THEODORE “TEDDY” ROOSEVELT, soldier, president and outdoorsman, once summed up his vision for America as a “doctrine of the strenuous life”. Hunting lay at the heart of that doctrine: the virile business of learning to shoot straight, to track beasts through brutal heat or cold and to master “buck fever”–a nervous excitement felt in the face of prey that must be suppressed by effort of will. Years before he declined to blast a bear tethered to a tree by his hosts on a 1902 hunt, spawning admiring newspaper cartoons and the worldwide teddy-bear industry, Roosevelt crafted and promoted a “credo of fair chase”.
In addition to encouraging sportsmanship, his vision of the American hunt was democratic. Though he crossed oceans to shoot lions and scaled mountains to hunt bears, Roosevelt deplored Europe’s elitism, with its royal forests and aristocratic estates wherein lisping sons of privilege chased their father’s deer for sport. Closer to home Roosevelt and his allies were dismayed by the near-extinction of the buffalo and other species, driven by such forces as gun technology and competition for land.