Tradition: Some Beg to Differ
January 4th, 2010 | 
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This bumper sticker neatly expresses some conventional wisdom of the conservation elite: Hunting and fishing aren’t just pastimes, they are “traditions.” Unfortunately, that seems to be a minority view, even among those who hunt and fish.
In the Anglers’ and Boaters’ Attitudes Toward Various Messages that Communicate the Benefits of Fishing and Boating: Results of a Series of Nationwide Focus Groups study, conducted by Responsive Management a number of years back, the researchers found that for many anglers, the word “tradition” was too strong. One of the focus group participants was quoted this way:
…it is not a tradition. To me a tradition is something that continues on, it is something that the past family members have done and you have done and future generations will do. That is not always the case. My parents were never real big on boating or fishing and things like that, but I am… and my daughter is not real big on fishing and boating like we are. It just depends on the individual and what they like.
Now – some of the anglers interviewed did buy the notion of these family activities amounted to family traditions, but as messages go, “tradition” is not a slam dunk. For a healthy number of people, it just comes across an overstatement.
In the Water Words That Work Message Method, “tradition” falls somewhere in the grey zone between the words that work and the words that don’t.
With all things recreation, the word to emphasize is family. That is the word that elevates the sentiments expressed in the sticker below into something important.
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I believe I understand your fine parsing of the present meaning and use of the term “tradition” by conservationists but take a bit different view on a couple of points.
The conclusion of the poll is very misleading I believe in that how hunting & fishing terminology is viewed cannot be defined nationally. The practices are local in pursuit and understanding. The split in how folks feel about the term has much more to do with locale and history, lifestyle and region. In the south, where I work and fish, the practices of hunting and fishing are intensley regarded as “traditional” despite the erosion of passage within the family. Whether you continue the family tradition or take it up on your own you are still participating in what can be considered “a traditional practice” in the larger national, historical, even evolutionary sense; as mankind has depended on this aproach to nature and provision for thousands of years.
The real rub or growing rift and challange to conservationists/preservationists is the lack of understanding between an expanding urban centric environmentalisim and shrinking and a paranoid hunting and fishing community who fear their way of enjoying nature is under siege. We modern defenders of ecosystems have much to be grateful to the hunting/fishing “tradition”, for it is these folks that birthed, funded and sustained our present movement. Admittedly their are deep contradictions, disagreements and hypocrisy within the hook and bullet crowd, but I believe we need to engage and listen for a better understanding of this important group of “traditional” nature lovers.
This ought to get things stirred up! For anyone interested in a deeper understanding of the hunting psyche, ethics and moral implications and challanges of traditional approaches to nature I would reccommend the excellent compilation of writings by David Petersen in ” A Hunting Heart”.
I understand we need to be careful how we use certian key words in communicating with our various audiences, but I do not agree we need to allow popular and shifting use to lead us to drop important terms like “traditional” if we believe they are an important component guiding which direction we want the future of conservation to go. By allowing the loss of fully charged and historicly important language do we not lessen our connection to the past and abandon it’s importance in the present and future? Thanks, Wayne
Wayne,
I think you make some excellent points about the regionality of the issue. I completely agree with you about the sense of tradition being much stronger in the south. Favorite hunting grounds are often used throughout the history of a family, and often hunting is done as part of a family traditions. “We always go hunting on New Years day at xyz.” And they do.
Our data on the Mississippi River also supports the difference in attitude toward the River from Northern states to Southern states. In the North the River is about vacation places, swimming and boating. In the south the fishing and hunting is a much stronger factor. Fishing is strong in the North as well, but not in the same way as it is perceived in the southern Mississippi River states.
I wonder if the research that Eric refers to has been analyzed by state or region?
Jennifer – Biodiversity Project
Good points. I’m not a hunter or an angler, but I can understand the historic role both activities have played in conservation, and I support them as ‘traditional’ activities. On the other hand, I found the ‘Department of having a good time’ decal rather offensive. To me, the use of tradition speaks to a certain ethic and an attempt to either maintain or pass on certain values.
In contrast, family time is not the first thing that comes to mind with ‘having a good time’ in a hunting/fishing context. It does make me think of the yahoos who use hunting/fishing as an excuse to go drinking in the woods. To my mind, it also plays to the stereotype of hunters as people who like killing stuff for fun, whereas ‘tradition’ encompasses more than that.
Of course, I have no statistical data to back up this impression.
On a related note, keep an eye on the Biathlon in the Olympics this year. One of the Canadians is a Native woman who learned to ski and shoot while working her family’s trapline with her dad. A trapper’s association raised money to sponsor her. It should be interesting to see how much protest she attracts.
The problem for me with the word “Tradition” is that it isn’t a word with strong positive connotations, at least not all the time. Although it may conjure up images of families spending time together, traditions have been good and bad. The tradition of hunting is viewed as positive by some and barbaric by others. Owning slaves was a family tradition at one time. So the use of “tradition” in advertising that is supposed to automatically conjure good positive feelings just doesn’t work, at least not for me and I’m sure many of my peers.
The “having a good time” decal doesn’t say a darn thing about family to me, as there’s a lone person sitting in the boat, probably getting some “away time” from his family while he takes the lives of other living creatures’ family members. <— probably not the kind of sentiment the creator or bearer of the decal were going for for. This topic is controversial, adding the word "tradition" does not make it less so and only serves to further diminish the positive that is associated with "tradition" which makes it less effective for such use. If the hunting and fishing crowd want to change their image for the positive they might want to go for the "environmental stewards" image, which could be cultivated with a good pr campaign. However the hunting crowd will have to consciously live up to that image for it to hold, and that is the real challenge within their own ranks.