Keeping land open

Outdoorsmen, activists and legislators rightly express curiosity about Hillside Game Ranch, an Aurora-based game ranch where hunters can pay a fee to shoot exotic game. But they would be mistaken to confine their interest to an ethical debate over whether killing animals inside a fenced area is appropriate, because the issue transcends that circumstance, going straight to the tradition of open land — crucial to many of Maine’s outdoors pursuits.

Hillside, the only game ranch in Maine, offers up to 700 hunters a year the chance to kill exotic game in two fenced-in areas, each roughly 250 acres. Its presence has the Legislature debating whether such hunting should be legal in Maine, and has stirred significant passions over sport hunting in general.

Certainly, that question is a legitimate target for policymakers, although a survey of public sentiment might show that ranch hunting is to hunting as picking out your lobster from a restuarant tank is to fishing. More to the point, lawmakers will want to consider what happens to a cherished tradition here when landowners begin charging to hunt on their land.

Game ranches of Hillside’s sort are common in other states, such as Texas. In fact, elsewhere in the United States, it’s commonplace for people to pay to hunt for native species on private land, either directly to a landowner, or indirectly, by joining a hunting club that leases hunting rights on private land.

Now, 500 acres of ranch is minuscule, relatively speaking, and no lawmaker is going to tell landowners that they can’t carry out a legal activity on their property. Maine is unique in that several large timber companies privately own more than 11 million of its 17 million acres of woodlands. Those companies have very liberal land-use policies; basically, anyone can access that land without asking for permission. Such a thing happens virtually nowhere else on private land, and certainly not to the scale it happens here.

But as new owners take over those timberlands, the pressures to start restricting access — and even to start charging those who want to use the land — are mounting. Maine could see a tradition it values eroded and with it the very nature of how it enjoys the vast expanses of undeveloped land.

Maine has made significant progress in recent years in terms of landowner relations, and has an extensive reward program for those who keep their property open for recreation of all sorts. Building on these incentives to keep what it deems important is one practical way of addressing this problem.