Robert "Bob" Model was born in Greenwich, Connecticut, in 1942 to Faith Rockefeller Model and Belgian Jean Model. Model attended The Browning School in New York and then graduated from Elon College in Elon, North Carolina in 1967. Bob and his wife, Mona, now live in Cody, Wyoming where he is a rancher, outfitter, and businessman; as well as a hunter, conservationist, philanthropist, and active participant in wildlife conservation.
Bob has long been a champion of the importance of private lands in sustaining our public wildlife resources and of the need to improve sportsman /landowner relations. On his Mooncrest Ranch, Bob has actively worked to revise and improve grazing systems and to utilize prescribed burns to enhance wildlife habitat on both private and public lands. In an ongoing partnership with Game and Fish and the Shoshone National Forest, Bob has successfully grown a non-migratory elk herd in the Rattlesnake Mountain and Trout Creek Basin area from 250 elk to well over 2,000 since the mid l970's. The herd is maintaining their population in very difficult circumstances, including predators and drought. In addition, the Mooncrest Ranch provides several hundred days annually of free public access for big game hunting.
While Bob is an excellent steward of the land, his most noteworthy contributions to wildlife conservation in Wyoming and throughout the country arc in the public policy arena at the national level. Bob is a member, past president, and chairman of the Boone and Crockett Club. During Bob's tenure as president he was a leader in re-establishing the Club's historic role as one of the premiere conservation organizations promoting hunter ethics and advancing national policy on wildlife conservation and hunting heritage. As a well- read historian, Bob understands, believes, practices, and even preaches the conservation philosophy of Theodore Roosevelt And George Bird Grinnell who were founders of the Boone and Crockett Club. As a Boone and Crockett member, Bob has personally provided major support for Boone and Crockett endowed professorships at the University of Montana, Oregon State University, and Texas A&M. He was a founder and past chairman of the American Wildlife Conservation Partners (AWCP) which is a coalition of over forty of America's most respected hunter/conservation organizations that meet to discuss and take action on the most important conservation issues. The AWCP has developed and forwarded a conservation vision to the Bush and Obama Administrations and works actively with administration officials to implement the necessary policy revisions.
During the Bush Administration, Bob was a member and chairman of the Sporting Conservation Council, and was just recently appointed by the Obama Administration to the newly formed Wildlife and Hunting Heritage Conservation Council. Bob was also a founder and board member of the National Conservation Leadership Institute in Shepherdstown, WV, a joint endeavor between state and federal wildlife agencies, private conservation organizations, and natural resource industry to provide world-class leadership training to the next generation of conservation executives.
Bob was the person most responsible for working with then Secretary of Interior Norton to convene the National Conference on Cooperative Conservation, and for working with CEQ Chairman Connaughton and Secretary of Interior Kempthorne to convene the White House Conference on Hunting Heritage and Wildlife Conservation which resulted in a 10-year national action plan for maintaining wildlife resources and our hunting heritage.
