Is hunting harmful to National Wildlife Refuges?
Besides the obvious harmful impacts to individual animals who are shot and killed for sport, hunting is harmful to the management of Refuges as well. In 1989, a General Accounting Office report to Congress stated that National Wildlife Refuges “are not the pristine wildlife sanctuaries implied by their name.” The GAO report, which was based on surveys completed by Refuge managers, reported that those managers almost uniformly believe that external pressure from local economic and recreation interests, combined with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s increasing reliance on “non-biological factors in making compatibility decisions,” had caused the expansion of a multitude of “harmful secondary uses”—including hunting—that “disturbed the wildlife habitat, disrupted breeding activities, or modified established animal behavior patterns.
