Decline in Urban West : Hunters: On Vanishing Species List?

Dennis Hepler fondly remembers the first time he hunted, on a frosty fall dawn in a southern Illinois cornfield.

And, all too well, the last time, trying to tote a dead deer home to a different world.

His first hunt was with his father. He was 13. He remembers their German shorthaired pointer’s casting energetically for the scent of a bird and freezing in mid-stride as it found one. Hepler recalls in fine detail the pheasant’s exploding from a pile of cornstalks and his father’s accurate shot that brought it down.

It was the first of many memorable days. There was the overwhelming excitement as he crept up on his first big buck, and the frigid mornings hunkered down in a swamp, his father’s duck decoys bobbing on the water.

Quit Hunting

To Hepler, they were the best days of his life, but he hasn’t hunted in five years--and may never do so again.

What happened to Hepler to make him give up his greatest pleasure?

Los Angeles happened to him.

The city got to him, him and thousands of others who are abandoning hunting for a host of reasons ranging from high costs and animal-rights hecklers to the dwindling ranks of traditional fathers and the disappearance of wild lands and and rural life styles. It is a pattern particularly striking in the urban West. Hunting license sales, down 6% nationwide, have dropped 21% in California.

“If you enjoy hunting, Los Angeles is no place to live,” mourns Hepler, 46, of Tarzana.

“It’s expensive and time-consuming and impractical. And, in this area, it seems hunting is just not accepted. I wanted to continue hunting when I moved here, but I used to get that ‘You kill defenseless animals?’ stuff all the time.”

His last hunt occurred in 1984.

Hostile Reaction

“We took a nice deer in Northern California and packed him out and onto the roof of my station wagon to bring home. Up there, near Redding, people honked their horns and waved and yelled things like ‘nice buck’ at me. By the time we got past Bakersfield and into the outskirts of L.A., people were making obscene gestures at me. They were real hostile about it.

“In about eight hours, we drove from one culture into a completely different culture.

“I haven’t hunted since, and I don’t think I will again. Not as long as I live here.”

Hepler is part of a group of at least a million: Nationally, the number of active hunters has fallen from a high of about 17 million in 1981 to 16 million in 1988.

In the West, states that have remained mostly rural--such as Nevada and Utah--have seen a continued strong interest in hunting, and even growth. In Nevada, the sale of resident hunting licenses jumped from 45,200 in 1981 to more than 60,000 last year.

But in states such as Oregon, Washington and Colorado, where cities are growing and the life of the land is becoming a memory, hunting is fading. In 1981, Oregon sold 396,000 hunting licenses to its residents; in 1987, only 334,000.

Washington sold 370,000 resident licenses in 1981 but only 265,000 last year, a decline of about 27%. In California, the sale of hunting licenses plummeted from 554,501 in 1980 to 436,537 for the 1987-88 hunting season. In each state, the trend for non-resident permits parallels those of residents. The anti-hunting sentiment that Hepler experienced after his deer hunt is one of several reasons that wildlife officials give for the decline. There are many others.

“In Washington, we have seen a dramatic decline,” said Jon Gilstrom, executive assistant to the Washington State Wildlife Commission. “And there are a whole variety of factors that have caused the bottom to drop out in states like Washington and California.”

Loss of Habitat

Among them is the loss of habitat for animals and the resulting pressure on animals in the remaining wilderness regions.

“All human developments--the houses and freeways and shopping centers--occupy former wildlife habitat,” Gilstrom said. “Elk tend not to graze near condominiums. Perhaps they don’t like eating ornamental shrubs. Very simply, when you make a pasture smaller, you are able to fit less cows in it.

“And, if you can still find a place to hunt, it is already crowded with hunters.”

Another major factor, Gilstrom said, is that the largest segment of the population--the baby boomers who are now entering their 40s--are outgrowing the typical hunting years, late teens to 30s.

“When you hit 40, you are busier than ever with your career and your family, and you don’t have as much free time as before,” he said. “And, when you hit 40, your physical conditioning tends to drop. And hunting is a physical sport. You have to be in decent shape. So, as this group of our population gets older, many of them will leave the sport.”

The changing makeup of the family also has played a role, he said.

“Hunting is traditionally taught by the father to the son,” he said. “With more and more single-parent families caused by divorce, it is more common to have a son being raised by a mother only. And the bottom line is that mothers don’t teach their sons to hunt.”

Finally, an urbanized America produces fewer hunters and more people who don’t approve of hunting.

“I have done extensive studies on population densities and hunting,” Gilstrom said. “They show very clearly that when people live in urban areas they become culturally different than people who live in rural areas. Hunting is traditionally a rural thing. Our forefathers hunted for their food. The longer you live in a city, the more you lose touch with that idea.

“For urban people, they don’t even understand where food comes from any more. To them, food comes from a grocery store and they gather it not by hunting it but by buying it.”

A much-publicized buffalo shoot this winter outside Yellowstone National Park, to thin a herd to match the size of its grazing area, brought cries of outrage not from residents of Montana, where the killing occurred, but from animal-protection groups in Los Angeles, San Francisco and other distant cities.

“There is no anti-hunting sentiment in Wyoming,” said Hal Langston, a spokesman for that state’s Department of Game and Fish. “It just doesn’t exist here. I guess every state has its anti-hunters, but in Wyoming you just don’t hear about it. It just doesn’t happen.”

In fact, it is beginning to happen even in some of big-game hunting states.

Gilstrom of Washington calls anti-hunting sentiment his state’s “sleeping giant” and said he expects it to awaken in the next few years and do battle with hunters.

“Five years from now, you will hear great protests by animal rights groups in Washington,” he said.

In Colorado, which has some of the finest hunting in the country, the giant already has awakened.

“For the first time ever in Colorado, we have seen the anti-hunting sentiment,” said Dale Laschnitz of that state’s Division of Wildlife. “They have taken us to court over proposed hunts.”

A lawsuit in Denver seeks to cancel a state-run deer hunt on the grounds of the Air Force Academy near Colorado Springs. A deer herd of 1,500 lives on the enclosed 1,800-acre site, and the animals--like the buffalo in Yellowstone--are starving to death because of the lack of grazing land.

“The animal-rights groups don’t see the big picture,” Laschnitz said. “They seem to be more concerned with the individual rights of an animal than they are with the overall well-being of the species.”

Hunters in no other state face the number and severity of the obstacles to hunting as in California. Along with the problems common to other states, it has at least one drawback that is unique.

“California has very, very complicated hunting seasons with so many rules and regulations for each of more than a hundred hunting districts,” said Steve Comus, the hunting editor of the Costa Mesa-based Western Outdoor News magazine. “It is so complicated that it turns people off. We have more rules and regulations concerning any one species of animal than many states have for all of their wildlife combined.

“If you live anywhere in L.A. and you want to hunt, you have to be pretty serious about it. You’ve got to really want to do it, because they sure don’t make it easy on you.”

Despite the obstacles, there are L.A. hunters in the woods.

The Angeles National Forest is less than a two-hour drive from most of Los Angeles County and, according to state Department of Fish and Game spokesman Pat Moore, supports a population of deer, rabbit, coyote, bobcat, quail and chukkar.

Hunting is permitted on land owned by the federal Bureau of Land Management and on National Forest land, including the Angeles National Forest.

But, within those areas, the regulations concerning species, bag limits, seasons and types of firearms are highly complex.

“When you over-regulate anything and it becomes too much of a hassle, people will stop doing it,” said Comus. “Hunting in California is proof.”

An easier way to pursue the sport is at private hunting clubs, but there are very few of them. The closest to Los Angeles is the Antelope Valley Sportsmen’s Club, about 70 miles from downtown. At the privately owned club, a non-member pays $35 for a day of hunting. For that fee, the hunter gets a private field for two hours and access to the rest of the land for the remainder of the day.

In his private field, a hunter can choose his quarry. For the $35, club workers will release two pheasant or three chukkar or four quail into the field--as the hunter watches--from a truck.

“We simulate as best we can a wild setting, where a hunter is driving down a dirt road and sees a pheasant fly across the road and then he gets out and hunts that bird,” said owner Dave Whiteside. “We assign you a field and liberate the birds as you watch. That simulates them flying across the dirt road. Then you get your gun from the trunk and hunt those birds. Eighty-six percent of the birds are shot in the assigned field.”

The Antelope Valley Sportsmen’s Club attracts as many as 25 hunters on a normal Saturday, Whiteside said. A regular is Jeannie Centuri of Northridge, who hunts there with her husband and their 14-year-old grandson.

‘Wonderful Place’

“It’s a wonderful place,” she said. “They have wonderful pheasants and chukkar and quail. It’s really terrific.”

If hunting the private clubs isn’t a hunter’s idea of a good time, and he is unwilling to master the state’s hefty book of regulations for hunting on public land, he still has an option, though an expensive one. For Los Angeles residents, it is the most common way to pursue quality hunting: Go someplace else.

Safari Club International, a hunting organization, estimates that half of the world’s big-game hunters live in the United States. Half of them live in California and Arizona, and half of those live in Los Angeles.

“In Los Angeles, there must be tens of thousands of guys who hunt deer out of state,” said Dr. Robert Thompson of Encino, head of a local chapter of Safari Club International.

Thompson was raised in Tennessee and began hunting as a child. He did not, however, begin hunting big game until a decade ago.

“Until then, I couldn’t afford it,” said Thompson, an oral surgeon. “I just didn’t have the money to pursue it. Hunting is an expensive sport. An average hunt in Wyoming or Montana for a week will run $1,000 or more, and that’s without any help. If you want a guided hunt, you can double that very easily.”

Thompson said he went on a four-day goose hunt in Louisiana during January. The price tag was about $1,800, he said.

States such as Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and Nevada have shown steady increases in the last decade in the number of non-resident hunting licenses they sell. Much of the traffic is coming from California.

A common thread links them all, from the $35 shoot-the-pheasant-out-of-the-truck types to those who spend thousands to hunt deer in the Rocky Mountains. It is the reaction from non-hunters. Sometimes it is just an ugly glance. Sometimes it is an obscene gesture from a stranger. Occasionally, it’s enough to make a hunter keep a low profile.

Showed License

“I never really saw or realized the impact hunting can have on non-hunters,” said Matt Locke, 26, of Thousand Oaks. He has hunted deer with his father and two brothers since he was 14. “I was in the library at Thousand Oaks High one day with my brother, and he needed to show some ID, and he took out his deer-hunting license. The girl behind the counter just freaked out. She was really hysterical, yelling about ‘how could you shoot a little deer’ and all that stuff. She started crying. From that point on, since seeing the impact it can have, I generally avoid mentioning it in conversation.”

Most hunters, however, wade into the battle.

“The more removed a person is from where the hunting or killing takes place, the better they feel about it,” said Western Outdoor News’ Comus, an avid hunter. “L.A. is about as far removed as you can get. A place like this is ripe for that ‘how could you shoot Bambi’s father’ stuff. But I don’t see any of those people caring much about how the cow died to make their hamburger.

“The difference between a hunter and a person who buys a steak is the degree of removal from the animal’s death. Hunters kill their own animals. The rest of the people pay somebody else to do it for them. The result is the same.”

Said Thompson, who has pictures in his office of himself posing beside downed deer and exotic sheep and other animals: “When I am confronted by that type of attitude, I gently lead the person into a discussion of steak. And then I get around to fur coats. A lot of people I know wear fur coats, and they question why I hunt.”

For some, hunting remains a test.

“Our forefathers lived off the land, shooting their game and catching their fish,” said Lou Nelli of Woodland Hills. “That was just a hundred years ago. I want to know if I can still do that, or whether I’ve become such a couch potato that I couldn’t possibly survive on my own.

“I want to know if I can make the same sacrifices, if I can wait all night on a frozen hillside in November in the Rocky Mountains for a chance at an elk. How many people can or will still do that? Not many. But that is important to me. It means something to me.”