President Donald Trump’s administration is quietly pushing to dramatically scale back hunting restrictions across national parks, refuges, and wilderness areas, raising questions about visitor safety and wildlife impact. This initiative follows a January order from U.S. Department of the Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, directing agencies to remove what he termed “unnecessary regulatory or administrative barriers” to hunting and fishing, and to justify any regulations they wish to maintain. Burgum stated, “Expanding opportunities for the public to hunt and fish on Department-managed lands not only strengthens conservation outcomes, but also supports rural economies, public health, and access to America’s outdoor spaces.” He added, “The Department’s policy is clear: public and federally managed lands should be open to hunting and fishing unless a specific, documented, and legally supported exception applies.”
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I live near a national historic park in a suburban area. They have struggled with deer overpopulation since we have basically no predators left in our area.
A few times a year they have sharpshooters doing deer culls after hours, and it’s helped a lot, you see some of those ripple effects where since the deer aren’t eating all the vegetation you’re seeing more and different kinds of plants returning which has brought back populations of other animals that used to be pretty uncommon.
And the deer are generally healthier with less competition from each other, I remember seeing a lot of sickly-looking deer there when I was a kid and I don’t see that as much anymore.
But even though the culls have helped, there’s still a bit of an overpopulation problem, and allowing some hunting could help with that, and maybe eliminate the need to pay sharpshooters for culling. We have other, similar-sized parks in our area where hunting is allowed with few to no issues and in this part of the state you’re basically limited to bows and shotguns which helps to limit how far a stray shot could go.
I wouldn’t want the whole park to be opened to hunting all through hunting season, but I think allowing it in certain parts of the bark on certain days could be very beneficial.
This occupation isn’t known for oversight nor competency. Expect any changes to be implemented in the worst possible way.
Oh absolutely, I have 0 faith in this administration to do this in any kind of remotely sensible way
But in general, with different people at the helm, I could really get behind more hunting opportunities in national parks as a conservation tool.
Really I’d like to see predators like wolves reintroduced, but that’s not going to happen anytime soon, and realistically for it to work in the parks around me that I have in mind for this we’d probably need to bulldoze and reforest huge swathes of suburbia to support those predators, so nothing that’s going to happen in a hurry, even if we somehow got the people living there to agree to move or eminent domained their properties (which isn’t going to happen) we’d probably be looking at years if not decades just to replant and regrow the forests.