Feels super weird to play devils advocate for poachers, but here we go. I've had a few conversations on the topic lately, and I'm starting to think people don't actually know what a poacher is and equate them to trophy hunters. While trophy hunters can also be poachers, a lot of trophy hunting has been and still is surprisingly legal.
The idea of poaching is largely tied to property rights, in origin and to this day. Historically poachers were people who hunted on the property of nobility without permission, largely out of the necessity. Its not too much different today. I had legal access to the property I used to hunt because my dad and I kept poachers off. We did chase a lot of people away, because there are realistic limits to how many people can hunt the same area, but we turned a blind eye a lot. There was a very thin line between us and them. We were just as dependent on putting meat in the freezer, the only difference was we knew a land owner well enough to get conditional permission. I have also been a poacher, even when I had legal access to a place to hunt. More than once at the tail end of a season, when it was now or never, I have shot through a hedgerow onto a piece of property I didn't have access to. That is enough to make me a poacher. A lot of people have been a poacher while fishing and not even realized it. (not defending that, its just irresponsible to not know when/where you can take game) Most poachers aren't what most people mean when they say poacher.
Fictional characters like Clayton (Tarzan, 1999) and Van Pelt (Jumanji, 1995) often get thrown at me as examples of the evils of poaching. Neither of them were poachers though. They were famed big game hunters in a colonial environment (for Van Pelt, before he got reverse isekaid). While morally reprehensible their hunting was probably mostly legal. A lot of the trophy hunting people hold up as examples of poaching or for why we need to eradicate hunting all together (a dumb ass take) is totally legal. That's not to say no trophy hunters are also poachers. There was more than one group we aggressively kept off the property for doing shit like taking heads/racks/beards/tails/etc and leaving the rest. At the same time though there were people we would have loved to say fuck off too but couldn't because they knew the owners as well as we did, or were related.
There's a whole nother depth to bushmeat in other colonized areas outside the US that I'm not even close to qualified to get into. That compromises a ton of the poaching in those regions. In addition a lot of unnecessary wild animal death, all over the globe, is tied to agriculture and also often doesn't count as poaching even when you think it would.
I'm absolutely not saying anyone should be able to go out and blast whatever critter they want, whenever they want, but I am saying there is so much more to this convo than so many people realize. Especially if they don't have any history with subsistence hunting or around people that rely on it.
