Cohort driven social change: Understand the broad shift away from hunting and fishing

Modernizing forces are changing the socio-political context of conservation across North America. Concurrently, fishing has declined ubiquitously, with a resulting reduction in conservation revenue. Stemming this decline in angling is of keen interest to state wildlife agencies, yet little is known about the nature of recent participation declines or the extent to which they will continue into the future. In particular, very little attention has been paid to the potential for cohort effects (differences in participation by birth cohort that continue throughout life) to drive fishing participation. To elucidate the role of cohort effects, we conducted an age-period-cohort analysis on hunting and fishing license sales in many states across the U.S. We found evidence that age effect prevail during the college years, and again beginning about age 70. Most interestingly, we found that cohort effects clearly drive participation. These data definitively demonstrate hunting and fishing are not tied to specific life stages; rather, there is a cohort moving through different life stages that have experienced high participation rates throughout their lives. All reasonable models project participation in hunting and angling will not only continue but be exacerbated into the foreseeable future as these cohorts reach older ages and eventually attrite.