By MATT PIKE
St. Joseph Post
The Missouri Department of Conservation is seeing a drop in the number of deer hunters.
Deer and Elk Program Leader Jason Isabel says looking at the number of deer hunters he sees that it has dropped tremendously over the last decade.
"If you look back about 10 years ago was our peak number of deer hunters and we're actually down about 41,000 deer hunters from where we were a decade ago,"" Isabel tells Kyle Carroll during his regular visit on the KFEQ Hotline. "And that trend is predicted to continue as the average age of our deer hunters get older and folks just drop out of hunting, and that's not a uniquely Missouri challenge that's something that other states are feeling."
Isabel says with a declining number of hunters it presents a challenge for his department to look at how deer management needs to be handled in the future.
Isabel says while there is a number of older hunters, it is common for people to stop hunting as they get older.
"By the time folks get in their 60's and certainly their 70's they're just not out there as much as they were when they were younger," Isabel explains. "The average hunter was much younger 10 or 20 years ago on average and we're just seeing the age of the average hunter increasing through time."
Isabel says he feels like the department does a good job of recruiting new hunters, but are not doing it at a consistent enough rate to offset the numbers that are being lost.
Isabel says it's challenging to recruit new hunters because of how the times have changed since that generation.
"If you look at where we are now a lot more of an urban population, certainly a big boom in technology and a lot of other ways for people to spend their time other than in the outdoors hunting," Isabel says. "And so, it presents some real challenges as that baby boomer generation ages and we lose those folks to try to figure out how do we engage more folks and get them interested in hunting."
Isabel says it presents a challenge in finding new ways to engage new hunters as that baby boomer generation begins to age out.