De-publicize, De-glorify & De-monetize Western State Hunting

By Mountain Pursuit

Nation-wide, hunting is a dying tradition in the United States. Hunting's roots lie in rural areas and rural populations, and as the nation urbanizes, fewer young people will be introduced to hunting.

While rural America has been slowly dying, the interest in western state hunting has exploded - driven primarily by industry marketing and celebrity hunter self-promotion.

Mountain Pursuit strongly believes in the Depublicize, Deglorify and Demonitize (DDD) movement as it applies to western state hunting. Mountain Pursuit did not begin this movement, but rather found it aligns with many of the concerns and positions we’ve taken since our inception.

De-publicize, De-glorify & De-monetize Western State Hunting
Self-promoting hunters and the hunting industry leverage social media to attract eyeballs, which they quickly monetize via subscriptions, apparel and gear sales, memberships, sponsorships, etc. 

Eastern and Midwestern white tail deer hunters and non-hunting newcomers to the west are the primary target audience for the hunting industry marketing and media onslaught. The aim is to extract dollars from this target audience.

Within the hunting industry, a corrupt “circle jerk” of celebrity hunters, hunting movie producers, gear/clothing manufacturers, internet hunting service companies (gohunt.com, etc.), podcasters, and approving mainstream hunting nonprofits stroke each other daily to keep content machine producing, audience growing, and money rolling in.

All hunting TV shows, movies, videos, podcasts and self-promoting celebrity hunters glorify western-state hunting.  Hunting by its nature is a controversial activity and its glorified over-promotion will only bring unwanted attention and scrutiny from anti-hunters and non-hunters. This unwanted attention will ultimately increase political opposition to hunting in general, and western-state hunting in particular.

Filmed kill shots and dead animal photos are political suicide for the future of western-state hunting. Glorified, self-promoting hunting content is a direct political threat to the future of hunting in the western-state US.

Unlike the East, Western-state hunting is dependent upon hunting being allowed on federal lands - USFS and BLM. Under current law, it only takes a department rule or a Presidential Executive Order to severely restrict, or even end, hunting on federal lands. Even though the states manage the wildlife, and hunting can be a management tool, state governments cannot dictate to the federal government how to manage activity on federal land. Specifically, federal restriction on hunting on federal land happened during the Obama administration in Alaska, and is currently being proposed by the Biden administration, again in Alaska.

Hunting media increases hype and hunting pressure on western-state public lands. Self-promoting celebrity hunters and the hunting industry value money from new nonresident hunters over maintaining uncrowded, quality hunting experiences for western-state resident hunters.

Hunting at its core is about seeing, not about being seen. Cameras, microphones and film crews violate this true spirit of hunting, increase hunting pressure, and bring hunting unneeded attention and scrutiny from anti-hunters and non hunters.

Mountain Pursuit will fight to make hunting social media posting taboo and to forcefully embarrass/discourage self-promotors from hunting.