The Ripple Effect of Hunting

Michigan was made for outdoor sports. Really, it is surrounded by the largest Fresh Water Sea’s in the world, thousands of miles of sandy beaches, old growth forests, more pine than anyone could ask for, hundreds of miles of snowmobile and ATV trails, thousands of acres of public hunting land, some of the most scenic hiking trails around, miles and miles of streams and rivers to fish, not to mention that you can go from flat agricultural land to rolling hills in just a few hours drive. What more could a sportsman need? Like everything else these day’s….. A better economy!

Studies have shown that hunting alone creates more than 700,000 jobs and supports 704,600 million jobs nation wide (or about 1% of the total civilian labor force), and annual spending by America’s 14 million hunters is around 22.1 billion. To put it another way, if American hunting was a corporation it would have ranked 35^th on the Fortune 500 list of Americas largest businesses in 1996, with the amount of hunters increasing every year since.

While pursuing their sport, hunters require goods and services that not only boost local economies but regional and national economies as well. Think about it. Hunters need a place to stay, camping gear, firearms, supplies, guide services, game processors, taxidermists, licenses, gasoline, the list goes on and on. Along with those purchases at the local level, it increases State coffers in the form of taxes, license fees, and ATV tags. In fact it adds about 1.4 billion dollars (Nationally) to state tax revenues on an annual basis.  

Each dollar spent by a hunter increases another person’s income enabling them to spend more, which increases someone else’s income, which allows them to spend more, increasing someone else’s income…. I think you get the picture. It’s like a small ripple on a pond; it gets wider and wider until it reaches all sides of the shore, or all areas of our economy. Compound that with other outdoor sports like fishing, camping, hiking, skiing, off-roading, shooting, and the rest and it’s easy to see how much something as simple as an activity can effect the country at large.

So, get outdoors, take your kids or a friend, and have some fun! It doesn’t have to be something extravagant, it could be something as simple as packing a lunch and going on a day hike, an afternoon hunt on some public land, or going to your favorite (local) fishing hole to float a bobber. Every time you do, you are enriching someone’s life and helping the economy at large. For myself, I think my kid’s and I will be taking a walk in the rain down my favorite hunting trail today.

(Statistics are from the report: “Economic Importance of Hunting” US Fish and Wildlife Service under Cooperative Grant Agreement No. 14-48-98210-97-G047)