Hunting Complexities of America and How to Navigate Them

Did you remember to leave one wing on that grouse you cleaned before driving home with it? Does your deer rifle weigh more than 16 pounds? Did you hunt waterfowl after noon? Did you keep the head of that deer you shot for at least 15 days? Did you remove all the meat from between the ribs of your bull moose?

All those are real hunting regulations in at least one state. If they seem onerous or frivolous, at least they’re grounded in a conservation purpose. The grouse-wing rule ensures hunters stay within species limits. Idaho’s requirement that guns weigh less than 16 pounds prevents hunters from setting up .50-caliber rigs to shoot across canyons. The noon waterfowl closure shared by several states reduces pressure and retains birds for more hunters, and Alaska’s rib-meat rule ensures hunters aren’t taking only the trophy parts of animals.

The basis for California’s deer-head-retention rule? Who knows.

Every state has a thicket of rules that can seem alternately vague, confusing or unnecessary, and every year otherwise lawful hunters get tripped up by obscure regulations that may be artifacts of an earlier era when game populations were low or hunters’ habits required correction. Then, too, every year wildlife agencies add new rules, often applying them to a part of the state or certain properties within it, or to a specific hunting season or hunting style.

Don’t forget about federal rules, such as waterfowl bag limits that change from year to year based on flyway population modeling, and those for national wildlife refuges. Then there are the broadest regulations, ones that govern a state’s minimum hunting age, season dates and the number of square inches of blaze orange hunters are required to wear in the field.

FEARING THE RULES

Many researchers have concluded that regulation complexity is a significant barrier to participation in our hunting seasons, and not just for beginners. Fear of unknowingly violating an obscure rule is also holding back veteran hunters, says Jon McRoberts, administrator of the Boone and Crockett Club’s Wildlife Conservation Program at the University of Montana and one of the investigators of the research.

“The majority of current hunters are honest, ethical people, and the fear of doing something wrong unintendedly could keep some from expanding their hunting,” he says.

The Boone and Crockett Club’s work that looked at regulation complexity and its influence on hunting participation was funded by the Council to Advance Hunting and the Shooting Sports (CAHSS). Researchers stress that their role is not to tell states how to fix identified problems but rather to point out commonalities in regulations shared by several states and to identify outliers, rules that are unique to just one or two states. Those outliers may be candidates for change or removal.

Researchers differentiated statewide regulations, which are generally consistent and understandable, from unit-specific rules, which are often influenced by tradition and hyper-localized management, making them vague or inconsistent. Texas, for instance, has deer rules that are specific to each of its 254 counties.

“If you are a new hunter, you might be in the right place to hunt, but you might be there at the wrong time” and can unknowingly run afoul of a county-specific rule, notes Boone and Crockett conservation fellow Jonathan Karlen. Rather than take the chance of getting a violation, new hunters might instead pivot to another activity that has fewer legal consequences.

DIGITAL HELP

Wildlife managers often argue convincingly that regulations have helped recover game populations and have ensured that hunting remains one of our safest outdoor activities. State attorneys note that lengthy and comprehensive regulations are required to win poaching cases in court. And many hunters perpetuate some regulations as a mechanism to limit harvest and expand hunting opportunity. The upshot is that regulation simplification doesn’t happen dramatically or often.

That’s why the International Hunter Education Association (IHEA) has introduced Scout, a digital tool that uses artificial intelligence to answer questions about hunting regulations. Hunters can go online to scout.ihea-usa.org, select their state and then type in their question. Scout spits out an answer based on updated regulations.

“For new hunters, or hunters who are exploring new types or areas of hunting, regulation complexity can be a daunting barrier,” says Jae Ellison, director of education for IHEA. “This is an effort to remove or at least reduce a known barrier.”

Scout is free for anyone to use, and Ellison says that the more people who use the tool, the better it becomes at refining its answers. The tool relies on what’s called a closed data base. Unlike many AI tools, Scout can only answer questions it derives from updated hunting regulations.

“It cannot provide an answer outside the data we give it,” says Ellison. “We also provide the actual rules and regulations where Scout found the answer. The idea is to add validity to the answer and to encourage users to dig deeper into the regulations and keep learning. We’ve been talking for a long time in this industry about ways of reducing regulation complexity, but this is one of the first tools that leverages technology to potentially solve the problem, and I think that’s noteworthy.”

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• This article was featured in the December/January 2025 issue of Game & Fish magazine. Click to subscribe.

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