Have you ever thought about how much food is produced from recreational hunting in this province?

Wildlife biologist Shane Mahoney did and that’s why he started Conservation Visions, a company compiling the numbers, not just for here, but right across North America… and they are staggering.

He says around 40-44 million people are harvesting food through fishing and hunting in North America each year, which puts estimates of people sharing in that food to be around 200-250 million people.

Mahoney says one of the greatest ways to convince people to care about wild creatures is to put a food value on them.

This week Mahoney invited dozens of hunters, outfitters and government officials from across Canada and the United States to this province for the first ever Wild Harvest Initiative Partnership.

Until now, there has never been a study quantifying the amount of fish and game recreationally harvested in North America each year.