Do legal hunts encourage the poaching they're meant to preempt?
Source: Christian Science Monitor
Do legal hunts encourage the poaching they're meant to preempt?
A new study aims to disprove the often-cited conservation logic that allowing
hunting of large carnivores discourages poaching.
By Lucy Schouten, Staff MAY 11, 2016
A new study challenges the notion of government hunts as a conservation tactic to limit poaching of large carnivores such as wolves, big cats, and bears.
This notion that the legal culling or hunting of large carnivores decreases poaching has become an unquestioned truth," Guillaume Chapron, a professor at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences who conducted analysis for the study, told Science magazine. "But theres no evidence to support it.
Provocatively titled, Blood does not buy goodwill, the study, published Wednesday in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, is among the first to empirically evaluate hunting as a conservation tactic. The finding joins the conservation debate at an important time because the federal government is in the process of delisting several once-endangered species and returning their care to the states.
Culling has this invisible effect, Adrian Treves, an ecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who led the research, told the the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. The government seemed to be sending a signal, unintentional, that poaching was OK.
Local governments in the United States and Europe have experimented with hunting as a conservation tactic for big cats, wolves, and bears. Evaluations of this tactic are limited by the difficulty of finding reliable data on poaching, an illegal activity. This study will surely stoke an already-controversial debate, especially because the researchers had to rely on mathematical modeling.
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Read more: http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2016/0511/Do-legal-hunts-encourage-the-poaching-they-re-meant-to-preempt
Related: Legal culls dont buy goodwill for wolves (Science Magazine)