1.Front section - IUCN

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Friends for Life: New partners in support of protected areas
Introduction
For millennia humans have realized that their actions
were capable of exhausting natural resources on
which they relied. Though actions were not always
taken on these realizations, in a broad variety of
cultures, times, and geographies human societies did
put into place institutions designed to prevent resource
exhaustion. Such institutions have focused first on
those resources most susceptible to overexploitation.
Until the last century or two, the resource that has
arguably been most susceptible to human overuse is
vertebrate species. It is then no surprise that humans
have created a variety of institutions designed to
manage this resource and prevent overexploitation. In
some traditional forest-dwelling or fishing societies
these institutions have focused on taboos and spatial
patterns of management In other, more agrarian
societies, management institutions have often
involved monopolization of hunting rights by elites.
Such systems usually involved exerting control over
areas of land and limiting harvest of certain species of
animals on that land. Though this was usually
associated with killing of “royal animals” the same
system was applied to capturing of elephants for
domestication in India (Rangarajan, 2001).
The custom of allocating areas for hunting often
involved enclosing areas of natural habitat and
restoring or enhancing populations of game animals
(Redford, 2000). For example, in Assyria in the 8 th
century BC King Saragon II was reported to have
stocked royal hunting grounds with wild bulls, lions,
ostriches and apes (van Zuylen, 1995). Often however,
these reserves were just habitat protected from
hunting by commoners. Such systems were
widespread from Venice in the 8 th century AD (Allin,
1990), to Mughal India (Rangarajan, 2001), to Java in
the 17 th century (Boomgaard, 2001). The rulers of
England, as elsewhere in Europe (Cartmill, 1993),
designated large areas as “royal forests” where only
the King and chosen guests were allowed to hunt. In
fact the “forest” was defined as “…a certain territory
of woody grounds and fruitful pastures, privileged for
wild beasts and fowls of forest, chase and warren, to
rest and abide in, in the safe protection of the king, for
his princely delight and pleasure…” (Manwood, 1665
in Whitehead 1950).
In all of these cases, the purpose of the institution
was to prevent the elimination of animals so that they
could continue to be harvested. This seems to have
most frequently have been accomplished by
identifying and demarcating areas and limiting use
within these areas. These “protected areas” were often
called “parks” as in “deer parks” (Whitehead, 1950)
and the English word park comes from the prehistoric
German word for ‘enclosed place’ (Oxford English
Dictionary). In the American tradition a park became
associated with preserving wilderness, but even here
the association with animals was maintained as
Williams (1989) states that etymologically,
“wilderness” comes from “the place of wild beasts.”
In its modern usage, the term park encompasses a
much broader meaning being subsumed under the
umbrella term “protected area”. IUCN defines a
protected area as “an area of land and/or sea especially
dedicated to the protection and maintenance of
biological diversity, and of natural and associated
cultural resources, and managed through legal or other
effective means” (IUCN, 2004). Some categories of
protected areas are strictly protected while others
allow specified types of use or protect anthropogenic
features. Increasing understanding of the ubiquity of
human influence worldwide has created a climate
where increasingly controlled human use is
considered acceptable if it provides support for
protection of many other, non-targeted components
and attributes of biodiversity (Redford and Richter,
1999). Hunting is a recognised use of protected areas
worldwide (Rosabel, 1997; Freese, 1998), and legal
code for protected areas and hunting is increasingly
integrated (Cirelli, 2002). But it is important to note
that even in the absence of other impacts, hunting has
been shown to affect genetic, species, and ecosystem
components of biodiversity (Freese) so areas where
hunting takes place do not achieve the same
biodiversity objectives as areas with no hunting
(Redford and Richter, 1999).
It is important to highlight the fact that the
relationship between hunting and protected areas is
not a simple one. Hunting itself has been responsible
for many extinctions, and left uncontrolled, is one of
the most prevalent threats to huntable species
worldwide. The ability of hunting to be useful as a tool
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