Column: ATV use should be restricted for big-game hunts

Tom Wharton

The use of all-terrain vehicles as tools for big game hunting needs to be restricted or, in some areas of Utah, even eliminated.

They give the hunters who use them not only an unfair advantage over sportsmen who choose to hike, but over big game itself.

I am reminded of something the great conservationist Aldo Leopold wrote in the late 1940s long before anyone had even thought about manufacturing an ATV.

"I have the impression that the American sportsman is puzzled," he wrote in the classic book A Sand County Almanac. "He doesn't understand what is happening to him. Bigger and better gadgets are good for industry, so why not for outdoor recreation? It has not dawned on him that outdoor recreations are essentially primitive, atavistic; that their value is a contrast-value; that excessive mechanization destroys contrasts by moving the factory to the woods or marsh."

Count me as a skeptic that ATV use has done anything to actually improve the quality of the hunting experience other than to make it more convenient for those of us who are in terrible physical condition to get to our hunting destination. I fear that noisy ATVs drive deer and elk away from hunters, that new trails created by cross country travel damage fish and wildlife habitat and the use of the vehicles to hunt violates "fair chase" rules.

That's more than just my opinion. Recent studies by the Idaho Game and Fish Department have shown that "the harvest of bull elk increases with increased hunter access that eventually can lead to reduced hunter opportunity. Elk use declines in areas adjacent to roads open to motorized vehicles. Slow-moving vehicles on primitive roads and trails are more disturbing to elk than fast-moving vehicles on highways. As motorized vehicle access increases, the quality and amount of elk habitat are degraded."

Also know that I am a realist. ATVs, used legally, are a legitimate and popular form of outdoor recreation. Their use is increasing in popularity. And riders should have the right to access and use some -- but not all -- public lands.

Utah Wildlife Board officials should take a close look at what Idaho has done to solve the ATV conflict between hunters who love them and those who loathe them. Its game commission has designated roughly a third of the state as areas where "hunters may only use motorized vehicles on established roadways which are open to motorized traffic and capable of being traveled by full-sized automobiles. Any other use by hunters is prohibited."

This strikes me as a fair balance, though a 50-50 split seems even better. If I am a traditional hunter on foot or horseback, I can choose to hunt in an area where off-road vehicle use is largely prohibited, even if only during big-game season. If I want to use my ATV, then I hunt in an area more open to that use.

Of course, that begs the larger question that I fear too few hunters ask themselves. Is using an ATV to get closer to game ethical?

While it might make the experience easier, does it make it better? And does the use of these vehicles, coupled with improvements in weaponry and rifle scopes, tip the balance in favor of the hunter to the point where it could hurt big-game populations and the land itself?

Again, I turn to Aldo Leopold for guidance.

"There is value in any experience that exercises those ethical restraints collectively called sportsmanship," he wrote. 

"Our tools for the pursuit of wildlife improve faster than we do, and sportsmanship is a voluntary limitation to the use of these armaments. It is aimed to augment the role of skill and shrink the role of gadgets in the pursuit of wild things."

Hunters who have become too dependent on their ATVs to pursue big game ought to think seriously about what their use says about them as sportsmen.

Perhaps more important, they should think about how non-hunters view them.

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Source: http://www.sltrib.com/outdoors/ci_13919874

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