The Hunter - Who is He? (And where is the rest of his body?)

As a continuation of my literature review on hunter retention, I came across a 1961 paper ("The Hunter - Who is He?") covering an early survey of hunting license purchasers in Ohio that contained many oddities from a 2006 perspective.

“The result was a printed booklet… containing 200 questions on 23 pages… In timed tests, it took most people between 20 and 30 minutes to complete the questionnaire.”

There is no chance whatsoever of getting any reasonable response rate at this point on a 23 page, 200 question survey of hunters. (You would also very rarely see a modern methods section that contains as much detail as this one did. I suppose at the time, the detailed information was useful to people without very much research experience.)

“Coding for machine punching takes about 5 minutes for each booklet, while the key-punch operators can completely punch the data on two cards in about 2 minutes. The information was condensed on the cards by using combinations of multiple and addend coding.”

A two-minute data entry per survey seems pretty fast to me, though obviously not as fast as using optical scanning technology. I don’t even know what multiple and addend coding means.

“A cost accounting of the project is not complete since we are still in the process of receiving returns and tabulating data. A rough estimate based on an expected return of 4,000 questionnaires amounts to about $1.00 for each questionnaire. This estimate includes processing the data on punch cards, but does not consider any cost for machine analyses.”

Wow, a time when “machine analyses” had a variable cost?

“The first portion of our questionnaire was devised to identify the individual hunting license buyer and to determine whether he has belonged to what the psychologists call an ulstrith group (Toops, 1948).”

What the hell is an “ulstrith group”? From context, it could refer to just about anything. “Ulstrith” brings up a single hit on google, for an Edward Toops journal article written in 1959 on personnel psychology. (Needless to say, the UT electronic databases do not go back as far as 1959, so the content will remain a mystery.) Toops and the author of this 1961 wildlife paper were both from Ohio State. Kind of makes you wonder, were they friends? Did this guy include a reference to Toops’ work as a favor to a squash buddy whose new typology just wasn’t catching on? There isn’t any evidence that this terminology was even briefly popular. Perhaps it would have been more appropriate to write “what one psychologist calls an ulstrith group.”

“Only one of about every 100 license holders reporting was a huntress.”

Huntress? That’s a funny and very outdated term. (Yes, I can figure out what it means by applying straightforward linguistic principles, thank you.) A quick google search reveals Huntress to refer commonly to a comic book hero, a British consultancy, an airplane, and a TV show. It seems related in my mind to the goddess of the hunt, Artemis, as well; maybe I have heard it in that context before. Only 1% of their hunters are goddesses, the rest are mere mortals. Oh well.

“Six percent of the hunters admitted that they sometimes discard the game after reducing it to possession.”

I was not familiar with the term “reduce to possession” but it appears to be a common legal term when dealing with public resources, including fish and game, but also natural resources such as coal. Apparently, reducing to possession refers to acquiring a right in property that you did not previously have; it removes the specific animal from the wildlife resource that is held in common ownership by the people.

“No one was interested in shooting a walrus.”

There’s a shocker. Really, though, I would have expected at least one person to have answered yes even to something this ridiculous. And what if their survey had revealed a huge unmet demand for walrus hunting? Yes, the Ohio fish & game department is going to get right on THAT. This is one of those absurd, unactionable survey questions that I love.

But best of all are the amazing figures that accompany the section we often call the “hunter profile.” I have never seen this taken quite so literally.

First, check out the blind-folded huntersaurus depicted on the top left. Oh yes, it is totally aiding my intuitive understanding of the data to look at a drawing of a decapitated head with differently shaded strata. Then we have the hunters with various degrees of leg amputation; and here I would have thought that this kind of disability would interfere with one’s hunting abilities. Glad to have been straightened out on that! Somewhere out there, Edward Tufte is sitting in a restaurant right now, feeling mildly irked without knowing why.