An interview with Luke Hilgemann, head of the hunting and conservation group, the International Order of T. Roosevelt.
It’s deer season, so a few weeks ago, I took a call from Luke Hilgemann, the former executive of Americans for Prosperity, who is now heading up a hunting and conservation group called the International Order of T. Roosevelt (IOTR). Every few days, people contact writers here at NR with pitches for why they should be interviewed. Most of the time, we ignore these requests due to workload or incompatibility. However, there’s occasionally a gem; this time, it was a blaze-orange gem.
Luke is a fellow Wisconsinite who has a special interest in hunting, a pastime that I have a cultural affection for but have had few opportunities to indulge in. Over the course of 30 minutes, Luke and I discussed the political challenges hunters face, as well as the dwindling population of those who hunt and the consequences thereof. Whatever your position on hunting, the intersection of centuries of tradition, state involvement, and interest groups that compose the modern hunting experience make it a fascinating corner of American life.
Luther Ray Abel: How has Wisconsin changed from when you left for AFP to your return with IOTR?
Luke Hilgemann: Unfortunately, there’s a really sad decline in hunting in the state of Wisconsin right now. We’ve lost about 200,000 hunters in the last five years in the state of Wisconsin alone. Nationally, you’re looking at a drop-off of about 2 million hunters. And so, for my passion and what I love to do, and what I’m fighting for in my profession, it’s been a sad day for hunting in America and hunting in Wisconsin. And I think along with those traditions, when we see this kind of steady decline, along with it goes the values that many of us are raised on — faith, family, freedom, providing for yourself, having a lifestyle that allows you to support your family and bring some delicious, renewable protein back to your friends and neighbors. That’s starting to disappear.
Abel: What do you attribute to the decline? That’s a significant number — 2 million nationally.
Hilgemann: I think it’s a combination of things. But when asked in the most recent round of polling that I’ve seen, hunters have identified three kinds of things that are pushing them out of the woods. Number one is the high cost of equipment. Number two is the poor access to quality land to hunt. And then number three is the complex regulations that are involved with hunting. So just as an example of that, in my home state of Wisconsin and yours, the regulation book for deer hunting is 171 pages long* (*presuming a conglomerate of DNR and state codes). It feels like you need to take an attorney with you to the woods to figure out what you can kill and with what. We need to get back to a system that’s a lot simpler, a lot easier to understand, and something that makes sense for the future.
Abel: If you were standing in front of the Wisconsin legislature today, what is a solution or correction that you think would have the most impact? What’s the quickest, simplest way that a legislator might be able to alleviate some of the pressure on hunters?
Hilgemann: I think it’s twofold. Number one, it’s simplifying the regulations involved. And number two, it’s understanding the economic benefit of having hunters in the woods. Hunters pay for about 75 percent of the conservation efforts in the country. And we need to do a lot better job of arming ourselves first with that information. And number two, making politicians and elected officials at the state and national level understand the importance of the economic impact of hunting. Without hunters in the woods, conservation as we know it in America is going to be significantly changed.
Abel: It doesn’t sound like you have a conscious opponent. Is it incidental that things have become more difficult for hunters? Or is there a group on the other side of what you’re trying to accomplish? How did these 170 pages of rules come to be?
Hilgemann: So there is a very well-funded, well-organized, and in my opinion, ill-intentioned anti-hunting cabal out there. You have groups like the Humane Society of the United States, PETA, and the Animal Legal Defense Fund; HSUS’s operating budget is $150 million a year. Their sworn number-one top priority is to end big-game hunting in America as we know it. Same thing with PETA and the same thing with the Animal Legal Defense Fund. So as hunters, we are constantly under a barrage of attacks from groups like this, whether we realize it or not.
Just in the last year, there were attempts to ban hunting in a state like Oregon; they missed putting it on the ballot to make it a felony to hunt in the state of Oregon by 20,000 signatures. These are all efforts that are being pushed by this anti-hunting cabal, as I call it, and we at IOTR are going to do everything we can to stand up against and fight back against efforts to end these traditions in America.
Abel: We talked about people giving [hunting] up. How about fostering new interest among non-hunting families to arrest the decline? How do you recruit new interest?
Hilgemann: So I think the couple of key things that we’re going to be pushing for is identifying groups of people who have an interest in hunting but don’t have the opportunity to do so. NC State University did a national poll of 1,000 college students, which I think was probably done in 2019* (*2021). And it showed that among that group of people they talked to, support for hunting was at 60 percent among young people, and the biggest push for that was that they wanted a reliable source of protein for themselves and hopefully their families one day, and I think it’s efforts like that, that give us hope. That there is support to continue these traditions among younger people, but they need an avenue to be able to come into the outdoors. IOTR will be working with groups to break down those barriers, giving grants to different programs across the country that are aimed at bringing more young people who have an interest in hunting into the sport by partnering them with mentors who can take them out, show them that experience, and continue those traditions beyond just the one hunt.
A lot of organizations that I’ve been a part of for many years have a youth hunt day or hunting exposure day, but that’s one opportunity, and then that person goes back to a household where that doesn’t happen. And they’re kind of locked out of the sport again, even after they’ve had a great experience hunting. And so I think lifetime mentorship is something that we’re going to be working on — to partner people with folks who want people to come and hunt with them, and train them up in a responsible way to take on these sports and continue the tradition.
Abel: So, on the political spectrum, because of the contemporary debate around guns especially, hunting is thought to be conservative or right-wing. Now I understand that your group is one of conservation — which is considered to be more of a left-wing enterprise. Are these two in tension?
Hilgemann: Hunting and the Second Amendment are intrinsically linked. You can’t have one without the other. Yes, there’s archery hunting and other pursuits that don’t require a firearm, but at the same time, yes, hunting and the Second Amendment go hand in hand. I think there’s a real opportunity on the food angle — what hunting provides.
Twenty-seven percent of new hunters are women. That’s a real opportunity to bring these ladies and show them how to go out harvest game, bring it back to their tables for their families, and provide a reliable renewable source of protein that they can’t go down to the grocery store and get. We can break down barriers and, hopefully, the political divide. Because, at the end of the day, the more people we bring into the field, the more opportunities we have to continue these traditions for the future.
Abel: We were talking about the cost of hunting. I think of guys lined up at a Wisconsin Fleet Farm in late November. A lot of the purchasing is unnecessary, strictly speaking, but it’s fun. What are the foundational things that one needs to hunt, and how can one reduce those costs while also acknowledging that a lot of hunting expenditures are just for the fun of the experience?
Hilgemann: I’m the worst example of this. I have to go out and get the newest bow, with the newest arrows, the top scents, and everything else. I spend thousands of dollars a year on my passion. And now I have three kids who are taking up the sport, too. What you see is an opportunity for organizations like ours, supported by very successful business people, to provide those opportunities for people who want to have exposure to hunting — bring them into a mentoring situation, provide them with a firearm, and allow them the opportunity to come out and experience something without having to shoulder the full economic cost of what the sport is. You talk to your average hunter, they’re spending somewhere between $5,000 to $7,000 a year* on their hunting gear and equipment, and that’s a national average (*~$1,900 per the International Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies). So I think there’s a way for you to get into the sport in a much more economical way by creating programs like this that allow people to invest to bring more people into the sport of hunting, and that’s something that I’m looking forward to pursuing with IOTR.