Project Launched to Improve Hunters’ Image

            With the enthusiastic support of SAM’s Board of Directors, the organization has launched a major initiative called:  Continuing the Tradition – Improving the Image of Maine’s Hunters.

            “We’re all excited about this project,” reported SAM President Edye Cronk, “and getting it started is a high priority for us this fall.”

            Phase One of the project will be initiated this fall.  One hundred banners proclaiming:  “Welcome Hunters – Keep Hunting Safe” are on order for tagging stations and country stores.  The banners include SAM’s logo and the logo of fish and game clubs or other sponsors can be added. 

*** ACTION ITEM *** Fish and Game Clubs interested in participating in the banner project should contact the SAM office.  Also, SAM members who are willing to deliver the banners to local tagging stations and stores are asked to contact the office.

            Also in Phase One, a media information kit will be prepared and distributed prior to the fall hunting season to provide news reporters and editorial writers with important facts about hunting in Maine – including economic impact and safety information.  SAM will lead a delegation of outdoor leaders to meetings with editorial boards across the state to present and discuss this information.

Maine needs a public awareness campaign to educate landowners, community
officials, outdoor enthusiasts, and the general public about the value of hunting.
Not only is it essential to reassure people of Maine’s excellent safety
record, but also to help them understand the crucial role that hunting plays in
wildlife management.  And most don’t realize the economic impact hunting has on
the entire state. They need to be connected to the long heritage of hunting
in Maine. And they need to see who Maine’s hunters are: men and women, old
and young, their neighbors, their co-workers and their friends.

In Phase Two of the project, planned for 2004, grants are being sought to expand the project.   SAM recently submitted a grant application for this project to the Maine Outdoor Heritage Fund.

SAM’s partners for the Phase Two Project are:  The Maine Bowhunters Association, the Presque Isle Fish and Game Club, the Rangeley Regional Guides and Sportsmen’s Association, the Windham-Gorham Rod and Gun Club, and Associated Sportsmen’s Clubs of York County.

The entire project will include an array of initiatives, described below.

Television and radio ads will be produced and aired in which Maine hunters of all ages and walks of life can talk about why hunting is so important to our state.  It will take money to deliver an effective media campaign - $100,000 plus production costs according to one estimate. That's why SAM is asking MOHF for $25,000 in seed money for airtime and hopes - by soliciting sponsors from large and small sporting organizations and businesses – to increase that contribution fourfold. Each ad would leave time for a sponsor’s tagline saying, “This message is brought to you by.”

A total of 300 banners with the message, “Welcome Hunters … Keep hunting safe” will be produced and distributed for community stores and tagging stations – banners sponsored by rod and gun clubs as well as SAM.  Beer distributors now provide similar banners welcoming hunters to stores, with their logos attached. It’s important to link hunting and safety, not hunting and drinking, in the mind of the public.  The banners will be of sturdy construction and will last for many years.  At the end of each hunting season, SAM will collect the banners and store them for future use.  In 2004, with the help of this MOHF grant, we will purchase an additional 200 banners (and maybe more), to add to the 100 banners SAM is purchasing this fall.

Each fall, SAM will develop and distribute of the media information kit.  This kit will help the state’s reporters and editors learn more about hunting and provide them with opportunities to talk to hunters. The kit will contain facts and figures about hunting in four areas: economic impact, wildlife management, safety, and history. It will contain all the available data about the previous hunting season, as well as a story about the upcoming season. It will list contacts in each county so reporters can reach hunters for interviews and stories.

A statewide publicity campaign will be conducted annually. The project coordinator will send the media kit to the state’s outdoor writers, daily newspapers, and television stations by September 30 and follow up with phone calls to make sure the kit was received. Meetings with editorial boards will also be done.  And appearances on TV and radio talk shows will be scheduled.  The media kit will be available for delivery to weekly newspapers by local hunters, whenever possible, to increase the impact and to begin establishing positive contacts between local hunters and the press. An electronic version of the media kit will be available on SAM’s website and also will be emailed to Maine’s rod and gun clubs and members of SAM’s Rapid Response Team.

This campaign will continue for years to come.  By the time you read this story, the first phase will be underway, including banners and media kit.  These elements will be continued, with more banners purchased in future years, and the media kit updated and distributed each year.  With the MOHF and other grants, we will also be able to expand the campaign to television and radio.  To the greatest extent possible, we hope to utilize the free media to deliver our messages, but an important element of this project will always be paid advertising.

Campaign Needed

It’s getting harder to be a hunter every year. There’s more posted land, so it is tough just to find a place to hunt. No trespassing signs proliferate even on Maine’s backcountry roads.  You can barely pick up a newspaper without reading that another town is considering whether to restrict or ban the discharge of firearms.

And it’s not just in Maine’s fields and forests that hunters are feeling unwelcome. They say they hesitate to talk about hunting at work or at a party because the chances are high someone will be anti-gun or anti-hunting. When they go into a convenience store wearing blaze orange, they say they often see distaste in the eyes of their own neighbors. Some hunters compare themselves to smokers, struggling to adjust to a world in which what was once ordinary has become odious.

            “You almost have to say to people under your breath that you're a hunter,” says Les Priest of Readfield. “You're not proud of the fact anymore . . . You almost have to defend yourself.”

A public awareness campaign will tell non-hunters why hunting benefits the entire state. It will allow Mainers to see who hunters are – their co-workers, their friends, and their neighbors. If more landowners understand the value of hunting, it could reverse one of the most troubling trends in the Maine outdoors – the increase in posted land.

“Former fish and wildlife commissioner Bill Vail said it best when he told me that in the future, ‘the question will not be: Is there any game to hunt? It will be: Is there any place to hunt,’ ” said George Smith, executive director of the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine.

The campaign also would boost the morale and perhaps the numbers of Maine hunters, which have been slipping for the past two decades.

In the 1980s, Maine had about 250,000 hunters. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s 2001 survey, the state now has only 164,000 (16 and older) and only 123,000 of them are residents. Just since the last federal survey in 1996, Maine has lost 31,000 hunters, 25,000 of them residents.

Young hunters are not stepping forward to fill that gap. When Gerry Lavigne, a state wildlife biologist, studied the ages of hunters in a 1996 survey, he found that youngsters were hunting at only half the rate of previous generations.  Two older hunters are being lost for every young hunter gained.  Maine is losing its hunting heritage.

Only about 10 percent of Mainers now hunt, compared to about 17 percent in the 1980s and the numbers elsewhere are even lower. Hunters make up just 6 percent of the population nationally and only 4 percent in New England.

A growing number of people don’t understand hunting and many hold a pretty low opinion of hunters in general. In a nationwide survey in 1995, 64 percent of Americans agreed that a lot of hunters violate hunting laws or practice unsafe behavior while hunting. Half of those surveyed thought hunters drink alcohol while hunting and nearly 40 percent felt that hunting was an unsafe recreational activity.

In 1993, even many Maine hunters seemed to have lost their confidence. In a survey commissioned by the Sportsman’s Alliance, 500 people were asked how strongly they agreed or disagreed with the statement: “I don’t feel safe walking in the woods during the deer hunting season, even when I’m wearing blaze orange.”

Overall, 65.2 strongly agreed and 7.8 agreed somewhat; 20.2 percent disagreed strongly and 4.6 disagreed somewhat. The remaining 2.3 percent didn’t know.  What was more surprising was that 43.6 percent of hunters agreed with the statement, 34.4 percent of them strongly; 47.1 percent disagreed strongly and 7.7 disagreed somewhat.

Last spring, the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife put the question slightly differently, asking if hunting is safer, less safe or about the same over the past five years. Of the 500 people surveyed, 34.9 percent said it was safer; 10.3 percent, less safe; 27.7 percent, about the same, and 26.9 didn’t know. Among hunters, 50.5 percent said safer; 3.7 said less safe; 40 percent, about the same, and 5.9 didn’t know.

An awareness campaign could tell Mainers that hunters across the United States and Canada have conducted one of the most successful safety crusades ever undertaken.

With about 200,000 hunters, Maine had only six hunting fatalities in the past decade.

Yet with roughly the same number of participants, 188 people died in boating, snowmobile and ATV accidents. There were 5,920 boating, snowmobile and ATV accidents in the last 10 years, but only 108 hunting incidents.

“Hunting is absolutely, unequivocally and without question the safest possible outdoor pastime in the State of Maine,” said Gary Anderson, who was the state’s recreational safety officer from 1972 to 1997. “And I’ll hold it up to anything you can come up with - tiddlywinks or anything else.”

Many Mainers already know that some wildlife populations are so abundant, they’ve become a nuisance. Coyotes are frightening walkers, joggers, and dog owners in city parks and cemeteries. Canadian geese are noisy, messy year-round residents in some areas. Wild turkeys are hanging out at bird feeders and becoming a problem for some farmers.  Bears are rampaging through neighborhoods, rummaging through garbage and eating out of birdfeeders, causing at least one resident this year, in Otisfield, to shoot a bear in fear for his grandchildren.  Deer are causing crop and shrub damage. Many Mainers are afraid of hitting a moose or deer and they’re very worried about Lyme disease.

Mainers also worry about the economy and especially about the continuing loss of jobs. They should know that hunters spend $162 million annually in Maine, according to the 2001 U.S. Fish and Wildlife survey, and that their impact is felt throughout the state’s economy. A 1998 University of Maine study estimated the economic impact of hunting at half a billion dollars each year. And when the state’s 2001 tourism survey summed up Maine’s strengths, nearly all involved the outdoors, including “excellent hunting.”

Mainers are proud of the state’s history, yet many are not aware how hunting is woven through the state’s past.

A public awareness campaign will promote better understanding between hunters and their neighbors. It will increase public knowledge about Maine’s wildlife resources and public support for wildlife management. It also can help hunters feel good about being part of a tradition that is as old as Maine itself.

 “I really feel that I’m looked at as a second-class citizen because I teach hunter safety and I like guns,” said George Fogg of North Yarmouth. “And that bothers the heck out of me.”

It’s clear that even in Maine, many people no longer understand hunting or its importance to the entire state. If that heritage is to be preserved, the public must be told about its value – not just to hunters, but also to non-hunters.

This project would improve relations with landowners, help prevent further loss of the land available for recreational use and address the decline in the number of hunters. This project responds to these statewide problems in an innovative way. It will not only bring together the hunting community, but also will help foster better understanding between hunters and natural resource agencies, interest groups, community leaders, and others.  Since hunters play such an important role in wildlife management, this project also has major benefits for Maine’s natural resources.