The future of wildlife is at stake.

Until we start harvesting game populations responsibly, we will never be able to manage wildlife in a sustainable manner.

This article takes an indepth look at the effects of over and under shooting game populations.

And, most importantly, what we should be doing instead.

As the brains, looks and charm behind the popular Instagram page @hamsofficial (we’re literally none of those things) we often get asked about our thoughts on how to run a successful hunting and shooting focused account without attracting unduly unpleasant attention and representing our way of life in a good light.

So here I’ve made a list of suggestions to help get your page off to a good start.

This article looks at adaptive management in wildlife conservation and provides a guide for the most optimum system of game management.

Hunting has been carried out for centuries and continues to play a vital part in the management of wildlife. Passed on through generations upon generations of families, it is still an important tradition.

However, if we want to continue, we need to proactively participate in responsible and accountable management based on numbers and facts. Because whether we like it or not, game management is about the numbers, year-by-year, season-by-season.

So, what numbers should we be collecting?

And what can we do with them?

In this article here at HAMS we are going to take a look at what monitoring and data collection means for wildlife management and what we can do with these numbers.

And lastly, why it’s so darn important.

Hunting has always been a way of life, it has dominated the course of human evolution for millions of years and is still a way of life for many millions of people closely connected to nature and the animal world.

It is also common knowledge that our ancestors were hunter-gatherers who used tools to obtain food, however, what is less commonly known is that the laws to manage animal populations were only established much, much later when modern humans noticed that certain species had started to decline, and in some cases, disappear.

So, in light of this knowledge, what would be the consequences if we stopped hunting?

What would happen to the wildlife populations and the land they live on if, as many that are opposed to hunting, we stopped intervening?

We often talk about how to manage wildlife populations, and we’ve even discussed these topics in some length here on HAMS Blog. However, we quite often fail to fully discuss one of the most important topics: what are the requirements for having a specific type of game on our land, what are the features of the habitat they require and what should we do to get the most out of our land?

So, in this article, we are going to take a look at what habitat actually is and how important good habitat management is when managing our game populations.

Now more than ever, we need to focus on protecting our planet and the conservation of it. With one of the main problems being climate change, with every year that passes we are losing more and more species to extinction. Understandably, we are becoming more concerned about the future of both ours and the next generation’s lives.

Some blame politics for this; some blame our way of living, some say that hunting contributes to it, and some of us, we take action…

But how can we take action? What can we do to play our part?

Well, as part of our ongoing series today we are going to look at wildlife management and ask what exactly is wildlife management, what role does is play in conservation, and how can hunting help in the fight against biodiversity loss, and... finally, is it really that important?

A look at how the British shooting and hunting community has reacted to the recent licensing issues. 

There are many aspects of successful game management, some of them are straightforward and obvious, whilst others are less clear and often induce heated but professional debate.

Falling into the latter is the necessity and various methods of predator control.

Let's take a closer look at this contradictory topic.

Game meat is good. Not only does it taste awesome but it’s also good for your health. Let’s take a look why!

Firstly, game lives freely in Nature. It eats what it finds and what its instincts dictate: and that’s a diverse diet containing various kinds of grasses, herbs, buds, seeds, acorns, bark, leaves as well as many other things. That sign on the food you buy at the grocery store, Free Range. Well, all game meat is free range. No label required. It has lots of exercise, lives according to its instincts and its true nature, which also ticks the “happy animal” box.