Blood does not buy goodwill: allowing culling increases poaching of a large carnivore
نویسندگان
چکیده
Quantifying environmental crime and the effectiveness of policy interventions is difficult because perpetrators typically conceal evidence. To prevent illegal uses of natural resources, such as poaching endangered species, governments have advocated granting policy flexibility to local authorities by liberalizing culling or hunting of large carnivores. We present the first quantitative evaluation of the hypothesis that liberalizing culling will reduce poaching and improve population status of an endangered carnivore. We show that allowing wolf (Canis lupus) culling was substantially more likely to increase poaching than reduce it. Replicated, quasi-experimental changes in wolf policies in Wisconsin and Michigan, USA, revealed that a repeated policy signal to allow state culling triggered repeated slowdowns in wolf population growth, irrespective of the policy implementation measured as the number of wolves killed. The most likely explanation for these slowdowns was poaching and alternative explanations found no support. When the government kills a protected species, the perceived value of each individual of that species may decline; so liberalizing wolf culling may have sent a negative message about the value of wolves or acceptability of poaching. Our results suggest that granting management flexibility for endangered species to address illegal behaviour may instead promote such behaviour.
منابع مشابه
Correction to ‘Blood does not buy goodwill: allowing culling increases poaching of a large carnivore’
Electronic supplementary material is available online at https://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.3634499. & 2016 The Authors. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited. Correction to ‘Blood does not buy goodwill: allo...
متن کاملComment on: ‘Blood does not buy goodwill: allowing culling increases poaching of a large carnivore’
Electronic supplementary material is available online at https://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.3713035. & 2017 The Authors. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited. Comment on: ‘Blood does not buy goodwill: allowi...
متن کاملBlood may buy goodwill: no evidence for a positive relationship between legal culling and poaching in Wisconsin
متن کامل
Shoot, shovel and shut up: cryptic poaching slows restoration of a large carnivore in Europe
Poaching is a widespread and well-appreciated problem for the conservation of many threatened species. Because poaching is illegal, there is strong incentive for poachers to conceal their activities, and consequently, little data on the effects of poaching on population dynamics are available. Quantifying poaching mortality should be a required knowledge when developing conservation plans for e...
متن کاملA conceptual framework for understanding illegal killing of large carnivores
The growing complexity and global nature of wildlife poaching threaten the survival of many species worldwide and are outpacing conservation efforts. Here, we reviewed proximal and distal factors, both social and ecological, driving illegal killing or poaching of large carnivores at sites where it can potentially occur. Through this review, we developed a conceptual social-ecological system fra...
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عنوان ژورنال:
دوره 283 شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 2016