Alberta has joined a global conservation group. Here are the important upsides for hunters

Have you ever heard of the International Council for Game and Wildlife Conservation (CIC)? I hadn’t, at least not until this past January following a big announcement at the Safari Club International Convention in Nashville. That’s when I learned Alberta had become the first-ever jurisdiction in all of North America to join the CIC. As an Albertan and a hunter, I naturally wanted to learn more about the organization and the benefits of becoming a member, so I met with Matt Besko, the province’s representative on the council.

“Our membership in the CIC offers us a direct window to both conservation leaders and hunters around the world,” says Besko, the executive director of Alberta’s Hunting and Fishing Branch. And that’s no small thing. As I learned, the CIC has been a recognized global authority on wildlife and habitat conservation since 1930. Its mission? “To promote and support the conservation of wildlife and related landscapes, local communities, and traditions through sustainable use, including hunting.”

INTERNATIONAL REACH

Headquartered in Vienna, Austria, the CIC comprises more than 1,900 individuals, NGOs and governments, with 86 different countries in total represented. Over the years, the UN-recognized council has been an influential contributor to many important global conservation initiatives, such as the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the world’s largest conservation umbrella organization.

Responsible for guiding ongoing activities, the CIC’s 41-member executive committee includes two Canadians of note. Shane Mahoney, the renowned scientist and conservationist, is president of the group’s Policy and Law Division, while the Fur Institute of Canada’s executive director, Doug Chiasson, is deputy president of the Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities Working Group.

The scope of the CIC’s diverse international efforts is vast, with four key areas of focus: science, policy, culture and leadership. Current projects range from investigating the decline of snipe across Europe, to providing training in handling zoonotic disease outbreaks in Mongolia.

Some Canadians may already be familiar with another CIC-led program, the Wild Harvest Initiative. Headed up by Shane Mahoney, it represents the first science-based effort to quantify the full impacts of hunting on food security, biodiversity, economic stability, human and animal health, and the preservation of cultures.

INFORMATION SHARING

For Alberta, and by extension the rest of Canada, the benefits of joining the CIC are many, says Matt Besko. “The future of hunting in Alberta and elsewhere depends on us managing our wildlife wisely and responsibly,” he says. “Our membership in the CIC allows us direct access to key data from around the world. It’s now much easier for us to learn from those who’ve gone through many of the challenges we face.”

Along with now being able to learn from the experiences of other jurisdictions, Besko says, Alberta will also have access to the CIC’s treasure trove of materials and data. “An important advantage of our membership is that we’ll also have greater access to information and programs that offer funding, as well as facilitate new relationships with leading researchers worldwide.”

At the same time, Besko says, the province can contribute its own information, including cultural and economic data, to the collective pool. The way he sees it, involvement with the CIC gives Alberta another level of relevance as a credible international leader in wildlife conservation and sustainability. “That, in turn, should lead to increased business for Alberta, whether traditional tourism, science-based interests or visiting hunters,” Besko says.

As we all know, the hunting community is continually subject to scrutiny from the anti-hunting minority and, perhaps more importantly, from those who don’t hunt, but willingly give us the social licence to do so—provided we conduct ourselves legally, ethically, sustainably and with science as a backdrop.

Hunters in other parts of the world, notably across much of Europe and in many regions of Africa, have been dealing with such pressures much longer than we have. As a result, they’ve learned more than a few lessons on how to effectively get the right messages across to the people they want to reach. They’ve also learned, often the hard way, what doesn’t work.

From my perspective, joining the CIC will not only help Alberta—and Canada as a whole—avoid pitfalls, it will also eliminate the risk of needlessly duplicating efforts. Not only is there strength and safety in numbers, there’s also wisdom.

Learn more about the CIC at www.cic-wildlife.org.