Sportsmanship, Fair Chase Hunting, and Wildlands Conservation

The Boone and Crockett Club’s Records of North American Big Game, 12th Edition

By Allen M. Jones, 2-02-06

I have an early memory: Me, six or seven years old, cross-legged in front of a bookcase, flipping through an edition of The Boone and Crockett record book. Hardbound in green cloth, about the thickness of an XYZ Encyclopedia Brittanica, the pages kept wanting to drop loose from the binding. Maybe this was the edition that first printed Dad’s Yukon moose. Anyway, just a few black and white photos of antlers and horns, thirty-some chapters of score listings running up the page (hunter, owner, date killed, etc.) in such a way that, to actually read the thing you had to tilt it sideways. For a certain kind of kid, though, a gopher shooter and perch fisher, this was pre-adolescent Playboy. All these possibilities, potentials. Running your finger down the list of whitetails, for instance, it looked like most of the big bucks were coming out of the midwest and Canada. What would a Nebraska hunt cost? And what would it be like, sitting in a treestand in the middle of a Saskatchewan snow storm, seeing a 200 point buck step out into your shooting lane?

Fast forward about thirty years. The basic, browser, daydream impulse behind the record book remains the same: equal parts ego displacement and envy and melancholy. It’s a good kind of jealousy. For an outdoorsman, a big game hunter, a fair chase sportsman, it’s still a cultural icon. This most recent version, Boone and Crockett Club’s Records of North American Big Game, Twelfth Edition, has gone fat as a Brooklyn phonebook. Where their first, 1952 edition apparently listed only 84 typical whitetails that “met the then minimum score of 140. This book includes 4,060 that make the current minimum of 170!" It also includes a selection of eight personal essays from “some of today’s most popular outdoor writers," (frankly, a negligible addition, given the quality of writing) as well as a nicely produced section on firearms, a spotlight on the rifles “that have connections to both current and former Boone and Crockett Club members...from Theodore Roosevelt to Jack O’Connor." The most interesting aspect of the new edition, however, is how each of the 38 different species is introduced with a personal anecdote or comment from the hunter or owner of the world record head. The new world record American elk, for instance, while killed in Arizona in 1968, was only recognized in 1995. The rack was spotted by an antler buyer as it rode through town in the back of a blue Dodge pickup. It was turned upside down, straddling a clothes dryer.

As a sportsman, this book is a kind of lodestone, the reference point for those late night, three-beer debates about who killed what and when. Its larger value, however, lies in the way it provides an entree into the Club’s considerably more important activities, their work in hunting ethics and conservation. It’s the greatest kind of sad irony that most people don’t recognize how the history of good hunting is, coincidentally, the history of species and habitat conservation. Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation to Ducks Unlimited, North American Wild Sheep to Pheasants Forever, monies raised by duck stamp and license sales to the countless small acts of habitat restoration by local hunting clubs, if it weren’t for sport hunting, it’s a safe bet we currently wouldn’t have much wilderness left to preserve. In this regard, and as this book makes clear, The Boone and Crockett Club stands first among equals.

Founded in 1887 by Theodore Roosevelt (along with his buddies George Bird Grinnell, William Tecumseh Sherman, Gifford Pinchot...) and now headquartered in Missoula, Montana, the Club has, for almost 120 years, spearheaded a certain kind of conservation. Particularly when contrasted against other, less conscionable organizations (for instance, that one down south that sells Reno trade booth space for a couple hundred bucks a square foot) the B & C Club has always stood for something outside itself. Lately, this means managing the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Ranch on the Rocky Mountain Front (a teaching venue and ecology station) as well as endowing three different university chairs. They’ve also sponsored a teacher-in-service training program and managed a conservation grants program that funds wildlife research at the graduate student level. They have their fingers in enough essential pies to have certainly made Teddy proud.

If you believe the press releases, the number of sport hunters in this country is on a slow but steady decline. Given that good hunting remains one of our few umbilical ties to the land, to our ecological roots, losing it in dribs and drabs is the worst kind of news. It can only mean the eventual diminishment of hunter-sponsored conservation. Fortunately, The Boone and Crockett Club, as seen in this newest edition of their record book, is keeping up the fight.

(Although please, somebody, next time, please print the entries so you don’t have to keep turning the thing around to read it.)

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