AR-News: Decline in number of NJ hunters

[Stu Chaifetz]

Hi everyone,

I wanted to share this with you some good news regarding the number of hunters in NJ, as  I just received an OPRA request on the number of resident NJ hunting licenses sold from 2000-2003. 

Here are the numbers per year:

2000 - 108,336
2001 - 101,898
2002 - 98,022
2003 - 93,651

>From 2000-03, there was a drop of 14,685 licenses.

The important thing to realize is that these numbers do not represent the actual number of hunters; hunters buy more than one license for different forms of hunting. An example would be a hunter who kills with both bow and shotgun - he would have bought a bow and arrow license and a hunting one as well. Therefore, far from there being 93,000 hunters in NJ, the true number is considerably less. 

When you take into account that there are about 8,700,000 people in NJ, hunters make up only a fraction of the population, falling somewhere between .5% and 1%.  Please note this, as some people still use very old data, and say that hunters make up 2% or 3% of the state.

Some exciting news is the decline of bow hunters. We know how many less bowhunters there are as they have to buy a specific license to bow hunt.  In 2000 there were only 24,401, and just three years later there were 19,295, a decrease of 5,106 bowhunters.  If they continue to fall at this rate, there will literally only be a handful left by the end of the decade.

The truly critical news, however, is that there are so few children hunting that the state does not even sell licenses for them any more.  With no significant number of children to replenish their ranks, there is no question that hunters will, sooner than they might expect, be regulated to a thing of the past.

While this is a cause for rejoice, it does not mean that wild animals will suffer much less. Hunters and the Division of Fish and Game, having spent years demonizing deer and bears so people will allow their slaughter, have done too good of a job; many towns now pay people to shoot and kill their wildlife. This then is the irony of the hunter as the conservationist, for he will have doomed tens of thousands of lives to destruction even after he is gone.

Stu Chaifetz
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www.HonorAndNonViolence.com