Hunters hope to boost the reputation of their sport in Maine with a new program that would certify “master hunters” through skills testing in such areas as wildlife biology, laws and ethics, and shooting proficiency.

“If you just try to influence the image without improving the hunter, that’s just window dressing,” said Debi Davidson of Wayne, who serves as president of the local Izaak Walton League, a national hunting, fishing and conservation group.

“We want the image of hunters to be changed through actions,” she said.

Davidson and fellow members of the league met with officials of the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife and Maine Warden Service late last week to pitch the idea.

“We got the green light,” Davidson said.

Maj. Tom Santaguida, who will take over leadership of the Maine Warden Service next month, said the only down side to creating a master hunter qualification right now is the limited resources the state can offer.

“From the commissioner’s office on down, we’re going to do what we can to support them,” he said.

George Smith of the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine, too, welcomes the idea of a hunter certification program, but said that his group, Maine’s biggest hunting and fishing lobby, would have little time for new initiatives until after the November bear referendum is through.

“Anything that’s possible to postpone, we’ve got postponed until after Nov. 2,” Smith said.

However, the Izaak Walton League plans to start moving forward with designing a program, with a goal of having the first master hunters certified in time for the fall 2005 deer season, Davidson said.

Davidson hopes that many of the state’s experienced hunting guides and other leaders will pursue certification, but even for them, it shouldn’t come easy, she said.

“We want to keep the bar raised high enough that not just anybody can be a master hunter,” Davidson said.

“It would be a small but, I think, influential group,” Smith said.

Washington state has had a similar program in place since 1992, and although 7,750 people have started the program to date, only 1,700 have actually been certified – less than 3 percent of the total Washington hunting population of about 275,000 people, said Mik Mikitik, hunter education administrator for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, and founder of their program.

“Although I would love to see every hunter go through this training, it’s not realistic,” he said. “By design, it’s not easy.”

Several years ago, Mikitik attended a seminar at the Institute for Global Ethics in Camden, which helped plant the seeds for an advanced hunter training program, he said. Washington was struggling with the loss of access to traditional hunting lands as millions of new people moved into the state and slapped up “No Trespassing” signs around their perimeters.

Perhaps creating a means for hunters to prove their responsibility could stop the trend, he thought. Now, 12 years later, several landowners have allowed master hunters to use their posted land. Each master hunter leaves a positive impression with the landowner, slowly improving relations, and opening up the door to their peers, Mikitik said.

“When it spreads over time, these individual impressions have a collective influence,” he said.

And it’s not all image, Mikitik said. Though violation statistics haven’t changed, he believes hunter ethics are improving.

“People have told me that they’ve changed the way they hunt,” Mikitik said.

Here in Maine, most hunters care about their sport enough to become quite knowledgeable about the state’s fish and game laws – even those few who choose to break the laws, Santaguida said.

But it’s rarer for hunters to spend time considering the ethics of their sport, he said.

“You have a person who’s working six days a week … they know they have an obligation to the law, but that’s where it ends. That’s the thought process,” Santaguida said.

Many hunters don’t think enough about ethics ahead of time – planning before they get into a difficult situation what they personally believe would constitute ethical behavior, Davidson said.

“It’s not a definable thing, and I don’t ever expect it to be, but talking about it is really important,” she said.

Here in Maine, Davidson hopes master hunters can help stem the rapid closing of land all over the state.

Perhaps certified hunters can also help with education or to meet the state’s nuisance wildlife needs, serving some of the same roles as bow hunters do, in managing out-of-control populations – particularly given the recent loss of animal damage control funds from the DIF&W budget.

Davidson doesn’t expect master hunters to get special privileges, though, she said.

“In no way do we want it to be an elite program,” she said. “This is a way for hunters to give back to their sport.”

For more information, contact the league at 897-6295 or iwlamaine@iwlamaine.org