It is not necessary to go on these expensive hunts. Many of these hunts you can do yourself. On the other hand, where things get expensive is TROPHY hunts -- hunt the objective of which is to take a male that has horns that are freakishly exceptional. "Freakish" you ask, yes, 98th percentile could be argued to be freakishly exceptional.

I don't think this objective is intrinsic to hunting. The original goal of hunting was to kill an animal and eat it. Females -- doe deer and cow elk -- provide just as good meat as a mature buck or bull with a big rack. In fact, the females probably taste BETTER. If you want to take a cow elk, you don't need an outfitter or a guide to get this done. Where a guide and an outfitter become critical is when they know where the big racks are because they have invested time doing pre-season scouting and when they have negotiated exclusive hunting rights on private lands. I think if you do not subscribe to trophy hunting objectives -- which I think could be argued philosophically to be a perversion of hunting -- the state of hunting is just fine and you don't have to be a rich man to do this kind of hunting. Now if your idea of hunting is bagging an elk with a huge rack . . . then you get stuck in the money issues. There are more people wanting that 98th percentile rack than there are elk carrying these racks around: basically this limited resource is monetized by shrewd business men.