Coloradans are taking the newly created partnership between their state wildlife department with their state parks department seriously. This article in New West discusses how several Western states are looking to combine state agencies to save money.
What the article doesn’t mention, however, is that there are almost as many ways to organize the bureaucracy of wildlife management at the state level as there are states, or that many states in other regions already combine parks and wildlife, most famously, Texas.
I think it matters less where a state sticks its wildlife management function within its bureaucracy, than how the people of the state view their relationship to wildlife. That’s something that can’t be legislated.