Published by The Fund for Animals,
May 1999

Desperately Seeking Diana

In the ancient world, hunters prayed to a woman; the Greeks called her Artemis, the Romans Diana, goddess of the hunt. Perhaps her worship recalled the fabled time in prehistory when society was ruled by women and deities were feminine. Or perhaps lonely male hunters found it more comforting to visualize a woman. For hunting has been a masculine pursuit -- for many, the quintessentially masculine pursuit -- throughout recorded history, from the Biblical Nimrod pursuing wild animals across ancient Mesopotamia to President Bill Clinton shooting tame ducks on the Eastern Shore of Maryland (Ifill). 

Now, at the end of the twentieth century, that tradition is being seriously challenged for the first time in history.

Today in the United States we are witnessing the world's first large scale campaign to turn women into hunters.

Firearms manufacturers are creating and advertising hunting rifles and shotguns designed specially for women; fashion shows are being held to promote women's hunting gear; articles appearing in "outdoor" magazines and journals proclaim that hunting initiates women into the last of the exclusively male clubs and so represents female empowerment; while others argue the opposite side of the coin -- that a woman who wants to spend more quality time with her husband should stand by her man out in the woods with a gun on her arm.

But first and foremost, there is Becoming an Outdoors-Woman, or BOW for short (pronounced like the archery weapon), a program of classes created at the University of Wisconsin, one of the major think tanks of the hunting industry.

Promoted by state wildlife agencies all across the country, BOW introduces women to the outdoor life -- especially the life of hunting. 

Why are hunters, who from the dawn of history have jealously and zealously guarded the gender exclusivity of their sport, now devoting massive amounts of time, energy, and money to convince women to become hunters?

Why are the guardians of the last and oldest all male fraternity in the industrialized world desperately seeking Diana? Have hunters suddenly become gender sensitive and politically correct? Or is something else at work here?

We are going to suggest that something else is indeed at work -- three things, in fact -- and they are money, motherhood, and the Nineteenth Amendment.

We will look at each in turn, but first, we must take a moment to acknowledge the single most important fact about hunting as we enter the twenty-first century. 

Dead Sport Walking

Hunting is a sport under a death sentence, a fact known to its supporters as well as its opponents. Daniel J. Decker, Jody W. Enck, and Tommy L. Brown of Cornell University's Department of Natural Resources' Human Dimensions Research Unit, who describe themselves as "academic researchers and hunting advocates," put it this way: "The future of hunting looks bleak given prevailing social values coupled with recent and projected trends in American demographics" (Decker et al. 24).
  [emphasis in original] 

They go on to quote two other leading authorities on the demographics and future of hunting, Thomas A. Heberlein and E.J. Thomas of the University of Wisconsin, birthplace of the BOW program, who foresee a doomsday scenario for recreational hunting: "It is not out of the question that there will be no sport hunting, or a dramatic change in the character of sport hunting, in the United States by mid-century" (Decker et al. 31). 

Decker, Enck, and Brown then recite the numbers that lead to this conclusion, stating that "the percentage of the American population 12 years of age or older that was hunting hovered around 9-11% for 25 years between 1955 and 1980.  But a declining trend could be detected from 1975 to the present: 1975 - 9.9%, 1980 - 9.1%, 1985 - 8.4%, and 1991 - 7.5%" (Decker et al. 25).

In 1996, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, an agency of the Department of the Interior, 13,869,000 Americans sixteen and older hunted, representing only 6.8% percent of the United States population in that age group (U.S. Dept. of the Interior, 1996 National Survey 24). 

Show Me the Money

Killing animals for pleasure is big business. Very big business. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reports that in 1996, the latest year for which statistics are available, hunters spent $20.67 billion on their sport (U.S. Dept. of the Interior, 1996 National Survey 24).

Numbers of this magnitude are usually the exclusive province of governments and multi-national corporations. To break it down to a size that we can more easily wrap our minds around, hunters in the United States spend $397.5 million every week, or $56.6 million every day. 

To put these numbers in perspective, in the previous year, 1995, the gross revenues from all sources for Walt Disney Enterprises were only $12.1 billion, for Apple Computers only $11.1 billion, and for Time-Warner only $8.1 billion (World Almanac 142). 

Every hunter who quits or dies and is not replaced represents $1,500 lost to the hunting industry every year, which means that a decline of just 13,800 hunters (or 1 percent) costs the industry $20.7 million annually.

It is no wonder that as the number of male hunters continues its quarter century decline with no sign of leveling off, the leaders of the hunting industry are willing to swallow their male pride and open their ranks to women. If they can't hang onto Nimrod, they are going to need Diana. 

Article by Fund for Animals
May, 1999