In his May 5 Thursday Opinion essay, “Those Anacostia turkeys are a miracle of conservation,” Keith Urbahn neglected to mention the factors and efforts by true conservationists (non-hunters) that brought wild turkeys back from the brink of extinction after hunters slaughtered them with reckless abandon.
One element of the species’ recovery was the Great Depression. When a lack of income forced small farmers and rural residents into cities, turkeys rebounded. And though the Pittman-Robertson Act has generated a large amount of money for habitat restoration and other initiatives, it didn’t do so with hunter dollars. Less than 4 percent of the U.S. population hunts, and the 96 percent that doesn’t still pays the excise tax on sporting equipment that the act established. Nevadans for Responsible Wildlife Management analyzed funding for U.S. wildlife programs and found that about 95 percent of federal, 88 percent of nonprofit and 94 percent of total funding for wildlife conservation and management come from the non-hunting public.