This language closely reflects the text of H.B. 3187.
“The percentage of Americans who hunt and fish grows smaller each year,” announces a promotional video on the Nimrod Society’s website. “At the same time, anti-hunting and animal rights organizations use mass media and skewed data to influence the public.”
The nonprofit argues it’s time for hunters and fishers to fight back and protect their rights.
The Nimrod Society’s Be Like Teddy program offers support in starting a wildlife council. Their promotional video lionizes Theodore Roosevelt, an American president well-known as a wildlife conservationist but who also called Native Americans “reckless, revengeful, fiendishly cruel” and who said the Sand Creek Massacre was “as righteous and beneficial a deed as ever took place on the frontier.”
Recognition of Roosevelt’s racism has become more prevalent, and the American Museum of Natural History in New York City announced last year that it will remove its statue of Roosevelt out front.
Today, the 5% of the world’s population who are Indigenous are safeguarding 80% of the Earth’s biodiversity, according to an in-depth report from National Geographic in 2018.
Steele expressed a personal belief that there should be more Indigenous presence in wildlife conservation and emphasized that he envisions a conservation landscape for Oregon that is more inclusive of those who are Black, Indigenous and people of color.
But it was the Nimrod Society and its Be Like Teddy program that spurred Steele to get together with Rep. Witt and draft a bill calling for an Oregon Wildlife Council to promote hunting propaganda. It didn’t pass in 2017, and Steele attributes this to having submitted the bill too late. So they’re running it again this year.
Following the money
Witt is the beneficiary of years of campaign contributions from hunting lobbyists.
A political action committee called the Oregon Hunters Alliance has given nearly $27,000 to 29 different Oregon House and Senate candidates since 2006. Of that, just over $6,000 has gone to Witt.
When Street Roots reached out to Witt with questions about H.B. 3187, Steele replied instead. Steele denied any knowledge of the Oregon Hunters Alliance. But he confirmed he’s partnered with Oregon Hunters Association, a lobbying group that publishes Oregon Hunter magazine.
Testimony the Oregon Hunters Association (the lobbying group) submitted to legislative leaders in support of H.B. 3187 was written by Al Elkins, the director of Oregon Hunters Alliance (the political action committee).
According to state records, Oregon Hunters Alliance makes regular payments of $395 to Oregon Hunters Association for running ads. These ads call for donations from hunters to “defend your hunting rights with the government’s money!” This is presumably one way they raise campaign donations for legislators like Witt.
A big industry in Oregon
Hunting and fishing is a $622 million industry in Oregon, which generates around $27 million in state and local taxes each year. Hunting and fishing licenses themselves will generate an estimated $128.5 million over the next two years for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. The state spends revenue from license sales on fisheries, wildlife management, conservation and the Oregon State Police, Steele’s former employer, which enforces hunting and fishing regulations.
To keep up with costs, hunting licenses have become steadily more expensive over the past few years. A resident hunting license is now $34.50, compared to $29.50 in 2015. Out-of-state hunters pay almost five times that — $172 to hunt in Oregon.
But license sales have been in steady decline over the past several decades. According to data provided to Street Roots by the Department of Fish and Wildlife, it sold 401,077 hunting licenses (both resident and out-of-state) in 1980. By 2019, annual sales had dropped to 313,862.
In 2017, Fish and Wildlife launched the Take a Friend Hunting program to encourage more license sales. If participants brought a friend or family member along on a hunting trip, they had the chance to win a free deer tag — or a gun.
When COVID-19 came along, license sales made an uncharacteristic uptick as people increasingly sought solitary or small-group outdoor activities. In 2020, Fish and Wildlife sold 362,216 hunting licenses, more than it had in decades. And an unprecedented 48,376 of those were to out-of-state hunters, compared to 18,399 the previous year; 30,000 more hunters crossed the Oregon border to hunt during the coronavirus crisis, each one paying five times more than locals for a license.
But the boost from pandemic conditions isn’t projected to correct the slow decline of public interest in sport hunting and fishing overall, even by optimistic estimates.
“Our sales projections do not currently indicate any significant rebound for fishing and hunting license sales between 2020 and 2030,” Fish and Wildlife’s budget reads.
A duplicate commission?
Because so much of Fish and Wildlife’s hunting and fishing money goes to conservation and wildlife management, Oregon lawmakers’ efforts to bolster statewide hunting and fishing could have benefits for wildlife. Even so, not all conservationists favor the bill.
“We recognize the connections between hunting, fishing and conservation but believe that, today, Oregonians who do not hunt or fish also care deeply about protecting and restoring the state’s fish and wildlife,” Bruegger said in a statement submitted to the House of Representatives on behalf of the Oregon Wildlife Coalition, a group made up of organizations including WildEarth Guardians. “This council would duplicate the role of the Governor-appointed ODFW Commission.”
Testimony from The Conservation Angler, a Northwest fish habitat conservation group, which also opposes the bill, echoed the latter objection.
Steele disagreed that the new council would duplicate the existing Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife Commission, which is made of seven congressional representatives from Oregon’s five districts.
According to the commission’s website, “commissioners formulate general state programs and policies concerning management and conservation of fish and wildlife resources and establishes seasons, methods and bag limits for recreational and commercial take.”
“The commission deals with policy and different conservation programs throughout the department,” Steele said. By contrast, he called the proposed council “a public education campaign.”
This might sound familiar. The Oregon Forest Resources Institute was another publicly funded agency tasked with educating the public; only its subject was Oregon’s working forests. This legislative session, there are efforts to defund the institute following an investigation that revealed it worked to discredit research that didn’t favor the timber industry. The comprehensive report from ProPublica, Oregon Public Broadcasting and The Oregonian illuminated what environmentalists have been saying in Oregon for years: The agency was an extension of a for-profit industry, using public funds to create pro-industry propaganda.
Little to do with wildlife
Whether a marketing campaign such as what’s proposed in H.B. 3187 would do any good for Oregon wildlife is not certain. In Colorado and Michigan, results are varied.
According to market research conducted by R&R Partners following Colorado Wildlife Council’s Hug a Hunter campaign, Coloradans found the commercial memorable but didn’t know what the Colorado Wildlife Council was. Meanwhile, public support of hunting and fishing decreased overall.
The Michigan Wildlife Council fared better, reporting to its Legislature that a few years of running ads produced a “greater understanding that hunting and fishing licenses are the largest source of funding for wildlife management” and that public support for hunting and fishing remained strong. The Michigan Wildlife Council spends about $1,186,955 per year on their marketing campaigns.
Neither Colorado’s nor Michigan’s councils appear to have reported any impact on wildlife.
Who supports the bill?
In Oregon, there are only three testimonies of support of H.B. 3187. One is from Elkins, the director of the Oregon Hunters Alliance political action committee writing on behalf of the Oregon Hunters Association, the lobbying group and publisher. Another is from a resident of Boulder, Colorado, who said he had a hand in founding both the Colorado and Michigan wildlife councils. The last is from Steele, whose testimony was submitted three times — twice from Michigan, where the Nimrod Society is headquartered, by Russ Mason, the former chief of the Michigan Department of Natural Resources’ Wildlife Division.
In addition to conservationists’ opposition to the bill, a few Oregon residents have filed opposing testimony as well.
The bill passed out of committee April 8 with a do-pass recommendation.
How they voted
Legislators who voted yes on House Bill 3187:
- Rep. Bradley Witt (sponsor; D-Clatskanie)
- Rep. Anna Williams (D-Hood River)
- Rep. Vikki Breese-Iverson (R-Prineville)
- Rep. Jami Cate (R-Lebanon)
- Rep. Bill Post (R-Keizer)
- Rep. David Brock Smith (R-Port Orford)
Legislators who voted no:
- Rep. Zach Hudson (D-Troutdale, Fairview, Wood Village, Gresham, Portland)
- Rep. Pam Marsh (D-Ashland)
- Rep. Susan McLain (D-Hillsboro)
- Rep. Jeff Reardon (D-Happy Valley)