Great post on flint age technologies!
As for the conversational side of the matter, we can pinpoint the appearance of wildlife management, at least in the UK, within a couple of decades. And that would be early Victorian times.
The last shooting writer to ignore conversational issues was Peter Hawker, whose "Instructions for Young Sportsmen" were published from 1818 to 1844, not counting postmortem editions. For him 'game preservation' was about protection from poachers and nothing else. His diaries present, for modern eyes, a pretty depressing picture of a blatant game exterminator of a hunter, who goes out of his way to shoot as much as he possibly can (chasing, for example, what he knows to be the last pheasant in the county persistently for days before triumphally killing it), complaining that with each season game was becoming scarcer and scarcer - and yet not doing anything for conservation, and not even giving a thought that this decrease in game numbers might have anything to do with his own deeds.
And yet Stonehedge, whose books were coming out in 1850s, only a few years later, gives a great discussion of game management, including the need to know the numbers of birds on the preserve, the dangers of overshooting, etc. By the end of XIX century, concerns over parts of Africa being 'shot out' were repeatedly voiced, and in India conservation measures were taken to protect both game and forests. Teasedale-Buckell in his 1907 "Complete Shot" gives views on conversation not far behind modern ideas - he argues, for example, that predators are necessary for healthy ecosystem (without using the word 'ecosystem', of course).
Incidentally, the time difference between Hawker and Stonehedge coincides with the transition from muzzleloaders to pinfires.
On the other hand, I can identify another area of hunting weapons where progress is happening now, fueled by military technologies as well. I'm talking about night sights. I believe they are illegal for hunting in both EU and US, but in the former USSR they are legal, and there is a growing interest of hunting boar and bear by stalking on crop feeds at night. The supporters of this hunting claim that it is sport, not slaughter; it's not that easy, the stalk has to be very close, especially when the crops are high, and the risk, in dealing with a big boar and especially bear, is there. The advantages of every new generation of this technologies are quite comparable with the advantages that, for example, transition from pinfire to central fire gave - at least, as far as can be gathered from the reports of night hunters. Progress allows them, they claim, to take better shots, and make cleaner kills. And yet the game preserves these hunters frequent are some of the best managed and rich in game areas in the country.
What I mean to say is, apparently, advances in game-getting technologies and conservationalism do not seem to be directly related in one way or another.
More later.
