After enjoying nearly four centuries of acceptance, and even celebration as a significant component of our way of life, over the last forty years hunting has become yet another fault line along a growing rural-urban divide. Hunting is no longer viewed as intrinsic to our collective identity as Americans. While there are many socio-economic reasons behind the shift in the public's perception of hunting and hunters, the fact remains that hunting, as a topic, is a ready source of fractious debate in contemporary American culture. One aspect of the larger debate is the notion of hunting as a right, which begs the question: Do we have a right to hunt?

As North American sportsmen and women, we view hunting as an integral part of our heritage, part of the legacy brought to these shores by the European settlers who founded our society. They brought with them three key things: a worldview that placed supreme importance on the private ownership of land, the notion that a free man was free to do what he wished on his own land, and guns.

Although originally limited to a means of survival, as the colonies grew and farming flourished, subsistence hunting by settlers became generally unnecessary except for those who lived on the fringes of the frontier. And yet it was that same agrarian affluence that enabled hunting to continue as a pastime amongst those living in relative comfort. For European immigrants, hunting was as much an assertion of individual self-determination as it was a means of putting meat in the larder. By the time of the Declaration of Independence, hunting, as a tradition of the common citizen, was over one-hundred fifty years old and essentially inseparable from life in "the Colonies".

After independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, hunting became a natural extension of the newly codified right to keep and bear firearms. The United States of 1789 occupied only about 1/7th of the continental U.S. Westward expansion into game rich wilderness, though slow, was still much faster than the pace of the infrastructure that followed. This rendered hunting a practical necessity and it quite literally fed the frontier. Experienced during the adolescence of our nation, Manifest Destiny intertwined hunting and firearm ownership as inseparable icons of the American pioneer spirit. This perception went largely unchallenged until the 1960s and the growth of the animal rights movement.

From its inception, animal-rights (AR) activism was (and remains) a primarily urban political phenomenon. In the post WWII period, as the U.S. population became increasingly urbanized, the AR movement gained momentum as more and more Americans lost touch with where food really comes from. Ironically, the most strident proponents of animal rights were those members of society most insulated from the processes that render animals into food. Generally, this remains true today.

Animal-rights and anti-hunting activism was largely ignored by hunters until the mid 1970s when AR activists scored their first legislative victories to restrict hunting. Even in the face of a credible threat, hunters remained unaffiliated, unorganized, and vulnerable. It wasn't until the 1980s that hunters began to form associations geared towards countering increasingly successful AR propaganda campaigns, which brings us to today.

Books and magazines, the primary source of information and opinions for and against hunting, have been eclipsed in recent years by the popular explosion of the internet and the advent of the "Blog." Like virtually everything else in the known universe, there is no shortage of information and opinions about hunting available on the internet (after all, you're reading this on a hunting website). Blogs and web forums have revolutionized public discourse on….well…everything, including guns and hunting. I admit to being an enthusiastic participant in web forums. I enjoy reading other people's opinions on topics of interest to me and I enjoy reading the responses of others to my expressed opinions. I even moderate the Alaska section on a popular hunting forum website. I mention this internet stuff only because it was the words of others, posted in cyberspace, which inspired me to compose this essay.

The right to hunt comes up often in web debates about hunting and gun ownership. In the minds of many hunters the two are still as intertwined now as ever, primarily because hunters represent a substantial segment of gun owners. The relationship between hunting and the constitutional right to private gun ownership is often used by hunters to support their arguments in debates on either topic. Many times have I read sincere and often impassioned statements citing "Our hunting rights…", or "our rights and traditions as hunters…", and even "…our constitutional right to hunt…" or words to that effect, which brings us back to the question: Do we have a right to hunt?

In short the answer is no.

Upsetting as this may be to some, we do not have any hunting rights, per se. This is not simply my opinion; this is a matter of law, and we are a nation of laws. Yes, there is an on going academic debate in some circles regarding hunting as an extension of the same "natural law" referred to by the Framers; the argument being that man is a predatory species and therefore has an innate right to hunt that transcends enumeration. While this is compelling support of that idea, my point is that the Second Amendment does not address hunting as an aspect of our constitutional guarantees to gun ownership, nor in my opinion should it. The Framers wisely elevated the private ownership of firearms to the exalted status of fundamental right, not to protect hunting but for the express purpose of guaranteeing that the people should retain the means to defend themselves against tyranny, no matter its source.

Hunting for sport, or for the pot, is in fact a legitimate and natural extension of firearms ownership, and it did help shape our nation and our culture, but it is not a right, it is a privilege. At its essence, hunting remains an important part of our cultural identity because it challenges us to acquire and hone skills that celebrate our time-honored values of resourcefulness, independence, and personal excellence. It refreshes our personal connections to the cycles of life, the seasons, the land, and to the greatness of our heritage. Hunting makes us active participants in the world that sustains us, and exposes us to moments of untold beauty that foster an appreciation for the importance of clean water, soil and air.

I believe very strongly that hunting can continue to do all these things for us as long as we keep our relationship with it in perspective. By assuming it is a "right" we risk taking hunting for granted and letting it slip from our grasp. There are those who would say, "That'll never happen! Hunting's too popular." Take voting for example. Granted, we are not in any immediate risk of losing the right to vote so this is not a linear analogy. I am merely drawing a comparison between our relationships with rights and privileges.

Voting is a crucial right that the vast majority of us don't bother to exercise. Barely 30 percent of Americans voted in the last Presidential election, and I personally witnessed people get out of line at the polls. Evidently 15 minutes was too long a wait to help preserve democracy's most fundamental institution. Now let's compare that to driving. Driving is a mere privilege and yet virtually every single person in our society who can, does. We will stand in line for hours to secure a driver's license, and whenever circumstances threaten our ability to drive, for most of us, maintaining that privilege becomes the number one priority in our lives. Why? Because we revere our driving privileges.

I contend that if we consciously regard hunting as the privilege it is then we will guard it jealously, reminding ourselves of our responsibilities towards its continuance. Things like being good stewards of its traditions, and of the land. Bearing in mind that we are no more than 15 percent of the population, we must remind ourselves that we are involuntary ambassadors to the non-hunting public (who outnumber us 7 to 1) and that our actions, good or bad, frame their image of us. We must pass on our passion and traditions by mentoring the generations that follow us. If we assume it to be a right when it clearly is not, then we can be lulled into complacency, apathy, and ultimately, loss. If we were to cherish hunting only half as much as we do our driver's licenses, I believe we'd be much more likely to see hunting endure.