B&C President's 2025 Update

Tony Caligiuri addressing the membership at the 2024 Annual Meeting.

First, let me say how humbled I am to be trusted with your vote of confidence to lead the Boone and Crockett Club into the near future. Like most of our past presidents, I never directly sought out this position. My journey to Club president has been a bit serendipitous. It began with several years of Club service on various committees, followed by a term on the board, and culminated in four different vice president and executive vice president roles over the last eight years.

I was fortunate to serve behind some of the best presidents in the Club’s history. I have learned much through watching them work and trying to listen more than I spoke. Their leadership and counsel have been priceless, and I find comfort in knowing that they will be there to rely on whenever the need arises. We also have two tremendous and familiar faces in new executive vice president positions, Mary Webster and Steve Leath. I have worked with both for several years, and they are dynamic individuals who get things accomplished.

We are blessed with a combined membership of regular and professional members that no other conservation or hunter advocacy group can equal. Our regular members provide strategic thinking, financial support, industry connections, political influence, and guidance that keep us moving forward. The professional members are the brain trust of Boone and Crockett, representatives of the brightest and most highly respected names in science, wildlife health and management, conservation policy, and education across North America. Finally, complementing the efforts of our members is a tremendously passionate and talented staff. Working together is what we do best, and to accomplish our new upcoming strategic plan we will need the joint efforts of everyone to bring that plan to fruition.

Many of you know that we have been developing a new strategic plan over the past year that we hope to bring to the membership sometime this spring. From what I have seen so far, the plan mirrors many of my personal thoughts on the direction the Club needs to concentrate, making my job much easier. With that in mind, I have outlined a few of the Club programs below that have special interest to me.

Records

This past month, I had the opportunity to spend three days working the Boone and Crockett booth at the annual Wild Sheep Convention in Reno Nevada. Being a long-time sheep hunter and a past director of WSF, I have attended this show regularly for more than 30 years, but this was the first time I had the opportunity to see it from the other side of the aisle. Mike Optiz and Charles Hartford worked tirelessly to ensure the booth was set up and ready to go. Our team of volunteer OMs provided a knowledgeable cadre of folks to engage attendees. We measured a few sheep, signed up a ton of new associates, and talked to hundreds of hunters throughout the show. I have always maintained—and it was driven home again at the show—that the records book is one of our most valuable assets. As much as we are ingrained in the areas of wildlife health, policy, education, and conservation, when potential new members approach us at the shows, they almost always  start off their conversations with the records book, as such, records has and will always be the “hook” that we use to initially get potential associate members interested in the Club. But  what “hook” do we have to generate interest and support from the non-hunting public, most of whom do not have a strong opinion about hunting one way or another. Our challenge is how do we better reach the non hunting general public so that we might help them understand what the Club does in the areas of policy, education, conservation, and wildlife health.

Left to right: Emilio Rangel Espino-Barros, Mike Opitz, Official Measurer Bucky Ihlenfeldt, Tony Caligiuri, and Katie Opitz enjoying the events at the Wild Sheep Convention.

I have been a student of the record book for more than 50 years, often using it as a reference in my early career as an outdoor writer. My hope is that our new database system will allow us to become the undisputed leader in providing relevant and pertinent information not only to the science and outdoor media communities but to the general public as well. We have more than 100 years of data that combines the principles of the North American Model of Conservation and the awe-inspiring history in pictures of hundreds of record-class game animals. Hopefully, we will soon have the majority of this data at our fingertips via our new content management system; we need to use it, and we need to be proud of it.

Ethics

Records and ethics go hand in hand, not just regarding the integrity of our official measurers but also in the principles of Fair Chase, which define the spirit of everything Boone and Crockett. As technology in the hunting world advances, the Club will face new challenges on what is ethical and what constitutes Fair Chase. We have the opportunity to be the thought leader in helping states address technology issues and to help standardize them wherever possible so that our ethics and Fair Chase guidelines are the same from state to state and province to province. We hope to host a state summit of state wildlife departments to lay out our thoughts and, more importantly, encourage communication between them. For example, Dall’s sheep can only legally be hunted in Alaska, the Yukon, and Northwest Territories. What might be considered legal—and just as important, Fair Chase—in one province or state is different in the next.

Read More about Ethics and Fair Chase

Policy

Our policy team and related committees have done an amazing job under the leadership of James Cummins, Paul Phillips, and Simon Roosevelt. Simply put, our policy team at Boone at Crockett is the best in the conservation arena, and I plan to stay out of their way and let them do what they do best. The new strategic plan continues to support their efforts in working on such critical issues as conservation community leadership, RAWA, big game migration corridors, wildlife health, habitat and forest management, public access, and endangered species and delisting.

Nearly 20 Boone and Crockett members gathered in Washington, D.C. in mid-September for several meetings and the annual Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation dinner.

University Programs

University Programs continues to thrive, with Steve Leath, Johnny Evans, and many others working to bring two new programs at Clemson and the University of Wyoming online this year. We are also working to formalize Demmer Scholars as an official Club program. We currently have ongoing graduate and undergrad research projects on the TRM Ranch, most recently documenting the interaction of wildlife and livestock relative to grazing practices.

Other ranch education programs include K-12 in-person and virtual youth education experiences based out of the educational center, the Montana High Adventure Base program with Scouting America, and demonstration projects in conservation-based irrigation practices and forestry habitat improvement.

Adding packrafting has catapulted MOHAB into the highest category of BSA high adventure programs.

Advocacy

I have always been an advocate of involving the Club more at the state level through our continued strong partnership with the Congressional Sportsman’s Foundation. As a past chair of CSF, I realize firsthand how important it is to stop bad legislation and promote good legislation at the state level, especially when we face unprecedented ballot initiatives. These ballot box biology initiatives are based on emotion, not science. The Club helped our partners defeat Colorado’s Proposition 127, which sought to ban all cat hunting in the Centennial State. There will be more coming; we know of at least one other state where a cat-hunting ban may make it back as a ballot initiative during the next election cycle. This alone is another good reason to support BAC PAC and all of the hard work that Paul Phillips and other Club members are doing there.

Read More about Prop 127

We can’t forget that North America includes Mexico and Canada, which face unprecedented challenges with anti-hunting legislation. We need to make sure that members and organizations in those two countries can benefit from the knowledge that we have gained in policy, education, and conservation over the last century and a quarter in the United States. We make those resources available to them as we move forward.

I also look forward to working closer with Terrell McCombs and the foundation board. Terrell has agreed to remain the Foundation president for the next two years. Under Terrell’s leadership, our endowment has grown to a level we have never experienced. The Club and the Foundation must work together to ensure we have adequate funds to accomplish what we need to do and ensure the Club’s financial future is solid, strong, and true.

Within our Club, one can always find the reassurance of a friend who listens without judgment and men and women who keep their word and get things accomplished. These qualities make us more than a Club. As cliché as it might sound, we are indeed family. I look forward to attending more “family reunions” and hope to see you all in the very near future.