Written by Whoever Shows Up: The Quiet Hollowing of Montana's Public Comment
Photo: Grywnn, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Montana likes to think of its hunting tradition as a broad public inheritance — the North American Model, fair chase, every citizen a stakeholder in the wildlife trust. The paperwork tells a thinner story.
Attendance records from Fish, Wildlife & Parks regulation hearings across recent seasons show a familiar pattern: wolf season proposals drawing a few dozen attendees, trapping discussions drawing fewer, and the median commenter somewhere past retirement age. These are not fringe meetings. They are the constitutional assemblies of Montana's wildlife policy, and they are emptying.
The Faithful Few
It would be easy to blame apathy. But the structure itself selects for a certain kind of participant: someone retired, someone with a free evening, someone who has attended before and knows the drill. Working hunters — the younger cohort FWP says it desperately wants to retain — are calving, commuting, or coaching at the exact hour the hearing gavels in.
The result is that season structures, quota lines, and trapping rules are increasingly written by a self-selected class. That is not a conspiracy; it is a design flaw. And it should trouble everyone who claims to care about the hunting heritage, regardless of where they stand on wolves or baiting or hounds.
A Modest Proposal
Here is an idea that deserves a hearing in Helena: a mandatory lottery for comment seats at major season-setting hearings, with a modest stipend and a rotating draw, so that the comment record reflects Montana's hunting public rather than its hunting retirees. Pair it with a written-comment window that accepts submissions by phone — a nod to rural residents whose broadband is theoretical.
Critics will call it gimmickry. Perhaps. But the alternative is a regulatory record that grows less representative every year, and regulations that quietly harden around the preferences of whoever kept showing up.
Montana's wildlife belongs to everyone. The rules governing it should be written like it.
