“To do our job, we must do it in concert with private landowners. They are an integral part of our conservation equation. In fact, they are our primary conservation partners,” he said, explaining that while two-thirds of land in the United States is under private ownership, 97 percent of land in Texas is privately owned.
Cantu, as well as the other speakers, addressed the big-picture issue of “Wildlife as a Public Trust Resource: How Do We Keep Public Wildlife Public?”
Leasing land for hunting and charging fees for hunting access have been around in Texas since the 1940s, Cantu said.
“The landowners realized that wildlife has value,” he said.
If a landowner manages the land for the benefit of wildlife, Cantu asked, is it wrong to charge an access fee for that wildlife?
Today, the value of wildlife often exceeds the value of commercial livestock, he added.
As importantly, charging access fees provides income that helps ranchers stay on their land, said Cantu, who called the breakup of family farms and ranches the biggest threat to wildlife habitat in Texas and probably the United States.
Earlier in the session, Gordon R. Batcheller, of the New York State Division of Fish, Wildlife and Marine Resources, provided his forecast for hunting and conservation in 2040.
There will be three groups: Wealthy elitists with money enough to pay for hunting access, a majority of generalists who will rely on technology to obtain quick and easy results and a small group of skilled and ethical hunters, Batcheller said.
The number of hunters also will have declined to approximately 10 million by 2040, down from about 17 million in 1985. Places to hunt also will decline as farm acreage in the United States declines.
The diversity of those groups will mean hunting policies that are characterized by conflict, opening the doors to anti-hunting organizations, he continued.
Those hunter-habitat losses will make it difficult to find young wildlife professionals who understand hunting, hunters and the heritage of conservation, Batcheller said.
“It’s difficult to feel optimistic,” he said.
Cantu said that high fences on Texas ranches do equal canned hunts, which he characterized as an animal in a small enclosure that can’t escape.
At a cost of $15,000 per mile, Texas ranchers continue to put up high fences. The biggest reason, Cantu said, is frustration.
Hunters on a neighbor’s property shooting their little deer or wanting to keep deer from overgrazing their habitat, he cited as examples.
“These high fences are not enclosures. They are ‘exclosures,’” Cantu said.
During a question-and-answer session that followed the presentations, John Cooper; the secretary of the South Dakota Department of Game, Fish and Parks, alluded to the elitist hunters in Batcheller’s talk, asking Cantu how the average-wage Texas hunter coped with all of the high-priced leases and access fees.
“What do you do with these folks? How do you keep them in the game?” he asked.
Texas has a good, active hunting land program, and TPWD leases land from landowners for public use as well as buying deer hunts from large ranges and making them available in a lottery system, Cantu answered.
Cooper then asked about taking his son on a quality buck hunt in Texas but not being willing to pay the top money for a lease or a day hunt.
“Then opportunities for my son are relegated to management deer or does. The reality here is that people who cannot afford those high prices are relegated to some subcategory of being able to hunt those animals that high-priced folks don’t want to hunt,” he said.
Not every ranch in Texas is high priced, Cantu answered.
“There are affordable leases out there that have good quality deer. And on some places, cull deer are good quality deer to some people. Opportunity exists. Texas has lots of high upper-end hunts. Most of the property is not managed that way. Most low-fence property is managed for a quality deer herd. I know some of the deer there are better than on some of the larger ranches where they are charging a higher fee.”
(Reach outdoor writer Richard Hinton at 701-250-8256 or richard.hinton@;bismarcktribune.com.)