Identifying mid-twentieth-century historical trends in United States game law violations: any basis for conservation?

ABSTRACT

The mid-twentieth-century was an important period for game laws in the United States. Identifying trends in game law enforcement can help identify violations that occurred more and less over time (e.g. species that have had more or less violations at a particular time). There has been little research on species emphasis with regard to game laws, with respect to historical game law roots in mid-twentieth-century America. For this study, 10,062 violations were identified from randomly selected states including Kansas, North Carolina, Florida, and Oklahoma. New Jersey and Massachusetts were used from a prior nineteenth-century study and used twentieth-century data for this analysis. The results of this study revealed that fishing violations or hunting/ fishing without a license composed the majority of violations and there were some significant differences between species, number of fines, amounts of fines, violations that resulted in jail, and number of acquittals. Potential reasons for these results are discussed. Future studies could encapsulate more states with various ecosystems and biota (e.g. coastal states or Midwestern states) to better understand the majority and minority of species-specific enforcement trends in those states.

Keywords:

• Wildlife
• enforcement
• twentieth century
• history
• United States