Duck Census Challenges Core Beliefs Of Ducks Unlimited

Story by Ben Plowman 

| Published Oct 6, 2009

Hundreds of thousands of members of the prominent hunting group Ducks Unlimited have canceled their memberships today after preliminary 2010 US Duck Census data was released that revealed only a finite number of ducks are remaining. The embarrassing results have also led to the resignation of several members of the board of trustees, including former president Bruce Lewis.

“It is with a sad heart that today I must resign from the organization I love so dearly,” Bruce Lewis wrote in an open letter to be published in Ducks Unlimited magazine in late October. The letter continued, “I cannot, in good faith, continue to lead an organization that is based around such an obvious falsehood. If I had known when I first began that ducks were not an inexhaustible resource, I might have killed only those ducks I intended to eat or those that threatened my family, instead of every duck I saw.”

Others within Ducks Unlimited, however, deny the validity of the U.S. Census results and call into question President Obama’s motives in adding the waterfowl category to the coming census.

“This census, like everything else out of the Obama administration, is nothing but another liberal attempt to clamp down on Second Amendment rights by attacking some of its most prominent supporters,” said Ducks Unlimited interim president Don Young. “Most importantly, these are only preliminary numbers. We must allow all ducks to be counted before jumping to the conclusion that there are not infinity of them,” he added.

The hunting and conservation group was founded in 1936 on the then-common assumption that humans had no impact on animal populations, which was reflected in the group's original slogan, “Kill As Many Ducks As You Possibly Can.” The slogan has been revised several times throughout the group’s history but usually to appear more politically correct rather than out of legitimate fear of a limited duck population. At the end of World War II, the slogan made its final change from “Kill As Many Ducks Or Krauts As You Possibly Can” to “Conservation Today, Wetlands For Tomorrow.”

The hunting group has long been criticized by environmental organizations for its dismissive attitude toward sustainable hunting practices. These complaints had previously carried little weight because they were based on the assumption of duck finiteness rather than concrete evidence. Today’s census report is important in large part because it is the first piece of direct evidence supporting the theory of non-infinite ducks.

The group is currently debating how best to recover from the blow to its public image, with many members advocating changing the name of the group. At press time, the most likely candidates are “Ducks: Fun, Limited," “Ducks Unlimitless” and “Ducks Unlimited?”