Legal Hunting May Not Really Reduce Poaching

For years, wildlife authorities have tried to focus on culling---a word that describes selective, legal hunting----in their mission to reduce the wild animal population that are close to people or livestock.

They say that it is a way to reduce poaching and control hunters who undertake illegal hunting activities.

"The harvesting of wildlife on refuges is carefully regulated to ensure an equilibrium between population levels and wildlife habitat," according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS).

However, this might not always help as an effective hunting strategy, shows a new study.

"For about 100 years, the status quo wildlife management assumption is that hunting, trapping, and angling are good conservation strategies," said Adrian Treves of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and senior author of the study. "There is no evidence to suggest that poachers are going to refrain just because there is a legal recourse."

Titled "Blood does not buy goodwill: allowing culling increases poaching of a large carnivore," the title shows that culling might, in fact, shoot up the incidences of poaching in areas where carnivores are targeted.

Studying wolves in Michigan and Wisconsin between 1995 and 2012, scientists found that the animals did not feature in the U.S. Endangered Species lists, and culling was allowed at times.

Even though there was an increase in the overall growth of wolf populations, it got curbed by about four percent in the years of culling. Moreover, wolf populations too increased by 12 percent in the years that hunting was legal, compared to the 16 percent surge seen when the wolves were not supposed to be hunted.

"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," the researchers wrote.

"Culling sort of makes it somewhat permissible to shoot a wolf," said Matt Bishop, an attorney at the Western Environmental Law Center. "So it's not that much more of a step to shoot one illegally. It makes it more taboo to shoot it if you can't shoot it at all."

The findings were published in the May 11 issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.