Topic > History of Wildlife Conservation in the United States and Canada

The United States and Canada are known as one of the areas leading wildlife conservation action in the world. In Canada there is the Canadian Wildlife Service (CWA). There are also some NGOs such as Wildlife Conservation Society Canada, Canadian Wildlife Federation, Nature Canada and WWF Canada that are nationally known and play a significant role with government conservation agencies. There are also many governing laws and associations in the United States. Both lead international wildlife conservation. How wildlife conservation has changed over time from European settlement to the present in the United States and Canada is an important historical question of inquiry. Understanding their history of wildlife conservation will provide good examples for other countries or areas where they are currently working to develop their system and for the future. We say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essayThe United States and Canada have gone through similar situations and resolved in similar ways. The government first sought to protect wildlife, and non-governmental organizations were founded to advocate for their protection. Eventually, they began to lead global wildlife conservation by founding international organizations such as the WWF. Before wildlife conservation began in the United States, Native Americans lived with wild animals. Most Native Americans such as the Sioux, Arapaho, Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Cree, Kiowa, Mandan, Pawnee, and Shawnee primarily hunted small mammals with a small amount of large animals. They also collected nuts, berries and fruits, but most of them were crops. It is believed that around 3-5 million Native Americans lived in the area that was home to what is now the United States at that time. After the European arrivals in the United States, there were many problems such as fur farmers and trapping. The exploitation of fur farmers in the Northeast and Canada was primarily by the Hudson's Bay Company of French England. In the Pacific Northwest, the Russian-American Fur Company captured seals and sea otters, and by 1768 the Steller's sea cow became extinct. In 1748 alone, South Carolina shipped approximately 160,000 deer pelts to England. When wildlife populations declined, settlers initially blamed predators. Also in 1833, the American Fur Company shipped approximately 43,000 buffalo hides and they were mostly traded with Native Americans. Buffalo meat was also used for camps and for crews building railroads in the West. Because of this, there was a significant decline in buffalo numbers by the mid-1840s. The situation for wildlife also changed in Canada after European settlement. Wapiti, great auk and bison were the main species that were negatively impacted by Europeans. Wapiti is the second largest deer. Before 1492, wapiti are relatively rare in the fossil record, but thereafter grew rapidly as a result of the depletion of North American human populations due to Eurasian diseases and genocide. They reached their maximum geographic range before 1800. By 1835, however, wapiti had disappeared from their eastern range (Ontario and Quebec) due to hunting. They became extinct in Alberta before 1913, but were reintroduced from Yellowstone National Park in 1917. The other species, the great auk, is the largest and only extinct flightless auk. The great auk wasdestroyed by humans. Because they are flightless and colonial when breeding, they were heavily hunted by early explorers for food and bait by fishermen and, in the late 1700s, by commercial hunters for feathers. The last known breeding pair was captured at Eldey Rock, off southwestern Iceland, in 1844. Ultimately, the depopulation of bison was a direct result of the European invasion of North America. Population decline in Canada began with the need for meat for the fur traders of the Hudson's Bay Company and the North West Company. The North American slaughter was also the reason for several significant developments. First, the development of a new hide tanning process in Britain and Germany during the Second Industrial Revolution (1870-1914) resulted in an insatiable need for cowhides for the skin. The ability of hunters to kill large numbers of bison was facilitated by the development of new rifles. Furthermore, bison were a primary source of food for indigenous people, as a means of forcing them to leave their ancestral lands and take refuge in reservations. Before their depopulation, bison were the most abundant large mammals on the continent: there were approximately 30 million plains bison. When the slaughter ended in the mid-1880s, there weren't enough wild plains bison left in North America for a city block. Nearly all plains bison alive today are descendants of the last 116 wild bison. Plains bison were extirpated from Canada in 1888. The first step toward wildlife conservation in the United States came in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, where the first closed deer hunting season was enacted in 1646 when the deer did not resumed. Sportsmen's clubs were also formed to promote camaraderie and ethical hunting practices. The first sportsmen's club in the United States was Carroll's Island Club in 1832, for waterfowl hunting. Eventually, hundreds of local sportsmen's clubs were formed across the country to protect wildlife, and similar gaming laws were also passed. Additionally, some states banned the use of dogs for hunting and night hunting with lights, while others banned the use of traps, snares, and snares, which were common at the time. During the 1870s and thereafter, many other hunting and conservation organizations were formed, such as the League of American Sportsmen, the American Ornithologists Union, the Camp Fire Club, the New York Zoological Society, the Audubon Society, and the American Bison Society. These groups have fought for tougher laws to stop meat market hunting and the millinery trade and to ban unethical sport hunting. The Constitution Act of 1867 marked the beginning of wildlife conservation in Canada. This is a move made to develop wildlife conservation and protection areas. It envisaged the union of three colonies, the province of Canada (Ontario and Quebec), Nova Scotia and New Brunswick into a federal state with a parliamentary system modeled on that of Great Britain. This law shows the distribution of powers between the central parliament and the provincial legislatures. Wildlife conservation achieved success around 1900 in both the United States and Canada. In United States history, President Theodore Roosevelt was one of the most active presidents for wildlife conservation. Roosevelt formed the Department of Agriculture's Division of Economic Ornithology and Mammalogy, which became the Bureau of Biological Survey, and worked on surveying its biota. He was also given powers with the passage of the Lacey Act. In 1900, Congress passed the Lacy.