THE ECOHUNTER MANIFESTO

  1. The ecohunter sees not landscapes of sport, but habitats in need.
  2. The ecohunter hunts solely invasive species, seeing not 'game' but a destructive animal population to end.
  3. The ecohunter does not celebrate their kill, nor document themselves with their kill.
  4. The ecohunter seeks the swiftest death for their prey, within allowed means.
  5. The ecohunter does not treat their prey with contempt, understanding it is not they that are at fault but those that imported them.
  6. The ecohunter may choose to eat what they kill, or leave the corpse - away from waterways and paths - to nourish the environment it took from.
  7. The ecohunter does not sell what they kill, so as to avoid stimulating demand for a sustained supply of prey.
  8. The ecohunter hunts as a last resort, after all other available options for managing animal threats to habitat have been deemed insufficient.
  9. The ecohunter is informed by both indigenous and scientific knowledge of the habitat they seek to assist.
  10. The ecohunter never sets sights on humans, understanding that human behaviour can be changed where feral animal behaviour cannot.
  11. The ecohunter adheres to all local and indigenous laws in the course of their work.
  12. The ecohunter is a guardian.

This manifesto has been written from the perspective of conserving native forests in Aotearoa / New Zealand, where introduced species such as goats, deer, pig, possum, rat, feral cat, stoat, weasel and ferret are driving countless bird, lizard and plant species - whom had no history of predation prior - toward extinction. 80% of land-based birds, bats, reptiles and frogs in the country are at risk or threatened with extinction, a country whose only terrestrial mammal prior to human settlement was the bat. The entire composition of pristine endemic forests are being altered by ungulates, such as feral deer and goats, numbering hundreds of thousands, whom browse on the undercanopies, wiping out future generations of CO2e capturing and richly-biodiverse forest. They cannot be caught at any meaningful scale, and there is nowhere to put them.

It is considered but not expected that this manifesto may make sense in other biomes.

Created 27/12/20. Attribution: anonymous