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Show Hunlcrs and Fishermen Aid Efforts for Conservation seven times as ni:uiy antelope. an-telope. Turkeys, numbered at less than 100,000 as recently re-cently as 19Tj2, now total well over 1 million. And the colorful and popular pop-ular ring-necked pheasant, of which there are millions today, did not even exist in the United States 100 years ago. He's an immigrant first introduced by sportsmen in 1882. T he ranks of the conservation-interested have swelled by the m i 1 1 io ns in recent years. But the fact remains that a central core of hunters and fishermen have had more influence on this movement than any other group. That is why Congress moved unanimously un-animously to set September 22 as National Hunting and Fishing Day to recognize the sportsmen's contributions to conservation. That date will also be observed ob-served locally as Utah State Hunting and Fishing Day. In the past 50 years, hunters hunt-ers alone have contributed over $2.3 billion for conservation con-servation and wildlife management. man-agement. Through a self-imposed tax on sporting arms and ammunition, hunters and shooters have p r o v i de d nearly half a billion for wildlife wild-life management in the last 30 years and continue to add over $40 million annually. Fishermen have provided about $150 million for fisheries fish-eries research and acquisition acquis-ition of fisheries waters through a special tax on their equipment and annually swell that total by about $12 million. mil-lion. Thanks to sportsmen supported sup-ported m a n a ge m e n t programs: pro-grams: There are now some 15 million deer in the Ujiited States. There were only 500,000 in 1900. There are about five times as many elk in the nation today as there were GO years ago and about |