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Theodore Roosevelt. From hunter to United States president.
Theodore Roosevelt was born in 1858. Teddy, as his friends called him, was a frail child, prone to illness, asthma attacks, and physical weakness. Yet, despite his poor health, he was a passionate lover of wildlife. Inspired by the works of James Audubon, William Bartram, and Alexander Wilson, as well as the adventure novels of Mayne Reid about boy hunters and the writings of Frank Forester, as a teenager Theodore became deeply interested in naturalism and decided to dedicate himself to taxidermy. This, of course, did little to help his asthma, so his father insisted he take up outdoor sports. The choice was obvious: Teddy chose hunting.
His passion for hunting was remarkable. He took pride in shooting large numbers of birds and other wildlife, collecting impressive trophies—some of which he, as a naturalist, referred to as "specimens." But for Roosevelt, hunting wild animals and collecting their hides and horns was always about much more than sport—it was a primitive reconnection with the natural, pre-civilized world and "a free, self-reliant, adventurous life with its rugged and sturdy democracy." Hunting was not merely recreation, but a transformative journey involving apprenticeship, youthful trials, and ultimately, self-mastery. It was hunting that strengthened both his body and spirit, paving the way through a series of adventures and challenges to make him the most extraordinary American president.
After graduating from Harvard University in 1880, Roosevelt felt drawn to politics. Joining the Republican Party, he won election easily. But just two years later, after serving in the New York State Legislature, Teddy abandoned his political career in favor of the freedom—then still available—of the American West.
While hunting bison in Dakota in 1883, he became intrigued by the idea of establishing a cattle ranch in the region. He invested about $80,000—roughly half of his inheritance—into the venture. In the first few years, due to inexperience and harsh weather conditions, he nearly lost everything.
As a ranch owner, he had to develop his skills as a rider and hunter, as such abilities were essential for conducting business in these wild territories. These were difficult and dangerous times in every respect. On one occasion, Roosevelt led a posse to capture three armed criminals who had escaped in his boat during the spring flood. The stories from Teddy’s ranch life in Dakota formed the basis of his 1885 book, Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail, which, in many ways, defined his future path.
To promote the book, Theodore Roosevelt commissioned a fine buckskin suit made in the style of his childhood heroes, Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett. Wearing this outfit—complete with moccasins, a rifle, and a knife with a deer-antler handle—he posed for a publicity campaign. This was how he envisioned the hunter-heroes and trappers from the books of his youth. His boundless love of hunting was an inseparable part of his identity, and he emphasized it through his hunting wardrobe.
Roosevelt’s journey toward prominence in wildlife conservation began, strangely enough, with the same 1885 publication of Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail.
The book was largely well received by general readers. However, it drew mixed reactions from experts. One particularly uncomplimentary and even ironic review came from George Bird Grinnell. Grinnell wrote that Roosevelt, as a newcomer to the region, had missed many subtleties and failed to truly understand it. He criticized Roosevelt for his limited experience, claiming Teddy couldn’t separate fact from fiction or truth from exaggeration. Grinnell believed Roosevelt was too credulous toward local hunting myths and tall tales. At the same time, he acknowledged that the book’s naivety gave it a certain charm.
Soon after, the two men met. Recognizing Grinnell’s expertise, Roosevelt took his critiques seriously. They became close friends. From their conversations and correspondence emerged the idea of founding the Boone and Crockett Club in 1887. The club’s goals were to “promote manly sport with the rifle,” share information about big game and its habitats, spread the ideals of ethical hunting and interest in natural science, and advocate for wildlife protection and related legislation. Membership was restricted exclusively to hunter-naturalists, emphasizing the club’s commitment to conservation. “All hunters should be nature lovers,” declared Roosevelt when elected as the club’s first president. This was his first taste of the presidency.
As President of the United States, Roosevelt made the protection of America’s natural resources a top priority. He established five national parks, four game preserves, and 150 national forests to protect wildlife. During his time in the White House, he set aside 800,000 square kilometers of land as national conservation areas. In protecting the environment and regulating legal hunting, he accomplished more than any of his predecessors or successors.
Even as president, Theodore Roosevelt remained true to his passion for hunting. In 1902, he was invited to Mississippi to hunt bear. The trip was difficult, and the president was feeling unwell. To please Roosevelt, one of the hunting party used dogs to corner a bear and tied it to a tree.
Roosevelt could have easily shot the animal, but he refused, considering it unworthy of a true sportsman. The incident was widely reported in the American press, transforming a hunting anecdote into a national sensation.
Inspired by the story, cartoonist Clifford Berryman created a cartoon with the caption: “Drawing the line in Mississippi.” A New York confectioner, Morris Michtom, and his wife sewed a plush bear toy and named it “Teddy’s Bear.” The Teddy bear was instantly beloved by children and adults alike. As often happens in the United States, a good story quickly turned into a successful business.
In Chile, an Animal Whose Numbers Please No One
CERRO SOMBRERO, Chile — The guidebooks for Tierra del Fuego somehow fail to mention the gunfire.
From the mist-shrouded Patagonian steppe to the dense beech forests, shots pierce the air here for months on end each year. Hunters armed with telescopic rifles roam this archipelago at the southern tip of South America in pickup trucks as they pick off their prey: the guanaco.
Humans have already hunted the guanaco, a wild cousin of the llama, out of existence across big swaths of the continent. While hunting the animal here is legal, the culling of Tierra del Fuego’s guanaco herds is setting off a fierce debate over the fragile recovery of a native species and the sway of powerful ranching and logging interests, which contend that rising numbers of guanacos are competing with sheep for pasture and foraging in commercial hardwood forests.
“We’re witnessing a grotesque subordination to businessmen who view a creature of remarkable beauty and resilience as little more than a nuisance,” said Valeria Muñoz, a prominent animal rights activist in Punta Arenas, the regional capital. “It’s a return to a 19th-century mentality, where logging and sheepherding triumph over everything else.”
Elsewhere in South America, the hunting of animals for population control has largely focused on curbing invasive species. In Colombia, hunters have targeted the descendants of hippos imported by Pablo Escobar. In Ecuador, park rangers in the Galápagos Islands mounted an eradication campaign against goats that compete for food with native species like tortoises.
Chile’s hunting of guanacos seems more akin to the disputed control of native species in other countries, like Australia’s kangaroo hunts, raising the ire of animal rights groups and tourism officials who say the culling stains the reputation of a remote place where visitors are often stunned to come across herds of wild guanacos.
Guanaco hunting is prohibited along the main roads cutting through Tierra del Fuego — a land divided between Chile and Argentina that juts out from South America’s mainland like a spike — but along the back roads during the hunting season in the Chilean winter, the signs of the killing are clear.
Gunshots from the hunters’ rifles echo through the forests of lenga trees. Blood from recently hunted guanacos blemishes the snow. Communicating with the hunters by walkie-talkie, work crews fan out on private lands in search of the carcasses, hoisting them into pickup trucks for transport to slaughterhouses.
Ranchers who are allowed to carry out the hunts argue that they are victims of policies that have expanded Tierra del Fuego’s guanaco herds in recent decades. As recently as the 1970s, only a few thousand guanacos were thought to remain on Tierra del Fuego’s main island, an area larger than Belgium, after widespread poaching.
A crackdown by Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship on firearms ownership (and by extension hunting) opened the way for guanaco conservation efforts; the number of guanacos in Chile’s portion of Tierra del Fuego has climbed to about 150,000, according to Chile’s Agricultural and Livestock Service. The authorities allowed as many as 4,125 guanacos to be killed this year.
“Aside from competing for food with our sheep, there are now so many guanacos in Tierra del Fuego that they represent a risk for motorists trying to avoid them when the animals cross our roads,” said Eduardo Tafra, a rancher who butchers guanaco meat at his slaughterhouse in Cerro Sombrero, a windswept outpost on the plains.
“We do not want to exterminate the guanaco,” Mr. Tafra explained, “but we cannot idly sit by and watch it threaten our livelihood.”
Tierra del Fuego’s ranching culture has roots in the sheepherding operations established near the end of the 19th century, largely by British settlers who displaced nomadic hunters of guanacos. By the early 20th century, the Selk’nam, the indigenous people who had lived in Tierra del Fuego for thousands of years, had been almost completely wiped out in a brutal extermination campaign.
Throughout it all, the guanacos, one of the main sources of food for the Selk’nam, persisted in Tierra del Fuego and other parts of Patagonia. The animals are thought to have first been glimpsed by Europeans in 1520 when Ferdinand Magellan, the explorer who sailed through the strait that now bears his name, described seeing a “camel without humps.”
Part of the camelid family, guanacos once numbered as many as 50 million in South America, their numbers exceeding other big hoofed creatures around the world like the caribou, African wildebeest and saiga antelope, according to the American zoologist William G. Conway.
“Enormous numbers of guanaco haunt these grim plateaus,” the British explorer H. Hesketh-Prichard wrote in “Through the Heart of Patagonia,” a 1902 book in which he describes no-holds-barred hunting for guanacos. “They were about as tame as English park deer, allowing us to approach on foot to within 70 or 80 yards.”
As herds of nonnative sheep expanded in Patagonia, the number of guanacos plummeted, reaching a current level of only about 500,000, said Cristóbal Briceño, an expert on guanacos at the University of Chile. Guanaco herds have dwindled significantly in other parts of Chile where they were once plentiful, he said.
While the guanaco is not threatened with extinction on a continental scale, the animal still faces serious threats of poaching and the degradation of rangelands, and is likely to disappear from several of the regions that make up its historical distribution range, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
The Chilean authorities have quietly allowed hunting for guanacos in Tierra del Fuego over the last decade, arguing that the culling is needed to maintain a “sustainable” population that does not adversely affect other underpinnings of the regional economy.
Residents here generally abhor eating guanaco, so most of the butchered guanaco meat is exported to Europe. (An exception can be found at La Cuisine, a restaurant in Punta Arenas that offers Guanaco Grand Veneur, a stew of the camelid in a red wine sauce accompanied by mashed potatoes and pumpkin.)
“We closely monitor every aspect of the hunting to ensure it is carried out in a proper way,” said Nicolás Soto Volkart, an official with the Agricultural and Livestock Service in Punta Arenas. “We’re convinced this is good policy after guanacos recovered in numbers since the 1970s.”
Still, tensions run high over the hunting of guanacos, herbivores that eat everything from cacti to lichens and fungi. A proposal in 2012 to expand the program by allowing tourists to take part in the guanaco hunts was shelved after it met with fierce criticism.
Advocates of “rewilding” forests — essentially restoring ecosystems to something resembling how they once functioned — say that guanacos could help areas where they are reintroduced by dispersing seeds for certain types of trees.
“Guanacos seem to be an important missing species that used to play an important ecological role,” said Meredith Root-Bernstein, a conservation scientist at Aarhus University in Denmark.
Pointing to a growing resistance in Chile to hunting of various types, officials at the Agricultural and Livestock Service remain on edge after protesters attacked their building in Punta Arenas this year with firebombs in response to a separate proposal to allow the hunting of feral dogs accused of attacking sheep.
Even during the hunting season, the silhouettes of guanacos can still be glimpsed on stretches along the Strait of Magellan. The guanacos often gaze at approaching vehicles before sprinting away across the steppe.
“Hunting these animals is an aberration that reflects our skewed priorities,” said Enrique Couve, the president of Tierra del Fuego’s chamber of tourism.
“The guanaco is a treasure of Patagonia that brings a sense of wonder to people who are fortunate enough to see it,” he said. “And here we are, watching it be killed as if it were some sort of pest.”
Quinte West resident raises concerns about duck hunting near Bain Park
A Quinte West, Ont., resident is raising concerns regarding duck hunting happening near a children’s play centre in Trenton.
Quinte West resident Burritt Clarke often walks along the waterfront at Bain Park in Trenton, and was surprised one day when he heard gunshots.
“They were pretty close, really close,” Clarke said of the hunters, who he said were near the park.
Now well into duck hunting season, hunters across the province are able to head out with their permits for a day of shooting game.
Clarke said he doesn’t think firing guns should be allowed so close to where children play.
The popular public area features a children’s play centre, two ball diamonds and a soccer field.
“The fear is, sooner or later, a child is going to get shot when they’re going down to the water’s edge to look at the ducks,” he said.
Currently, no laws are being broken, according to the Ontario Provincial Police, the City of Quinte West and Ben Harvey, owner of High Falls Outfitters in Belleville.
“No laws are being broken, but it just might not be highly encouraged to be in that area, due to the fact that there are kids, a military base with operations going on, and things like that,” said Harvey.
According to Harvey, education on hunting laws might help in the form of signage at the park, something Quinte West councillor-elect Duncan Armstrong views positively.
The popular public area features a children’s play centre, two ball diamonds and a soccer field.
“The fear is, sooner or later, a child is going to get shot when they’re going down to the water’s edge to look at the ducks,” he said.
Currently, no laws are being broken, according to the Ontario Provincial Police, the City of Quinte West and Ben Harvey, owner of High Falls Outfitters in Belleville.
“No laws are being broken, but it just might not be highly encouraged to be in that area, due to the fact that there are kids, a military base with operations going on, and things like that,” said Harvey.
According to Harvey, education on hunting laws might help in the form of signage at the park, something Quinte West councillor-elect Duncan Armstrong views positively.
Clarke is calling for park spaces to be protected by a safe buffer zone between where people can fire a gun and where people live and play but for now, he hopes his own public awareness campaign through his website Safe Play for Children will at least warn park users about what he worries might be an accident waiting to happen.
https://globalnews.ca/video/rd/e07f6538-5a2c-11ed-b926-0242ac110007/?jwsource=cl
